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The Dictionary of Missing Time
The Dictionary of Missing Time, by Susan Eileen, is a memoir of addiction, family, relationships, mental health, and recovery organized through a clever personal lexicon. Each chapter takes its title from an expression Eileen has coined or adopted, such as “A Reverse Kafka,” “Memory Burn,” “Irish Goodbye,” and “Confident Humility,” then uses that phrase as an entry point into a particular period of her life. The dictionary framework gives shape to a story that ranges from a financially strained childhood in Ohio through marriage, motherhood, teaching, substance abuse, difficult relationships, legal trouble, and sobriety. Early in the book, Eileen describes her life as “a series of rambunctious events,” an apt description of a memoir that moves through painful and comic experiences with considerable energy.
Eileen’s voice is the book’s defining strength. She writes with candor about behavior that could easily be softened in retrospect, including drinking, pill abuse, financial instability, people-pleasing, damaged relationships, and the ways addiction consumed both her time and her attention. Her humor gives the book accessibility without erasing the seriousness of what she describes. The invented expressions are often funny, but they also function as compact explanations for recurring patterns of behavior. As the memoir progresses, these terms become a way for Eileen to name experiences she once struggled to understand. That approach is particularly effective because language itself becomes part of the recovery process: defining an experience allows her to examine it, connect it to the past, and decide what role it should have in her future.
The book also succeeds in presenting sobriety as a continuing process of self-examination. Eileen traces improvements in her work habits, finances, home life, boundaries, relationships, and ability to tolerate difficult emotions, while also examining transfer addiction and the patterns she carried from childhood and marriage into later relationships. Some of the memoir’s most thoughtful passages concern time, particularly the years and mental energy absorbed by addiction. Her observation that “Time can never be retrieved” gives the title its deeper significance. Recovery, in this telling, involves recognizing that lost time while becoming more deliberate about the time that remains. The result is a narrative concerned as much with identity, habits, and emotional maturity as with abstinence itself.
By the end, The Dictionary of Missing Time has become a record of reconstruction. Eileen arrives at a life built around simplicity, creative work, family, healthier boundaries, volunteering, and a more measured sense of self. Her idea of “confident humility,” defined as keeping one’s ego in proper proportion, neatly captures the balance she spends much of the book trying to establish. The closing sentiment, “I’ve built a life I don’t need a vacation from,” gives the memoir an especially fitting conclusion because it measures recovery through ordinary contentment. Eileen has created a personal recovery memoir with an unusual organizing principle, a conversational voice, and a clear interest in how people can use language, reflection, and self-knowledge to make sense of a complicated life.
Pages: 268 | ASIN : B0CTN1NJWW
Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness
Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness, by Alex Charns, is a warm, candid blend of memoir, humor, and practical guidance. Narrated by Annie, a German shepherd and husky mix, the book follows Charns’s recovery after hospitalization for major depression with psychotic features. Annie’s lively perspective makes difficult subjects approachable while establishing the bond between dog and owner as the book’s emotional center. Her declaration, “I rescued Alex and the whole family,” neatly captures the reversal on which the narrative is built.
Across twenty-six compact chapters, Charns presents wellness as a collection of mutually reinforcing habits. Walking, medication, talk therapy, meditation, sleep, faith, friendship, reading, volunteer work, political participation, and gratitude all contribute to a balanced life. The book’s structure reflects this philosophy, moving briskly among personal memories, observations, photographs, and Annie’s comic complaints. Her demands for walks, games of fetch, and generous portions of dog treats give the narrative an appealing rhythm and keep its advice grounded in daily experience.
The book gains depth from Charns’s account of intergenerational trauma. His mother’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland, her later struggles with post-traumatic stress, and his own early encounters with Holocaust history illuminate the fears that shaped his family. Charns writes with particular honesty about psychosis, suicidal thoughts, sleep deprivation, and the stigma surrounding psychiatric hospitalization. The chapters on treatment and family support are direct and humane, presenting recovery as sustained work supported by professional care, meaningful routines, and personal relationships.
