James Frey wakes up on a plane, with no memory of the preceding two weeks. His face is cut and his body is covered with bruises. He has abused alcohol and every drug he can lay his hands on for a decade - and he is aged only twenty-three. This work presents an account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed.

This is the story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of grandeur) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa Claus and a certifiable lunatic. Suddenly at the age of 12, Augusten found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian house in perfect squalor.

This work is a personal testimony from Kay Redfield Jamison: the revelation of her struggle with manic depression since adolescence, and how it has shaped her life. The book follows her through college, a love affair, her battle with the illness, bouts of madness, violence and attempted suicide.

Now a major film starring Winona Ryder, Whoopi Goldberg and Vanessa Redgrave A clear-sighted and unflinching memoir of an eighteen-year-old girl about her two year stay in a psychiatric hospital for depression

Mary Karr grew up in East Texas refinery town in a volatile and defiantly loving family. This memoir looks back at life with a painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip over into psychosis, and a heavy-drinking, fist-swinging father who liked nothing better than to spin tales with his cronies at the Liars' Club.