Art, narrative, and healing

• Personal narrative and healing (links)
• The self we tell ourselves we are influences our decisions
• Memoirs of illness, crisis, disability, differentness, and survival (a reading list)

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Partially sighted readers who want to listen to a title in audio should contact the National Library Service (NLS), which is part of the Library of Congress, or their state Library for the Blind.

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How putting events into a story may aid the healing process

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The Self We Tell Ourselves We Are Influences Our Decisions
"I have learned from autobiography that humans are adaptable and it is quite likely that more attention will be given to integration of information from the viewpoints of science, society, and individuals. Autobiography represents a 'soft area' for research, one that would not have been very respected in past years when the behavioral and social sciences were trying to emulate the advances in physics and chemistry. More recently, however, there is growing opinion that our interpretations of our lives influence the decisions we make. The self we tell ourselves we are, the narrative self, appears to influence what decisions we make in life. I had the opportunity to interview a leading psychoanalyst in Los Angeles when he turned 75. I asked him about his psychoanalytic theory and how it related to individuals. He said, 'That is my theory, you have to realize that every person has a theory about his or her own life.' This seems to me a very integrative statement for my approach to autobiography; autobiography reveals the individual's theory about himself or herself, how they explain their life. It leads to the idea that one's self, the self we tell ourselves, is in a sense a personal theory, a theory that provides direction for decisions and actions in everyday life. Here lies a possible connection between the autobiographical stories of life and the decisions that individuals have made and the directions their lives have taken."
~ James E. Birren, How Do I Think I Got Here? (The LLI Review, Fall 2006)
Birren is a pioneer in life story and reminiscence groups.
Read his life story here

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• Alden, Paulette Bates. Crossing the Moon: A Journey Through Infertility.

• Angelou, Maya. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (childhood memories of the black writer)

• Ansay, A. Manette. Limbo: A Memoir (an undiagnosed muscle disorder cuts short her career as a concert pianist)

• Ascher, Barbara Lazear. Landscape Without Gravity (about her brother's death from AIDS).

• Barron, Judy and Sean. There's a Boy in Here (life with autism, from both mother's and son's viewpoint)

• Bauby, Jean-Dominique. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death (immobilized by a stroke, the narrator discovers the life of the unfettered imagination)

• Beauvoir, Simone de. A Very Easy Death (about the death of her mother)

• Bernstein,Jane. Loving Rachel (about life with a blind daughter)

• Black, Kathryn. In the Shadow of Polio: A Personal and Social History (a memoir of Black's childhood experience of a mother in an iron lung, wrapped in the larger story of the search for a cure)

• Bragg, Bernard. Lessons in Laughter: The Autobiography of a Deaf Actor

• Breslin, Jimmy.I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me

• Brodkey, Harold. This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (the story of his confrontation with AIDS)

• Brookes, Tim. Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness

• Broyard, Anatole. Intoxicated by My Illness (critical illness, in his case from cancer, as a spiritual journey)

• Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors: A Memoir (the amusing, bizarre story of the author's life from 13 to 16, when his mentally ill mother has him move in with her eccentric psychiatrist) and A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (the more sober account of his childhood attempts to elicit warmth from his cruel and unfeeling, alcoholic father). The broad details of his story are at least partly corroborated in his brother's memoir, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's.

• Casey, Nell, ed. Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression

• Casey, Nell, ed. An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family (and some writers on being cared for)

• Clark, Clara Claiborne. The Seige:: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child's Life (by the mother)

• Cohen, Richard M. Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness, a Reluctant Memoir (living with multiple sclerosis and later colon cancer, and how his illness affected his wife, Meredith Vieira, and their three children)

• Cousins, Norman. Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (a classic take on how attitude, and especially laughter, affects health outcomes)

• DeBaggio, Thomas. Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's (the early memories and the daily struggle of a man coming to terms with a progressively debilitating illness)

• DeVita, Elizabeth. The Empty Room: Surviving the loss of a brother or sister at any age (partly a memoir of surviving the loss of her brother Teddy to aplastic anemia)