Annie’s humor gives the book its distinctive personality, but its strongest quality is the sincerity beneath the jokes. Charns’s affection for his dog becomes a way of expressing gratitude for the people, practices, and communities that helped restore his health. When Annie defines canine devotion by saying, “That is the power of the dog. Love. Love. And more love,” the line also summarizes the book’s central conviction. Concise, intimate, and encouraging, Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness offers an accessible portrait of recovery rooted in companionship, purposeful activity, and care.
Pages: 78 | ASIN : B0H699ML1N
Reawaken: Finding Hope, Purpose, and Joy Through Life’s Unexpected Journey
Reawaken is Richard E. Poulin III’s account of how his family’s adventurous, carefully planned life changed after his daughter, Rylae-Ann, developed unexplained medical episodes. Poulin begins with his and his wife Judy’s multicultural childhoods, teaching careers, and years of travel before moving into the book’s central story: their search for the cause of Rylae-Ann’s symptoms. That search leads to a diagnosis of aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase deficiency, an extraordinarily rare genetic disorder, and eventually to an experimental gene therapy trial in Taiwan. The result is part family memoir, part medical odyssey, and part caregiver field guide.
Poulin writes with an open, personable voice that suits the story well. He’s candid about fear, denial, exhaustion, financial pressure, and even the envy he felt while watching other families celebrate milestones that seemed unreachable for his daughter. His humor keeps those admissions from becoming overwhelming, whether he’s describing airport mishaps, hospital bureaucracy, or therapy sessions conducted over Rylae-Ann’s enthusiastic protests. Judy emerges as the family’s steady engine, while relatives, caregivers, educators, clinicians, and researchers gradually form the wider “Team Rylae.” That attention to collective effort gives the memoir much of its warmth.
The book is especially affecting when it concentrates on small, observable changes. Rylae-Ann sitting independently, selecting a picture in a familiar book, throwing a fork, speaking her first words, and taking a few unsteady steps carry more emotional force than broad statements about perseverance. Poulin’s background as an educator also gives the later chapters practical substance. His discussions of scaffolding, play, sleep, communication supports, and the family’s caregiver lifestyle framework show how therapy became part of ordinary routines. Brief sidebars on medicine, science, history, travel, and culture add context, though their frequency and the repetition of a few motivational ideas occasionally slow the story’s momentum.
I recommend Reawaken to parents and caregivers of children with rare diseases, disabilities, or developmental delays. They’ll recognize the difficult decisions, relentless research, improvised routines, and strange mix of grief and celebration that can shape caregiving. Educators, therapists, healthcare professionals, and rare-disease advocates will also find a useful reminder that families bring vital knowledge to clinical and educational partnerships. Above all, this is a hopeful account of a child gaining access to movement, language, learning, and a fuller life, and of a family turning that experience into advocacy for others.
Pages: 291 | ASIN : B0HB2NQP28
Life’s Like A Book…
Life’s Like A Book…, by Christina M. McKenzie, is a contemporary women’s fiction novel that blends romance, grief, friendship, family, and personal reinvention into the story of Kloey, a young woman whose carefully planned life has stopped feeling like her own. At the beginning, she’s ending a five-year relationship, finishing law school, dealing with the lingering effects of a serious medical condition, and questioning what she actually wants from adulthood. Then the sudden death of her best friend, Brandi, changes the direction of everything. What follows is less about finding one simple answer and more about Kloey learning how to participate in her own life again.
One of the strongest parts of this contemporary romance and women’s fiction story is the way grief remains present even when Kloey is doing ordinary, funny, messy, or impulsive things. Brandi’s death doesn’t disappear whenever romance enters the picture. Instead, Kloey carries her friend with her, quite literally for much of the novel, scattering Brandi’s ashes in meaningful places and eventually incorporating some into a memorial tattoo. That gives the book an unusual mixture of sadness, humor, sensuality, and everyday life. Kloey can be mourning one moment, flirting with Henry the next, worrying about work after that, and then thinking about food, her dog, or something completely mundane. It makes her feel like a person whose life keeps happening even when she isn’t emotionally prepared for it.
