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1106 books match the query 'Memoirs' and 2 start with q

cover of Qtopia: A Memoir of Love, Land, and Liberation

Qtopia

A Memoir of Love, Land, and Liberation

Juda Bennett

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

In the 1970s, while communes bloomed like wildflowers across the land, most had no room for queer members. The so-called counterculture still clung to heterosexual norms, even as it preached freedom from traditional gender roles and the nuclear family. Juda Bennett’s engrossing memoir follows his escape from suburbia into the back-to-the-land movement—and chronicles the efforts it took for him to “drop back in” to mainstream society and the ways in which he and his compatriots continued to honor their communal vision.

After enduring the hollow promises of “progressive” communes, Bennett finally found what he didn’t know he was looking for at Lavender Hill, a rural queer commune of visionaries carving out a life beyond heteronormativity, beyond capitalism, beyond shame. They didn’t just survive; they built something messy, luminous, and defiantly alive. And when the commune began to unravel, they didn’t vanish. They evolved. Qtopia is a story of chosen family and radical transformation. It is a reminder that queer utopia isn’t behind us—it’s still out there on the horizon, singing its song of joy, defiance, and fabulousness.

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cover of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir

Quite Mad

An American Pharma Memoir

Sarah Fawn Montgomery

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Diagnosed with severe anxiety, PTSD, and OCD in her early twenties, Sarah Fawn Montgomery spent the next ten years seeking treatment and the language with which to describe the indescribable consequences of her mental illness. Faced with disbelief, intolerable side effects, and unexpected changes in her mental health as a result of treatment, Montgomery turned to American history and her own personal history—including her turbulent childhood and the violence she faced as a young woman—to make sense of the experience.
Blending memoir with literary journalism, Montgomery’s Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir examines America’s history of mental illness treatment—lobotomies to sterilization, the rest cure to Prozac—to challenge contemporary narratives about mental health. Questioning what it means to be a woman with highly stigmatized disorders, Montgomery also asks why mental illness continues to escalate in the United States despite so many “cures.” Investigating the construction of mental illness as a “female” malady, Montgomery exposes the ways current attitudes towards women and their bodies influence madness as well as the ways madness has transformed to a chronic Illness in our cultural imagination. Montgomery’s Quite Mad is one woman’s story, but it offers a beacon of hope and truth for the millions of individuals living with mental illness and issues a warning about the danger of diagnosis and the complex definition of sanity.
 
 
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