Product Description: In the blockbuster autobiography A Child Called “It,” Dave Pelzer shared the story of his childhood—one of the most dramatic and extreme stories of child abuse ever prosecuted in the state of California. As a child, Pelzer was beaten, starved, and abused both emotionally and physically by his alcoholic and mentally unstable mother...read more

Product Description: “I wrote this book not to dismiss a rumor but to share something much more important: my journey to forgiveness.” Chiquis Rivera is a singer and the daughter of the late music superstar Jenni Rivera. In Forgiveness, her memoir, Chiquis bravely reveals the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father during her childhood and the difficulties she’s faced in her personal life as a result...read more

When Melissa Francis was eight years old, she won the role of lifetime: playing Cassandra Cooper Ingalls, the little girl who was adopted with her brother (played by young Jason Bateman) by the Ingalls family on the world’s most famous prime-time soap opera, Little House on the Prairie. Despite her age, she was already a veteran actress, living a charmed life, moving from one Hollywood set to the next. But behind the scenes, her success was fueled by the pride, pressure, and sometimes grinding cruelty of her stage mother. While Melissa thrived under pressure, her older sister ― who had tried her hand at acting and shrank from the limelight ― was often ignored by their mother in a shadow of neglect and disappointment. Tiffany could do nothing to please her mother, but it wasn’t until after Melissa had graduated from Harvard University with a degree in economics, found love, and married that Tiffany’s personal problems culminated in a life-and-death crisis. When Melissa realized the role her mother continued to play in her sister’s downward spiral, she resolved to end the manic, abusive cycle once and for all. Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter is a fascinating account of life as a child star in the 1980s, and also a disquieting tale of a family under the care of a highly neurotic, dangerously competitive “tiger mother.” But perhaps most importantly, now that Melissa has two sons of her own, it’s a meditation on motherhood. She asks the questions so many of us ask ourselves: how hard should you push a child to succeed, and at what point does your help turn into harm?

Product Description: Tom North is one of the eight North children, who together with the ten Beardsley children, became the family that was featured in the 1968 film, Yours, Mine and Ours, starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, and again in the 2005 version starring Rene Russo and Dennis Quaid...read more

Product Description: When Nancy Kilgore was nine years old, her eleven-year-old sister Sherry led her into the scorching midday sun, tied her to a chair, and taped her eyelids to her eyebrows with electrical tape, leaving Nancy helpless for hours to stare into a blinding blue sky...read more

Product Description: I am a survivor of horrific physical and mental abuse inflicted on me by the one person in my life that was supposed to love and protect me and teach me right from wrong. I am a fighter because I did not allow my past to dictate my future and I fought for years to successfully overcome the demons left over from my childhood...read more

Product Description: I am a survivor of horrific physical and mental abuse inflicted on me by the one person in my life that was supposed to love and protect me and teach me right from wrong. I am a fighter because I did not allow my past to dictate my future and I fought for years to successfully overcome the demons left over from my childhood...read more

Product Description: After years of allowing the lies and abuse he suffered as a child define his past and cloud his future, Roger Dean Kiser author of The Whitehouse Boys: An American Tragedy decided to find a way to make sense of a childhood replete with verbal, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse before it was too late...read more

A compelling, at times horrifying work that is impossible to put down, House Rules will stand beside Running With Scissors and The Glass Castle as a memoir that cracks open the shell of a desperately dysfunctional family with impressive grace and humour.Rachel Sontag grew up the daughter of a well-liked doctor in an upper middle class suburb of Chicago. The view from outside couldn’t have been more perfect. But within the walls of the family home, Rachel’s life was controlled and indeed terrorized by her father’s serious depression. In prose that is both precise and rich, Rachel’s childhood experience unfolds in a chronological recounting that shows how her father became more and more disturbed as Rachel grew up.A visceral and wrenching exploration of the impact of a damaged psyche on those nearest to him, House Rules will keep you reading even when you most wish you could look away.In the middle of the night, Dad sent Mom to wake me. In my pajamas, I sat across from them in the living room. I was sure Grandma had died and I remember deciding to stay strong when Dad told me. “What did you say to her?” he asked. His elbows rested in his lap.“What do you mean?”“You spent a good half hour alone in that hospital room. What did you talk about?”“I don’t know, Dad”“What do you mean, you don’t know? You know. You know exactly what you talked to her about.”“You talked about me, Rachel.”“No. I didn’t.”“To my own mother?”. . . . I wondered how he’d been with Mom, how she’d missed the signs. He couldn’t have just turned crazy all of a sudden. I wondered if his own father had infected him with anger. But mostly, I wanted to know what he saw in me that caused him to break up inside. Was it in my being born or in my growing up?--from House RulesFrom the Hardcover edition.

Product Description: A memoir of a father obsessed with control and the daughter who fights his suffocating grasp, House Rules explores the complexities of their compelling and destructive relationship as Rachel fights to escape, and, later, to make sense of what remains of her family.

Product Description: A provocative story, this memoir is a young man's search for his father's mysterious past.

The author describes how she survived being abused by her stepfather and learned to let go of her anger towards her mother and herself.

The personal story of author Debi Toporoff will help those dealing with the memory and pain of abuse, as well as those looking to understand what children suffering from abuse have experienced.Toporoff uniquely tells her story from a child's perspective, highlighting her mother's physical abuse, her father's neglect, and the moments of rest she had while taken away to foster families.By the age of four, Toporoff remembers being held responsible for cleaning the household while enduring the wrath of her never-satisfied mother. Not for the faint of heart, she graphically tells of going blind in one eye, cracking her skull, and breaking her leg, all by her mother's hand.Through several foster families, caring teachers and co-workers, Toporoff pieced together the story of Jesus, and his forgiveness and never-failing love for her, which lead to hope and forgiveness.

A series of vignettes laced with heartbreak and humor gives an account of the author's determination, courage, and creativity throughout more than two decades of her confronting her past, her body, and her identity.

A spokesperson for the National Network to End Domestic Violence recounts his upbringing in the shadow of a father who abused the author, his mother, and his siblings, discussing the writer's work as an activist, his recommendations for community intervention, and his struggles with his own anger. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Product Description: Me May Mary is an eloquent memoir about a teen emerging from a tumultuous past. Beginning with a childhood spent sleeping in cars and stealing money from her violent, alcoholic parents to survive, through her teen years in foster care and an orphanage, Mary struggled to overcome her history and embrace her potential...read more

The sibling of the child featured in A Child Called 'It' describes how after the removal of Dave from the family, their alcoholic mother turned her abusive attentions to the author and prevented his escape by hiding the severity of his injuries. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Poet David Ray, two-time winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, chronicles his efforts to overcome the abuse and poverty of his childhood.