KDL Recommends

Born in prison to a single mother and raised as a ward of Cleveland’s foster care system, the author relates how he resisted the lure of drugs and crime to build a successful life for himself.

The author describes her painful childhood with a manipulative mother, her relationship with an abusive man, and the Labrador dog who gave her unconditional love and the strength to escape the patterns of abuse.

An unusual memoir describes growing up as the victim of Munchausen by proxy, a dangerous form of child abuse in which her mother invented or caused illnesses and ailments.

The memoirs of Mary Karr, who grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town at the epicenter of a volatile family. In this book, she sorts through dark household secrets through a child’s eyes.

A Korean War orphan retraces her steps from the Korean countryside, where her mother was murdered for sleeping with an American GI, to the United States, where she found both hardship and salvation.

A poignant autobiography describes growing up during the 1970s, the shattering effects of tragedy — loss, loneliness, mistreatment — on her family, and her own will to survive.

The daughter of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman describes her very difficult childhood and the psychological abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepmother.

The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies.

The daughter of a former aide to the king of Morocco, who was executed after a failed assassination attempt on the ruler, describes how she, her five siblings, and her mother were imprisoned in a desert penal colony.

The author describes growing up with eleven brothers and sisters with a violent father and self-destructive mother who subjected their children to a relentless series of beatings, torture, starvation, and abandonment.

Traces the six-month period in which the author’s father was on the run from the police, a time during which the author evaluated her tumultuous childhood and considered her future as the offspring of a criminal.

The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family’s nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.

A victim of childhood sexual abuse, now a trained psychologist, chronicles his terrifying experience with multiple personalities later in life,detailing his road to recovery.