• Dew, Robert Forman. The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out

• Dubus, Andre. Meditations from a Movable Chair and the earlier collection of essays Broken Vessels (both written after a 1986 highway accident left him largely confined to a wheelchair, and only some essays deal with his response to the accident and his view of life from a wheelchair)

• Finger, Anne. Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth

• Fishman, Steve. A Bomb in the Brain: A Heroic Tale of Science, Surgery, and Survival (about surviving an aneurysm)

• Frank, Arthur W . At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (explores what illness can teach us about life, drawing on his experience having a heart attack and cancer)

• Franzen, Jonathon. My Father's Brain (abstract of New Yorker story about his father and Alzheimer's disease, September 10, 2001)

• Fries, Kenny, Body, Remember (born with incompletely formed legs, a congenital birth defect, Fries explores what it's like to be different)

• Funderburg, Lise. Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home (a compelling and beautifully written memoir by a grown daughter — a white-looking mixed-race girl raised in an integrated Philadelphia neighborhood — who gets to know her dying father in a string of pilgrimages to his boyhood hometown in rural Georgia)

• Galli, Richard. Rescuing Jeffrey (an account of the gut-wrenching decisions Jeffrey's parents face in the ten days after an accident leaves him paralyzed from the neck down)

• Gilbert, Sandra. Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (about the death of her husband after entering the hospital for routine prostate surgery)

• Gordon, Barbara. I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (on addiction to prescription drugs)

• Gordon, Mary. Circling My Mother (Gordon's memoir of her Irish Catholic mother, deformed by polio, eventually suffering dementia-and of their complex mother-daughter relationship)

• Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures (an adult with autism explains how it feels to her, and how she works as an expert in her field), as well as Animals in Translation

• Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face (about growing up with Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that severely disfigured her face)\

• Greenberg, Michael. Hurry Down Sunshine (memoir of his daughter's first manic episode, at 15, and how her bipolar disorder affects the family)

• Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (a work of fiction, not memoir, but it conveys insights from author's work with autistic children)

• Hammer, Signe. By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide's Daughter

• Handler, Evan. Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (recounting with grim humor his battle with leukemia and his hellish journey through the land of the sick)

• Havemann, Joe. A Life Shaken:My Encounter with Parkinson's Disease

• Hill, Susan. Family (about the death of a premature child)

• Hoffman,Richard. Half the House (about child abuse)

• Holzemer, Liz. Curveball: When Life Throws You a Brain Tumor (in her case, a baseball-sized meningioma — and remember, a brain tumor is different from brain cancer)

• Hood, Ann. Do Not Go Gentle: The Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time (her search for a miraculous cure for her father's inoperable lung cancer)

• Hull, John. Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (from sight problems at 13, gradually becoming blind)

• Israeloff, Roberta. In Confidence: Four Years of Therapy

• Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

• Jezer, Marty. Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words

• Johnson, Fenton. Geography of the Heart (about the death of a gay partner)

• Kamenentz, Rodger. Terra Infirma (a searing recollection of his mother's life and her death from cancer, his mother "yo-yoing between smothering affection and a fierce anger")

• Karr, Mary. The Liar's Club (about growing up with a mentally ill mother in a dysfunctional family)

• Kaysen,Susanna. Girl, Interrupted (a young girl's experiences with mental illness)

• Kincaid, Jamaica. My Brother (account of her younger brother's death from AIDS)

• Kingsley, Jason, and Mitchell Levitz. Count Us In: Growing Up with Down Syndrome

• Kleege, Georgina. Sight Unseen (marginally sighted and legally blind at 11 from macular degeneration, Kleege explores the meaning and implications of blindness and sightedness, reminding us that only a fraction of blind people see nothing at all)

• Kupfer, Fern. Before and After Zachariah (about a brain-damaged child)

• Kusz, Natalie. Road Song (growing up in Alaska, being mauled by a sled-dog, undergoing reconstructive surgery)

• Kuusisto, Stephen. Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (in this sequel to Planet of the Blind, the author learns to live by ear)

