Here are 100 books that I Hope You Stay fans have personally recommended if you like
I Hope You Stay.
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My journey with mental health started young and has colored my life for as long as I can remember. So, I have a fascination with storytelling and time. Time is the container for stories. But for a long time, I didn’t understand the depth of what ‘story’ really is and how much it shapes everything. When I started to write my book and unravel how inseparable the story is from the mental health journey I’d been on, my appetite for writing that could help me understand that connection became and remains voracious. I hope these books are as impactful for you as they have been for me. Enjoy!
I’ve read this book over and over and highlighted something new every time. Somehow, through the lens of Nazi death camps, Frankl validates everyone’s suffering, including my own. I’ve always known that suffering is an inescapable part of the human experience, but this helped me understand that to the brain, it isn’t relative in the ways I always thought.
Furthermore, this book helped me understand that my coping mechanisms inform suffering’s hold on me. Stories are a coping mechanism, and I learned that redirecting my attention and creating my personal narratives around what is meaningful to me rather than the source of pain is key to the cage of suffering. This book changed how I understand the importance of purpose and the power of what I build my stories around.
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
I am an award-winning author of two five-star rated memoirs: “My Whorizontal Life: An Escort’s Tale” and “A Someday Courtesan,” and the creator/performer of the 90-minute solo show: “My Whorizontal Life: The Show!” I co-host the podcast My Index to Sex. and I am a Juilliard Drama Graduate and the former #1 escort in the country. Thinking about how I grew up in a safe, typical suburb in the middle of America made me wonder if the things that happened to me with men as a girl happened to many women as we came of age in the 70s.
We all know the incomparable poet, writer, and speaker she became, but before that was her coming-of-age story. Raw and painful yet written with Maya Angelou's lyrical and insightful eye, this too was a book I started and could not put down.
Drawn into her world as a girl feeling imprisoned inside herself for terrible reasons, she finds that self-love and kindness and the world of words, books, poetry, and writing unlock the cage she was in.
As a woman, as a girl, I would never know the cruel racism she experienced, but her journey into art and its ability to heal and set one free was something I felt kin to.
Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy,achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover.
I’m an Australian author and artist who is quite cautious and introverted by nature, but very curious and playful at heart. I make books that help people untangle what’s on their mind today and shift their thinking in creative ways, often using visual metaphors. My latest book, Guidebook to the Unknown, was created during the long lockdowns we had in Melbourne (and all over the world of course) during the pandemic. It was my way of exploring how to calm an anxious mind and find meaning in my daily life, right here and now, without knowing what tomorrow will bring.
This fascinating and charming book was written by a French magazine editor after he suffered a massive stroke and was locked inside his own body, unable to speak or move. Incredibly, he wrote this book in his mind throughout the day and then each letter was slowly transcribed by blinking his eyes. I kept thinking about this book long after I read it. It’s a nightmare scenario, but he leads us all the way through it. We’re with him as he survives and even finds meaning when almost everything else is lost.
Whilst suffering from a condition whereby he was unable to speak and his only movement was the blinking of an eyelid, Jean-Dominique Bauby devised a code for each letter of the alphabet and dictated this book about his experiences and feelings. He died just after it was published.
I'm the author of Penelope’s Purple Passions. I've been in love with writing poetry since I was a little girl. I would go under the bunk bed at night with my flashlight and write all these poems about love, not that I knew anything about love, but what I did know was how writing poetry made me feel. I believe love is truly the most valuable gift we can give to another soul in our lifetime. I want my poetry to empower people and be that beacon of light in people’s lives. Poetry is the avenue where I can spread love and hope globally to anyone who picks up my books.
I recommend this book because it places emphasis on women knowing their self-worth. This book also speaks about loving deeply and not having that love given back in return. I could identify with being in relationships that have made me feel unloved and unworthy. I could also identify with having that eye-opening moment when you come to the realization that you are this beautiful, gifted, wonderful human being worthy of having a person in your life who recognizes and truly appreciates you for all that you embody. The takeaway from this book I gained is to never love anyone more than you love yourself.
#1 New York Times bestseller Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.
The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
I have created art from an early age. Years later, my studies in civil engineering allowed me to combine my love for the arts with my belief in an orderly world. Meanwhile, reading and writing have always been my favorite pursuits. While collaborating as an editor with other authors, assisting them in their writing endeavors, in 2014, I wrote and published my first book. Sharing my writing on Instagram gave birth to the idea of my first poetry book, something like, published in 2018. Since then, two more poetry collections have been published: A TriAngle in 2019 and something like in reverse in 2020.
Pillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose about heartbreak, love, and raw emotions. It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most.
I never thought I’d be a poetry lover. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. During that time, I took quite a few poetry classes, even though I didn’t consider myself a huge poetry fan. Over the course of those classes, I learned that poetry isn’t all about abstract, obscure themes, and academic language. It’s also a way for humans to communicate the feelings and experiences in one heart to another. Once I learned that poetry doesn’t have to be difficult and confusing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to help other people discover that poetry can be more accessible and satisfying than what they may have studied in school.
This book blew me away. It looks deceptively simple with short poems and regular language, but the emotion of the poems is intense, direct, powerful, and breathtaking. Poem after poem just made me think “Wow!” I don’t usually read poetry for fun, but the pretty pink cover and the title of this book grabbed me at the bookstore and I bought it on a whim. It was definitely one of those cases where the right book gets you at the right time. I love this book!
International best-selling author of Love & Misadventure, Lullabies (Goodreads Readers Choice Award), and Memories, Lang Leav presents a completely new collection of poetry with a celestial theme in The Universe of Us.
