Greg Marshall tells his own story with such vulnerability, honesty, and good humor. He writes of his experience growing up gay in Utah in the 1990s while also struggling with "tight tendons" that turn out to be a manifestation of cerebral palsy. This book is thought-provoking and often laugh-out-loud funny.
Leg is Greg Marshall’s “riotous” (People) and “witty” (USA Today) memoir grappling with family, disability, and coming of age in two closets—as a gay man and as a man living with cerebral palsy.
* A NOTEWORTHY 2023 MEMOIR * Washington Post * USA Today * Esquire * Buzzfeed * Debutiful * LitHub * and more! *
Greg Marshall’s early years were pretty bizarre. Rewind the VHS tapes (this is the ‘90s) and you’ll see a lopsided teenager limping across a high school stage, or in a wheelchair after leg surgeries, pondering why he’s crushing on half of the Utah Jazz.…
Suzanne Ohlmann tells her own story with heart and humor. This is an insightful memoir of Suzanne coming to terms with her past after being adopted by a family that never felt like her own. She tries to build a relationship with her birth mother - once she finds her - and grieves for the father she'll never know. This book is for anyone who has struggled to understand and define their own identity -- or who just wants to read a great story.
With her feet firmly rooted on the plains of Nebraska, Suzanne Ohlmann launches the reader into flight over miles and decades of migration: from an apple-pie childhood in America's Fourth of July City to the dirt floors of a cowshed in rural India, we zigzag across time and geography to see the world through Ohlmann's eyes and to discover with her the pain she'd been avoiding through her boomerang travels away from her native home.
Through incarnations as a musician, arts manager, and registered nurse, Ohlmann finally lands in Texas, buys a house, and gets a dog. But her house…
It is so well-written and engaging! Dr. Gonzalez is a natural-born storyteller who has a lot of great material to work with from his childhood in Cuba to his agonizing move to New Jersey as an adolescent. A wonderful memoir!
He leaves his birthplace during a nuclear missile crisis. As a refugee in a foreign land he struggles to adjust to a new set of life circumstances. The author recollects his childhood in his Cuban barrio from the eyes of a child, and then decades later, from the vantage of a grown adult. From stealing a rowboat and being nearly capsized by a Russian tanker, to befriending an old fisherman who tells him a haunting tale, to being bullied by a neighborhood thug, to cockfights gone wrong, to witnessing the plight of political prisoners during an invasion, to dealing with…
A memoir of triumph in the face of a terrifying diagnosis, Up the Down Escalator recounts Dr. Lisa Doggett’s startling shift from doctor to patient, as she learns to live with multiple sclerosis while running a clinic for uninsured patients in central Austin. Recounting before and after the discovery of her MS, she chronicles vexing symptoms while trying to be an attentive mother, wife, and a caring family doctor.
Facing the prospect of a career-ending disability as she adjusts to life with multiple sclerosis, Dr. Lisa Doggett is forced to deal with a new level of uncertainty and vulnerability, and the everyday fear that something new will go wrong. Taking off her white coat—becoming a patient herself—she confronts unimaginable fears, copes with her limitations, and sidesteps her skepticism of alternative medicine to seek help from unlikely sources. Drawing on riveting patient stories, Doggett reveals the dark realities of the dysfunctional U.S. healthcare system, made all the more stark when she becomes the one seeking care.
MS pushes Doggett—a perfectionist at heart—to soften her inner drill sergeant and embrace self-compassion. As a patient, she learns to advocate for herself to ensure on-time medication deliveries and satisfactory treatment plans; to navigate chronic dizziness, relapses, and parenting frustrations; and to push her physical limits as a runner to go farther than ever before. As the director of a health clinic for the uninsured, Doggett’s MS inspires an even deeper empathy as she confronts challenging cases, prompting her to work harder on behalf of those in her care, many of whom struggle with illnesses more serious than her own.
This hopeful and uplifting book will encourage those living with chronic disease, and those supporting them, to power forward with courage and grace. It will spark conversations to redefine perfect parenting and trigger uncomfortable discussions and outrage about the vicious inequalities of health care in the U.S. Most of all, it will inspire readers to embrace the gifts of an imperfect life and look for silver linings, despite life’s detours that sabotage plans and take them off their expected paths.