The romantic storyline with Henry fits naturally into Kloey’s larger journey because attraction forces her to confront insecurities that existed long before she met him. Her illness has changed her body, her former relationship damaged her confidence, and dating exposes both wounds pretty quickly. Henry’s response to her scars becomes an important early moment because he treats them as evidence of a life lived. Their connection develops alongside separations, career decisions, long-distance conversations, and Kloey’s fear of allowing another major change into her life. That makes the romance feel connected to the book’s broader questions about confidence, intimacy, independence, and whether feeling safe is always the same thing as feeling fulfilled.
By the end, Life’s Like A Book… has grown into a story about accepting that a life can contain several different versions of the same person. Kloey has lost Brandi and her grandmother, begun establishing herself as an attorney, reopened herself to Henry, and reached a point where career, home, and love may all require another leap. The final pages deliberately leave her at that crossroads, considering a different firm, the possibility of taking over her family’s Florida farm, and a future with Henry before finally deciding to listen to what she wants and beginning to type. For readers who enjoy contemporary women’s fiction, romantic fiction, stories about grief and healing, and character-driven novels about starting over, this is an intimate look at how one chapter of a life can close while the next one is still being written.
Pages: 150 | ASIN : B0DH7T452J
Sharing My Story
In Turning Fertile, you share your difficult journey through infertility and medical complications as you learned to listen to your body and ultimately became a mother. What made you decide to tell your infertility journey as a memoir?
I chose to write Turning Fertile as a memoir because infertility often happens in silence. During my own journey, I searched for stories that felt honest, vulnerable, and unfiltered — stories that didn’t just describe medical procedures, but the emotional weight behind them. I couldn’t find many.
I realized that if I wanted a book that spoke to the loneliness, the fear, the hope, and the small victories that shape this experience, I would have to write it myself.
Sharing my story became a way to reclaim my voice after years of feeling like my body was being spoken for by test results, scans, and protocols. I wanted women to see themselves in a narrative that doesn’t shy away from the difficult parts, but still finds strength and meaning in them.
How did you decide how much of the medical experience to share?
I included the medical details that shaped my emotional reality — not every number or chart, but the moments that changed how I understood my body.
Repeated IUIs, the unexpected IVF cycle, ovarian hyperstimulation, surgery, and the tubal pregnancy were not just medical events; they were turning points in my life. Each one carried fear, confusion, and hope, and leaving them out would have made the story incomplete.
My goal was to strike a balance: enough detail for readers to understand the physical intensity of infertility treatments, but not so much that the memoir felt like a medical textbook. I wanted readers to feel what I felt — the waiting rooms, the injections, the ultrasounds — without overwhelming them.
Who did you imagine speaking to in the “Dear Reader” passages?
Whenever I wrote “Dear Reader,” I imagined someone sitting across from me who was going through the same emotional storm — someone exhausted, scared, hopeful, and unsure of what tomorrow might bring.
I pictured a woman who had just received a difficult test result, or who was silently grieving a failed cycle, or who was trying to stay strong for her partner while feeling fragile inside.
Those passages were my way of reaching out and saying: You are not alone. I see you. I’ve been where you are.
They became the emotional heartbeat of the book — a conversation between two people who may never meet, but share a deeply human experience.
What do you hope partners, family members, and friends will learn from your experiences?
I hope they learn that infertility is not just a medical condition — it is an emotional landscape that affects every part of a person’s life.
Partners may see the procedures and medications, but they don’t always see the quiet moments of grief, the self‑doubt, or the fear of disappointing the people they love. Family members and friends may offer advice or encouragement, but sometimes what people need most is simply understanding and patience.
I hope my story helps loved ones recognize that support is not about fixing anything — it’s about showing up, listening without judgment, and respecting the emotional complexity of the journey.
