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FAMILY SECRETS memoirs about things we don't talk about |
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After Visiting Friends : a Son's Story by Michael HaineyTraces the decade-long investigation into the mystery of his father's sudden death, describing his father's achievements as a dynamic reporter, the author's examination of inconsistencies in his father's medical records and the honor code of secrecy that challenged his research.
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by Nicole Chung
Born extremely prematurely into a family that had immigrated from Korea, she was adopted by a white couple who lived in a small town in Oregon. Often mocked by her classmates, and feeling out of sync with her adoptive family, she clung to a belief that everyone involved was motivated by a desire to give her the best possible life.
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by Mary Anna King
In a stirring memoir of finding one's family and oneself, the author, after her mother can no longer care for her, is sent from Camden, New Jersey, to Oklahoma, where she is legally adopted by her grandparents and gets a new name and a new life, but is haunted by the past and the siblings she left behind.
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by Christopher Lukas
A compelling memoir about growing up with a family legacy of depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide as the author details his own battle with bouts of depression and his struggle with grief over the suicide of his brother.
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by Robert Goolrick
A candid and deeply personal memoir of growing up in the seemingly idyllic world of a small Southern college town reflects on the devastating secrets behind the genteel façade and the effects of a family history of alcoholism on his life.
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by Will Boast
The author offers an account of how, after his father, the last remaining member of his immediate family, died, he discovered while settling the estate in Wisconsin that the man he thought he knew actually had had a secret family in England prior to the one he brought to America, a revelation that prompted the author to seek out this new-found family.
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by Jessica Berger Gross
Traces the abuse-marked childhood of the author and how her adult decision to separate herself from her family of origin redefined her understandings of estrangement, survival and healing.
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by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Documents the story of how a summer job at a Louisiana law firm and the case of a convicted murderer and child molester changed the author's views about the death penalty and forced her to confront traumatic secrets in her own family.
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by Miranda Richmond Mouillot
In a heartbreaking, yet uplifting, love story spanning two continents and three generations, the author - immersing herself in letters, archival materials and secondary stories - journeys to the South of France to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement after escaping Nazi-occupied France.
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by Jasmin Darznik
After the author discovered a photo of her mother in a wedding veil, but with a man she had never seen before, her mother soon sent her 10 cassette tapes, each part of an engrossing true story that involved her family's true origins in Iran, her mother's history of abuse and neglect and a sister that the author never knew she had.
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by Mimi Baird
A woman pieces together the story of her absent father's life, beginning with his advancements in isolating the bioeochemical root of manic depression, which he then began to suffer himself, leading to years of institutionalization and confinement.
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by Dani Shapiro
The author describes her staggering recent discovery that she is not biologically related to her father, tracing her efforts to uncover the truth from a half-century web of family secrets to reestablish her sense of identity.
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by Walter Anderson
The chairman of Parade magazine describes how he learned the identity of his true father, a Russian Jewish man secretly loved by his German protestant mother, and how he met his half-brother thirty-five years later.
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by Alan Cumming
Profiles the turbulent relationship with his father, tracing his 2010 appearance in a celebrity genealogy show to solve the disappearance of a WWII hero grandparent and his discovery of astounding family secrets.
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by Sarah Wildman
After finding a collection of her grandfather's letters, a journalist begins a search for the fate of the love he left behind in prewar Vienna six months after the Nazis took Austria.
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by Martha A. Sandweiss
Traces the secret double life of a nineteenth-century scientist and surveyor of the post-Civil War American West, revealing the mixed heritage that enabled him to cross color lines and conduct a second existence as a black Pullman porter and steelworker with an African-American wife and five multi-racial children.
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by Luke Dittrich
Explores the scientific, ethical and human dimensions of the 1953 brain operation by William Beecher Scoville that transformed understandings of memory science and triggered profound legal and medical debates.
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by Tom Kizzia
Documents the story of Robert "Papa Pilgrim" Hale and the antiestablishment family settlement in remote Alaska that was eventually exposed as a cult-like prison where Hale brutalized and isolated his wife and 15 children, describing the torturous abuse endured by the family before his older children escaped and reported Hale to authorities.
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by Catherine Bailey
After opening a room in a wealthy British estate that had been sealed for 60 years, a historian discusses the intrigue surrounding the death of the Ninth Duke of Rutland and why he erased portions of his life from all family records.
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by Emma Brockes
An award-winning journalist documents her investigation into a shattering childhood trauma in South Africa, tracing the discovery of the author's father's abuse, which compelled her mother's unsuccessful attempt to kill him before fleeing the country.
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