• Kuusisto, Stephen. Planet of the Blind (blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other, at his mother's urging he feigns sightedness until coming to terms with his condition)

• Lachenmeyer, Nathaniel. The Outsider: A Journey into My Father's Struggle with Madness (in which the author tries to reconstruct his father's downward spiral from a promising career as a sociology professor to his death as a schizophrenic vagrant, eluding police)

• Lang, Jim. Learning Sickness: A Year with Crohn's Disease

• Latus, Janine. If I Am Missing or Dead: A Sister's Story of Love, Murder, and Liberation

• Lear, Martha Weinman. Heart-Sounds: The Story of Love and Loss (heart disease)

• Lewis, Mindy. Life Inside (diagnosed as schizophrenic at 15, kept in a psychiatric hospital till 18, recovering for decades, believing she was never schizophrenic)

• Lord, Audre. The Cancer Journals (explores her breast cancer and mastectomy)

• Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled (wheelchair-bound from advancing multiple sclerosis, she offers "a Baedeker for a country to which no one travels willingly").

• Maurice, Catherine. Let Me Hear Your Voice: A Family's Triumph Over Autism

• McDonnell, Jane Taylor. News from the Border: A Mother's Memoir of Her Autistic Son

• McLean, Richard. Recovered, Not Cured: A Journey Through Schizophrenia (a brief, readable memoir by a gay Australian artist whose drawings vividly illustrate the story he tells about his life and mind with schizophrenia)

• Monette, Paul. Borrowed Time, Becoming a Man, and Last Watch of the Night (a gay man battles AIDS)

• Morrison, Blake. When Did You Last See Your Father?: A Son's Memoir of Love and Loss

• Neugeboren, Jay. Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival: A Memoir (his brother's 30-year struggle with mental illness)

• Neugeboren, Jay. Open Heart: A Patient's Story of Life-Saving Medicine and Life-Giving Friendship

• Nyala, Hannah. Point Last Seen (fleeing an abusive marriage)

• Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty: A Friendship (about her strange relationship with Lucy Grealy)

• Pelzer, David J. A Child Called “It”: One Child’s Courage to Survive (a memoir based on one of the worst recorded cases of child abuse in California history, involving an abusive mother and an alcoholic father), the first in an inspirational trilogy, followed by The Lost Boy: A Foster Child’s Search for the Love of a Family and A Man Named Dave: A Story of Triumph and Forgiveness

• Phillips, Jane. The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder

• Price, Reynolds. A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (spine cancer makes him paraplegic, but liberates his imagination)

• Ratushinskaya, Irina. Grey Is the Color of Hope (remembering four years in a Siberian labor camp)

• Rhett, Kathryn, ed. Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis

• Rice, Rebecca. A Time to Mourn: One Woman's Journey Through Widowhood

• Richmond, Lewis. Healing Lazarus: A Buddhist’s Journey from Near Death to New Life (viral encephalitis sends him into coma, and in recovery he experiences an acute neuropsychiatric complication from a therapeutic drug)

• Robinson, Jill. Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found ( a compelling account of severe memory loss as the result of a seizure, by a fine novelist who grew up in Hollywood , as daughter of writer and film executive Dore Schary)

• Robinson, John Elder. Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (an interesting book made more so by the fact that he is the brother of Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors, and tells from a different angle some of the same stories from their bizarre childhood)

• Roth, Philip. Patrimony (about a father's illness and about the father-son relationship)

• Rothenberg, Laura. Breathing for a Living (on making the most of life with cystic fibrosis that takes her life at 22)

• Saks, Elyn. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (a fascinating memoir of the internal chaos and external unfairness that have made a life with schizophrenia so difficult for this professor of law and psychiatry, and of the talk therapy—indeed, psychoanalysis—she felt was as important as medication in helping her live a high-functioning life as a professor of law and psychiatry)

• Sarton, May. After the Stroke (the poet's journal about recovering from a mild stroke when she is in her seventies)

• Scheff, David. Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction (chronicling a precocious teenager's spiral downward from abuse of mind- and mood-altering drugs to meth addiction)

• Scheff, Nic. Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines (the son's story, companion book to Beautiful Boy)

• Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (memoirs of madness, as recalled a century ago during confinement In a German mental asylum)

• Shawn, Allen. Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life — part memoir, part explanation, a beautifully written and fascinating account of Shawn's own anxiety and agoraphobia, and a fine summary of what is known about how we form and can learn to manage anxiety and phobias.

