Tagged: memoir

    After the loss of his wife in a tragic accident, artist Danny Gregory chronicled his grief in the medium he knows best—the pages of his illustrated journals. His new book, A Kiss Before You Go: An Illustrated Memoir of Love and Loss, reproduces these journal pages in a visual memoir of Gregory's journey towards recovery.

Gregory's process reminds us that creative expression offers its own therapy, and that living each day to its fullest may be as simple as putting pen to paper. Anyone who has experienced loss will take solace in this candid look at grieving.

    Christa Parravani is a photographer, capital region native, and author of the acclaimed new memoir, Her: A Memoir about the life and early death of her identical twin, Cara. For several years after her identical twin died of a drug overdose in 2006, Christa would look in the mirror and see her sister's face staring back at her. No matter where she went, she could not escape the image of her twin.

   Michael Hainey was 6 years old in 1970 when his Uncle came to their home one morning, to tell Michael and his brother that their father was dead. Bob Hainey was just 35. He was the night editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. Bob Hainey had died of a heart attack on a North Side street - as one of the obits put it - while visiting friends.

Over the years, Michael Hainey grew up to be a journalist himself - he's now the deputy editor of GQ - and began to wonder about some of the small differences in the obits between newspapers, and about some of the obliqueness in the accounts of his father's death that he grew up hearing from his uncle and mother.

So, he set out to find the story himself. His new book is After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story.

    When journalist Becky Aikman was widowed in her 40s, she felt unmoored. But she couldn’t find the kind of help that she needed, so she dug into the data and eventually created her own unique support system.

Her book, Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives, details the trials and triumphs following tragedy — and new research about what really helps the bereaved.

Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, Italian town north of Boston. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious figure in this place, was a drug addict and sometime dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, whose highbrow taste was at odds with her base appetites.

With or Without You: A Memoir is the story of Domenica Ruta’s unconventional coming of age—a darkly hilarious chronicle of a misfit ’90s childhood and the necessary and painful act of breaking away, and of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the process.