Posts Tagged ‘Commitment’

10 Books on Mental Health

June 6th, 2023

It doesn’t have to be Mental Health Awareness Month to add these books to your TBR. From thought-provoking fiction to informative nonfiction, these works tackle mental health subjects such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and more.

 

 

 


Commitment by Mona Simpson 

A masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.

 

Read an excerpt | Buy the book

 


My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel

From the editor of The Atlantic comes a riveting, revelatory memoir of life with anxiety–and the history of the scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers who have worked to understand this condition.

 

 

Read an excerpt | Buy the book


Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

The McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele and for its progressive methods. Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” from the perspective of a young woman trapped within it, while raising thought-provoking questions about our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

Read an excerpt | Buy the book

 


The Red Arrow by William Brewer

When a once-promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous physicist’s memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: Plagued by debt, he’s grown distant from his wife—a successful AI designer—and is haunted by an overwhelming sense of dread he describes as “The Mist.” Then, things get worse: The physicist vanishes, leaving everything in limbo, including our narrator’s sanity.

Read an excerpt | Buy the book

 


The Edge of Every Day by Marin Sardy

The critically acclaimed debut of an important new literary voice: Marin Sardy’s extraordinarily affecting, fiercely intelligent memoir unflinchingly traces the path of schizophrenia that runs in her family.

 

Read an excerpt | Buy the book

 


Fires in the Dark by Kay Redfield Jamison

The acclaimed author of An Unquiet Mind considers the age-old quest for relief from psychological pain and the role of the exceptional healer in the journey back to health.

 

Buy the book

 


Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her acclaimed Homegoing: a novel about a Ghanaian family in the contemporary South, at once a profound story about race in America and an astonishingly intimate portrait of a young woman reckoning, spiritually and intellectually, with a legacy of unmanageable loss.

 

Read an excerpt | Buy the book

 


Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Following the acclaimed and bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights is Joan Didion’s intensely personal and moving account of the death of her daughter, Quintana, and her thoughts, fears, and doubts about motherhood, illness, and aging.

 

Read an excerpt | Buy the book

 


Anti-Semite and JewHow Not to Kill Yourself by Clancy Martin

An intimate, insightful, at times even humorous exploration of why the thought of death is so compulsive for some while demonstrating that there’s always another solution—from the acclaimed writer and professor of philosophy, based on his viral essay, “I’m Still Here.”

 

Read an excerpt | Buy the book

 


Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—a brilliant and compassionate novel of love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change in an instant.

 

Read an excerpt | Buy the book