Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis - Hardcover

Lucy Grealy, Rick Moody, Reynolds Price, William Styron, and sixteen other literary writers recount how they coped with and survived experiences of adversity, including depression, alienation, divorce, illness, and death.

risis--of depression, alienation, divorce, illness, death--have recently become tremendously popular among both readers and critics alike. When poet Kathryn Rhett experienced her own crisis, she found comfort in others' stories of adversity and related to their survival tales. A teacher at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Rhea taught a course in memoir. She soon came to realize that many memoirs are actually stories of survival and so her new course, survival stories, was born.
Survival Stories is an outgrowth of this workshop. A collection of memoirs of crisis, Survival Stories speaks to our need to write and read about life-changing experiences. Here twenty writers-including Lucy Grealy, Rick Moody, Reynolds Price, and William Styron-reveal the variety and power of crisis memoir. Whether it be Lauren Slater talking about obsessive compulsive disorder, Christopher Davis coping with his brother's murder, or Christina Middlebrook reliving her bone marrow transpl