If this memoir teaches anything, I hope it teaches compassion.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Amazon
Sonali carried hers like a locked diary. Then, one ordinary morning, her seven-year-old son lifted a violin to his chin, drew a single trembling note into the air — and something she had kept closed for years finally cracked open.
Turning Fertile is the story of the woman behind that note.
A girl whose ambition burned so brightly she stopped hearing her own body. A diagnosis that named years of quiet signs she’d ignored. And then the long, unmapped country of waiting — where time is no longer measured in days, but in heartbeats, held breaths, and prayers whispered in bathroom silence.
This is a book about hope that refuses to die. About the question every woman has asked in the quiet of a waiting room — why not me? — and the slow, hard-won discovery that the question itself is a form of love.
Written as an intimate conversation — Dear Reader, yes, you — it reaches straight to the woman sitting somewhere right now with her own version of that silence, and tells her the one thing she most needs to hear.
This book will not be gentle with the truth. But it will be gentle with you.
Fundamental Pillars of Life
A Poetic Wandering is a reflective collection spanning four decades in which you explore memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the experiences that shape a life. What role has poetry played in helping you process emotions, develop self-awareness, and make sense of your experiences?
Growing up as an only child, I wasn’t able to compare life experiences or receive guidance from a sibling. There were times I felt lonely, times I felt life was unfair, times when anger reared its ugly head. Writing became a means to document and work through some of life’s instabilities. The process eventually created opportunities for stronger self-confidence and self-esteem.
How has becoming a parent—and later reflecting on family across generations—influenced your poetry?
As one ages, we realize more and more the true importance of faith, family, and friends. I was truly blessed to grow up with parents who believed in these tenets. As parents, my wife and I tried to instill these beliefs in our own children. Sharing these fundamental pillars of life through family generations only makes sense.
Your collection moves comfortably between serious subjects and humorous poems about aging, grilling, toilet paper, and everyday life. Why is humor important to the overall balance of the book?
Poetry should be reflective at times, entertaining at times. I want readers to understand what I am sharing without having to dissect obscure, remote, or hidden meanings. Regarding humor…didn’t Ficino say “Humor Is the Spice of Life.”
What do you hope readers—especially parents, grandparents, travelers, and people reflecting on their own lives—take away from A Poetic Wandering?
I hope that by sharing my thoughts and experiences, it may help others to BE POETIC themselves.
Author Links: Website
A Poetic Wandering
Kevin R. Peterson’s A Poetic Wandering feels much like its title suggests: a long, personal walk through memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the ordinary experiences that accumulate into a life. The collection reaches back to poems from Peterson’s 1980s chapbooks and then moves into work written across the following four decades, so the reader gets something close to a poetic autobiography. Peterson explains that poetry became a way for him to work through emotions, develop self-awareness, reflect on experience, and share what he’d learned, and that purpose remains visible throughout the book. The result is a collection that’s interested less in maintaining a single mood than in recording the things a person notices and carries with him over many years.
The most affecting section is the group of poems drawn from Kendra: A Father’s Feelings. Here Peterson writes about his young daughter’s grave illness, survival, deafness, and the family’s adjustment to a frightening new reality. The poems are plainspoken and emotionally immediate. In “Hospital Paradox,” the birth of one child and the medical crisis of another exist almost side by side, while “Can It Be” captures the complicated mixture of gratitude and sorrow after his daughter survives but loses her hearing. “Roller Skates” then turns a Christmas gift into something far larger, because having their daughter home and alive has changed what the family values. These poems are strong because Peterson trusts the events themselves to carry the emotion. That directness gives the family material an intimacy that stays with you.
