100 books like Your Pain is Not a Waste

I loved Jeanette Walls honest and raw telling of her father’s mental illness and her mother’s unorthodox mothering and the impact they both had on her childhood and adulthood. People with mental illness are often portrayed as villains with no redeeming qualities.

Still, Walls finds the bits and pieces of her father that are beautiful, made her childhood sometimes magical, and led to her own successful career and life. 

Frank McCourt's classic book, the memoir of his childhood, is proof in the pudding that the origin of humor is the suffering of the low-status character. And that’s only one reason why I love it.

He had me at “Above all -- we were wet.” His descriptions of the impossible and undignified conditions of his childhood, where children had absolutely no control over anything and adults were at the mercy of life itself, brought me so close to him that I think I started believing we were actually related and scribbled him into the family tree as a long-lost uncle.

McCourt captures the hapless quality of gullible, unsupervised children let loose on an unforgiving world with a buoyancy that comes through every sentence and rises above the brutal conditions of his childhood. 

And the truth he finds in the details, from the brutality of religious authority figures to the abject… show more.

This book is nonfiction, so it’s about real people rather than fictional characters. I love this book because it gives a descriptive perspective on what was happening and what was going on in Nazi-occupied Germany and Poland during World War II, and the horrors of the concentration camps (mainly Auschwitz) that were built and used to kill everyone the nazis hated for whatever insane reasons they had.

I’ve always had an almost alarming interest in World War II. It was my favorite lesson from the history classes I’ve taken, and this book really put some of the evil things that were done during that time into perspective.

When I heard Ginny Dent Brant interviewed about her books, I couldn’t wait to purchase them for myself. Finding True Freedom recounts Ginny’s uncertain days of watching her father’s passion for politics. (Lots of well-documented info about his and others’ involvement in Watergate.) But Harry Dent experienced a conversion and left politics for the mission field of Romania. I wouldn’t normally read a book about politics; however, I highly recommend Finding True Freedom as it was a page-turner for me and taught me that true freedom is not the easiest to find, especially in highly charged Washington politics.

This book is for children. Susan uses Biblical references and colorful pictures to teach children the importance of making healthy eating a priority. It is written by a certified health and wellness coach who inspires children to appreciate the foods God has made for us to eat that promote healing. Every parent needs this book to teach their children at a young age the health benefits of eating God’s Foods.

I have purchased and gifted this book through the years when I met someone in need of a reminder of how good life is and that pain is both part of the process of growing and a tool in becoming the strong person we were meant to be. 

It has wonderful illustrations of life pain that includes losing loved ones, jobs, status and position, and relationships; and how that pain may be turned into fuel to become stronger, wiser, and more compassionate in our life journey. 

Imagine being a medical school student in the best of health and full of spirit and ambition, and suddenly being engulfed by a strange and mysterious illness that even the best of doctors in the most renowned hospitals are unable to appropriately diagnose, let alone treat. This chilling story of a doctor who literally chases his own cure is a great example of the much-needed patient advocacy that may often be required to diagnose and treat rare and complex conditions effectively. The author’s passion for finding the underlying cause of his disease (Castleman’s disease) and experimenting with innovative unlikely combinations of drug therapies makes his story memorable and truly inspiring.

This is another book I wish I’d been able to read when my marriage ended. In this memoir, Gina Frangello writes about the explosion of her own marriage, the cause of which was her secret affair. This might seem like a surprising choice, but in so many ways it gets to the heart of why modern marriages come apart. So many women, myself included, entered into marriage committed to the idea of following codes and rules that were not our own. This author bravely excavates the reasons for her affair without punishing herself, but taking responsibility. In this way it is a sister memoir to Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath. This is not a book about widowhood at all, but I recommend it because it can offer fresh perspective on marriage and relationships…for next time.

I have been intrigued by the coexistence of crackpot notions and prescient science in the Third Reich, and the medical science of oncology provides some remarkable examples of the latter. German doctors realized that the high incidence of stomach cancers correlated with diet, leading to suspicion of smoked meats, aflatoxins, coal tar dyes, and various adulterants as possible causes of various cancers.

As cheap alternatives to modern medicine and processed flour, herbal teas and whole grain foods became part of the Third Reich social doctrine for reasons of both health and economy. Meat was eyed with suspicion (and growing crops as fodder wasted energy), and so vegetable cookery was encouraged.

Beyond cancer concerns, I found awareness of fetal alcohol syndrome to be quite surprising; Third Reich doctors admired the U.S. temperance policy and encouraged expectant mothers to drink unfermented cider to avoid alcohol effects on fetal development. 

This classic text by medical sociologist Arthur Frank was written in the wake of two life-threatening events: a heart attack at age 39 and a cancer diagnosis a year later. 

Frank draws on both his scholarly and personal experiences to guide others who find themselves in similar circumstances. He helps us understand that when we place ourselves in medicine’s hands, we also subject ourselves to their ways of knowing. Their stories bleed into our stories, but they are never the same as our stories because what medicine knows as disease is not the same as what we experience as illness. 

Thus, Frank teaches us: “These two stories, the story of medicine taking the body as its territory and the story of learning to wonder at the body itself, can only be told together, because illness is both stories at once.”