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IN THE COMPANY OF GRACE

One of our recommended books is In the Company of Grace by Jody Lulich

Rising to accept a prestigious award, Jody Lulich wondered what to say. Explain how he’d been attracted to veterinary medicine? Describe how caring for helpless, voiceless animals in his own shame and pain provided a lifeline, a chance to heal himself as well? Lulich tells his story in In the Company of Grace, a memoir about finding courage in compassion and strength in healing—and power in finally confronting the darkness of his youth.

Lulich’s white father and Black mother met at a civil rights rally, but love was no defense against their personal demons. His mother’s suicide,

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YOUR HEARTS, YOUR SCARS

One of our recommended books is Your Hearts, Your Scars by Adina Talve-Goodman

Engaging, funny, and unflinching essays about coming of age as a transplant patient and living each day as a gift

Adina Talve-Goodman was born with a congenital heart condition and survived multiple operations over the course of her childhood, including a heart transplant at age nineteen. In these seven essays, she tells the story of her chronic illness and her youthful search for love and meaning, never forgetting that her adult life is tied to the loss of another person—the donor of her transplanted heart.

Whether writing about the experience of taking her old heart home from the hospital (and passing it around the Thanksgiving table),

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TELL ME GOOD THINGS

One of our recommended books is Tell Me Good Things by James Runcie

A profound examination of grief and a great celebration of love by internationally bestselling author James Runcie.

In early 2020, as the world sunk into the pandemic, James Runcie and his wife Marilyn Imrie were going through a different, far more personal tragedy. After 35 years of miraculously happy marriage, they learned that the painful, frustrating symptoms Marilyn had been experiencing for two years were a sign of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. With this diagnosis, during the isolation and strangeness of the pandemic, James and Marilyn’s lives were transformed.

Now, in his startling and intimate memoir, James tells the story of Marilyn’s illness and death—in all its moments of tragedy,

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RECKONING

One of our recommended books is Reckoning by V

The work of a lifetime from the Tony Award-winning, bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-political, personal, profound, and more than forty years in the making.

The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer’s and activist’s life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose,

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I WANT TO DIE BUT I WANT TO EAT TTEOKBOKKI

One of our recommended books is I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Ttoekbokki by Baek Sehee

The South Korean runaway bestseller, debut author Baek Sehee’s intimate therapy memoir, as recommended by BTS.

PSYCHIATRIST: So how can I help you?

ME: I don’t know, I’m – what’s the word – depressed? Do I have to go into detail?


Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her – what to call it? – depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends,

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ANIMAL JOY

One of our recommended books is Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir

Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied.

Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Freud’s un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers,

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