Elsewhere, the book widens considerably. Kansas appears again and again through prairie landscapes, pioneers, bison, Dust Bowl memories, sunflowers, local history, and Peterson’s sense of generational connection to the land. Travel adds another dimension, with poems about Yellowstone, Florida, wilderness hiking, canoe country, sunsets, campsites, and the decades-long project of visiting all fifty states with his wife. Nature often becomes a doorway into something spiritual. Peterson says explicitly that it’s where he feels most comfortable and where he most strongly connects with God. There’s also a welcome streak of playfulness, including poems about toilet paper, aging, grilling, and other subjects that keep the collection from becoming uniformly meditative. Near the end, Peterson brings poetry and photography together in what he calls a “poetograph,” combining his own images with brief poetic responses. That makes the closing pages feel like a natural culmination of two lifelong interests.
I’d recommend A Poetic Wandering to readers who enjoy accessible, personal poetry rooted in recognizable experiences rather than poetry that needs to be decoded before it can be felt. It should have particular appeal for Midwestern readers, nature lovers, travelers, parents and grandparents, people interested in family or regional history, and readers who’ve reached an age when looking backward and looking forward begin to happen at the same time. Peterson writes with the perspective of someone interested in preserving memories while he still has the chance to name them, whether those memories involve a hospital room, a Kansas field, a campsite, a marriage, a family tragedy, or a ridiculous question about which way the toilet-paper roll should face. That range is the book’s real character. It reads like one man opening several decades of notebooks and photographs and inviting you to wander through them with him.
Evenings on the Edge of Death
Evenings on the Edge of Death is a deeply personal work of poeticized nonfiction about the long afterlife of family trauma, the erosion of memory, and the complicated work of loving people who have also caused pain. Theodore McDowell builds the book as a series of collages centered on his mother, father, sister, marriage, and finally the experience of saying goodbye. The form suits the subject beautifully. Memory rarely arrives as a clean narrative, and McDowell doesn’t force it into one. Instead, a beach, a baseball glove, a glass of whiskey, a rosary, a wheelchair, a field of wheat, or the sound of water can suddenly open a door to another time. The result feels less like being told the story of a life than being invited inside the way that life is actually remembered.
At the center of the book is a family wounded by an abusive father and by the silence that grows around abuse. McDowell returns to those wounds from different angles, especially through his relationships with his mother and his sister Rachel. The opening poem establishes the emotional vocabulary immediately, placing a father’s violence beside wheat fields, church bells, maternal tenderness, and a child’s bewildered questions about God. What gives these poems their staying power is McDowell’s willingness to let contradictory feelings occupy the same room. He can rage at his father and still search for the damaged man inside him. He can adore his mother while admitting resentment, exhaustion, and even the terrible wish for her suffering to end. He can grieve Rachel’s suicide while continuing to wrestle with guilt over not saving her. Forgiveness here isn’t a neat resolution. It’s an ongoing argument between memory, love, anger, faith, and the child who still wants an explanation.
The book widens considerably in the poems about marriage. Here, McDowell brings the same searching attention to intimacy, addiction, estrangement, reconciliation, aging, and the fear of losing the person who has witnessed your life. In one poem, a couple plants seeds while wondering whether they’ve truly fallen in love; in another, thirty-nine years of marriage are remembered through happiness, miscarriage, addiction, recovery, service, and the simple act of holding hands on a porch as death approaches. These poems show one of McDowell’s strongest gifts: he finds emotional weight in physical things. Hands, weather, flowers, rooms, rivers, photographs, and worn objects keep carrying the story when abstract language would be too easy. His recurring Christian imagery sits alongside Buddhist meditation, blues music, nature, and art, giving the book a spiritual restlessness that feels earned.
By the final section, death has become less a single event than the book’s constant horizon. McDowell writes about hospice, nursing homes, dementia, the indignities of the body, forgotten names, and the fear that a whole human life might vanish when nobody remains to remember it. Yet the book keeps moving toward preservation. Again and again, writing becomes an act of keeping faith with the dead, with the damaged self, and with moments of beauty that would otherwise be lost. The closing poems return to the book’s rivers, grief, childhood wounds, faith, and questions of identity, but the final movement is toward grace and self-creation. Evenings on the Edge of Death turns the fragments of a wounded life into something enduring: a fierce, tender testament to memory, love, and the grace of still becoming.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0CVJ4PR85
