Get a warm blanket, a comfortable chair, and a soothing cup of tea to settle in with a good book. These books are compelling enough to keep you from falling asleep. At least, that's my experience.

“The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls, 2005. This memoir is tragic and inspiring at the same time. One of the values of doing therapy, is to see the resilience and courage people have when they are able to overcome terrible childhoods of abuse, poverty and neglect. Sometimes I get discouraged and overwhelmed by my clients' history and begin to think there is no way a person can recover. However, Jeannette Walls memoir is one of those highly successful stories of bravery, family love, persistence and redemption that can come out of a dysfunctional family.

Both of her parents could easily be diagnosed as narcissistic mixed with alcohol addiction and hystrionics. They should never have been parents. Jeannette Walls and her siblings accomplished an astonishing feat to be able to make it out of their family of origin and by all accounts, to be reasonably mentally healthy. While this is a book of horrible abuse and neglect, it is not depressing like the book "It" and the follow ups, if you read those. This book was hard to put down, and I never dozed off once.