• Shields, David. The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (personal history melds with riveting biological info about the body at every stage of life — an "autobiography of the body")

• Shreve, Susan Richards. Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven (an "indelible portrait of the psychic fallout of childhood illness").

• Sidransky, Ruth. In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World

• Sienkiewicz-Mercer, Ruth and Steven B. Kaplan. I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes. (Encephalitis at 5 weeks left Ruth, a healthy baby, paralyzed and unable to speak normally. Diagnosed an imbecile at 5 years, she was eventually institutionalized and severely mistreated at a school for the mentally and physically disabled until a staff turnover brought her help, including a method for communicating.)

• Skloot, Floyd. The Night-Side: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the Illness Experience (an account of how this mysterious and life-altering illness struck
overnight, dramatically changing Skloot's life, and how he dealt with it)

• Solomon, Andrew. Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

• Spradley, Thomas S. and James P. Deaf Like Me (parents of a child born deaf as the result of an epidemic of German measles waste years avoiding sign language before learning how to communicate with their child)

• Steinem, Gloria. "Ruth's Song, Because She Could Not Sing It," in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (about childhood with a mentally ill mother)

• Styron, William. Darkness Visible (about his struggle with crippling depression)

• Sutcliff, Rosemary. Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection (the memoir of one of Britain’s best-loved historical novelists, crippled and badly disabled from the age of three by Still’s Disease, a form of juvenile arthritis)

• Tammet, Daniel. Born on a Blue Day (memoir of a life with synaesthesia and savant syndrome, a rare form of Asperger's syndrome)

• Taylor, Jill Bolte. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (a story that provides hope for the brain-injured, not just those who have had a stroke, as this young brain scientist did)

• Taylor, Nick. A Necessary End (about death of parents)

• Vincent, Eleanor. Swimming with Maya: A Mother's Story (how the daughter's fall from a horse ended in organ donations — transforming a mother's grief)

• Walker, Lou Ann. A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

• Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle (growing up in a decidedly eccentric, often homeless, family)

• Waxman, Robert and Linda. Losing Jonathan (losing a beloved child to drugs)

• Wexler, Alice. Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research (on Huntington's Disease)

• Wiesel, Elie. Night (a powerful account of surviving the nightmare world of the Nazi death camps)

• Wilensky, Amy S. Passing for Normal (a compelling account of life with a long-delayed diagnosis of Tourette's syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder — and an "exploration of the larger themes of difference and the need to belong")

• Willey, Liane Holliday. Pretending to Be Normal: Living with Asperger's Syndrome (a mother's account of her own and her daughter's life with Asperger's syndrome)

• Williams, Donna. Nobody Nowhere (growing up as an autistic child, and a far different story from others listed here)

• Williams, Marjorie. The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate (the last third is about her losing battle with cancer)

• Wolff, Geoffrey. The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father, about his con-man father

• Wolff, Tobias. This Boy's Life (about escaping life with his abusive stepfather). Geoffrey and Tobias are brothers; it is interesting to contrast their perspectives.

• Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (atypical depression and bouts with drugs)

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[Go Top]

"Many descriptions of autism and Asperger's describe people like me as 'not wanting contact with others' or 'preferring to play alone.' I can't speak for other kids, but I'd like to be very clear about my own feelings. I did not ever want to be alone. And all those child psychologists who said 'John prefers to play by himself' were dead wrong. I played by myself because I was a failure at playing with others. I was alone as a result of my own limitations, and being alone was one of the bitterest disappointments of my young life. The sting of those early failures followed me long into adulthood, even after I learned about Asperger's."
~ John Elder Robison, in Look Me In the Eye: My Life with Asperger's, p. 211