Planets, stars, and constellations feature prominently in this beautiful, original poetry collection from Lang Leav. Inspired by the wonders of the universe, the best-selling poetess writes about love and loss, hope and hurt, being lost and found. Lang's poetry encompasses the breadth of emotions we all experience and evokes universal feelings with her skillfully crafted words.
* International Bestseller: Over 26K copies sold in the UK of Love…
I love words! As a child, I learned the power of stories from my father, a master storyteller and creator of 480 original Brer Rabbit stories. I began writing myself at the age of seven, majored in journalism, and enjoyed a career that included everything from technical writing to several of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul books. But only through poetry did I discover the beauty of getting to the essence of experience. I love how poetry takes both the writer and the reader to a deeper place, creating intimacy, giving us “ah-ha” moments, and touching heart and spirit.
There’s a reason Billy Collins served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States. His work is known to be both serious and playful, and he is able to take everyday moments and turn them into lessons for living. I always love what he calls “the turn” in his poem—the surprise direction a poem suddenly takes, seemingly departing from its original subject and taking your breath away or leaving you in complete surprise. Aimless Love is a beautiful compilation of fifty new poems and some of the best of four previous books.
“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street Journal
From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years. Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard on every page, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience. His work is featured in top…
I love writing stories for young people in that “in-between” age: age 12, 13, and 14, when kids are figuring out who they are and who they want to become. For many young people, crushes are a huge part of this coming-of-age process—I know they were for me! When I was this age, there weren’t many books that explored crushes and the first romance for LGBTQ+ kids. I’m thrilled to be part of a wave of authors writing these stories now. And I’m so excited for a future where we have a wealth of books about the joy, heartbreak, and humor of all kinds of young love.
I absolutely love this fast-paced, adorable novel-in-verse, which is about two very different girls, Kate and Tam, who fall in “like,” learning a lot about themselves in the process. I really enjoyed watching Kate, who comes off as a stereotypical cheerleader, and Tam, a tall jock, learn to test their assumptions about each other and themselves.
It’s a heartwarming story with a lot of depth, and it’s told in quick poems that pack a real emotional punch. This verse novel holds a special place in my heart, and I recommend it to everyone who will listen!
2020 Odyssey Honor Award
2020 Rainbow Booklist Title
NCTE 2020 Notable Poetry Book
ALSC Notable Children's Recordings
Kate and Tam meet, and both of their worlds tip sideways. At first, Tam figures Kate is your stereotypical cheerleader; Kate sees Tam as another tall jock. And the more they keep running into each other, the more they surprise each other. Beneath Kate's sleek ponytail and perfect facade, Tam sees a goofy, sensitive, lonely girl. And Tam's so much more than a volleyball player, Kate realizes: She's everything Kate wishes she could be. It's complicated. Except it's not. When Kate and Tam…
My newest YA novel, Home Field Advantage, is your typical cliché sports romance between a high school quarterback and aspiring cheer captain…except that they’re both girls. Sports is such a fascinating setting for queer YA to me, because it adds a whole extra social dynamic of being teammates and how that can work for or against you, depending on the culture and who you are. It’s also a great venue for subversion of gender norms, which is always welcome to me! And in general, I really just love protagonists who are really passionate about what they do. If they happen to be queer as well, that’s just a nice bonus!
She Drives Me Crazy does a fantastic job mashing up two of the greatest tropes—enemies-to-lovers and fake dating—and combining them with a spin on the classic sports romance genre by having both basketball player Scottie and cheerleader Irene be girls. It’s not all fun and games—Scottie is nursing a breakup in a painfully relatable fashion—but it is a lot of fun and games, and Quindlen definitely knows how to write romance, too.
“A little sweet, a little sharp.” —Booklist, starred review
High school nemeses fall in love in Kelly Quindlen's She Drives Me Crazy, a queer YA rom com perfect for fans of Becky Albertalli and Casey McQuiston.
After an embarrassing loss to her ex-girlfriend in their first basketball game of the season, seventeen-year-old Scottie Zajac gets into a fender bender with the worst possible person: her nemesis, Irene Abraham, head cheerleader for the Fighting Reindeer.
Irene is as mean as she is beautiful, so Scottie makes a point to keep her distance. When the accident sends Irene’s car to the shop…
Growing up as a fat kid, I hardly ever saw myself reflected in the media I consumed. If I did, it was by someone relegated to the side character status as the funny fat friend or the cautionary tale. Now, it’s my great joy to spread the word about books that put fat people in the spotlight—living our best lives, falling in love, and just having our much-deserved Main Character Moments.
Jenna Miller’s books read like the best sort of secret between friends, except the friends are anyone who is at least a little bit nerdy—and as a fat nerdy person, I was instantly in.
The main character Jordan felt so relatable to me; everything from the Doctor Who references to being kind of in love with your ex-best friend to the realistic fears of a queer, fat teenager just trying to get by hit just right. As someone who also grew up queer and fat, I had to finish this one in a day!
"Charmingly wry and sharply perceptive. An ode to first love, complicated friendships, and the messy joy of rewriting your own story." -Becky Albertalli, New York Times bestselling author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
Jordan Elliott is a fat, nerdy lesbian and the first junior to be named editor in chief of the school newspaper. Okay, that last part hasn't happened yet, but it will. It's positive thinking that has gotten Jordan this far. Ever since Mackenzie West, her friend-turned-enemy, humiliated her at the start of freshman year, Jordan has thrown herself into journalism and kept her eyes trained…
