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Bronka Schneider and her husband, Joseph, were two of the thirty thousand Austrian Jews admitted as refugees to Great Britain between March 1938 and 2 September 1939. It was not until 1960, however, that Schneider wrote her memoir about the year she spent as a housekeeper, with Joseph as a butler, in a Scottish castle.

Schneider tells of daily encounters—with her employers, the English lady and her husband, a retired British civil servant who had spent many years in India; the village locals; other refugees; and a family of evacuees from the slums of Glasgow.

The editors have divided this memoir into chapters, adding headlines from the London Times as epigraphs. These headlines, reporting the escalating events of World War II, are in stark contrast to daily activities of the residents of this isolated region of Scotland. A commentary by Erika Bourguignon provides historical, political, and cultural background of this period.

When Joanne Jacobson’s writing about her mother’s respiratory illness was interrupted by her own diagnosis with a rare blood disorder, she found her perspective profoundly altered. Every Last Breath follows these two chronic illnesses as they grow unexpectedly intertwined. Rejecting a fixed, retrospective point of view and the forward-moving trajectory of conventional memoir, Jacobson brings the reader to the emotionally raw present—where potentially fatal illness and “end of life” both remain, emphatically, life. As chronic illness blurs the distinction between illness and wellness, she discovers how a lifetime of relapse and remission can invite transformation. Written at the fluid, unsettling boundary between prose and poetry, these essays offer a narrative diagnosis of ongoing revision.

The acclaimed and groundbreaking memoir from Wendy C. Ortiz
 
A darkly vibrant and daring memoir, Wendy C. Ortiz’s Excavation challenged the standard telling of abuse narratives when first published in 2014; over a decade later, it remains deeply prescient. Set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the late 1980s, the narrative follows the spiraling entanglement between Wendy and her eighth-grade English teacher as she becomes both victim to and participant in a simultaneously predatorial and impassioned relationship. Baited by initial praise and a false sense of control, Wendy tumbles into a dangerous dynamic that spans the duration of her teens. Artfully constructed from her own journals and decades of personal excavation, the story of this secret relationship has imprinted on Wendy and readers alike. A stunningly honest look at memory, agency, and power, Excavation will claim your whole heart.  

A candid and enlightening account of life with flawed vision

Alice Mattison observes the world differently: Her sight has been altered by a progressive eye disease. Mattison had hints early in life of something amiss when reading became difficult, and she was diagnosed in her forties with a rare form of macular degeneration—a disease that gradually destroyed her central vision in one eye. Years later, another form of the same disease threatened her other eye, further altering her sight. Her eye ailments affect relationships with friends, students, doctors, her partner—and especially with herself. Mattison asks questions that apply to all of us, whether or not we live with imperfect vision: What can we learn from a medical problem? How do we determine how bad it is? Who gets to decide that—our family and friends, our doctors, or we ourselves? And, perhaps most challenging of all, what good can come of disease?