Is your partner an adult child of an alcoholic (ACOA)? Are you struggling with your relationship? Children of alcoholics develop patterns of behavior during childhood that carry over into adult life. As children, they were taught to cover up the family secret and suppress their feelings, and as adults, no matter what's going on, they'll always tell you they're fine. Distrust, fear of abandonment, and sensitivity to criticism are all major issues for...

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

Jillian Slater hadn't seen her father or his mother in almost 20 years until, on the news that her father had finally drunk himself to death, Adella Atwater, the manager of her grandmother's apartment house, calls and says Jillian's expenses would be paid if she'd fly in to New Orleans for the burial. What Adella didn't tell her was that the apartment house bears the dead weight of a long and painful history. As an investigation into her father's...

Presents advice in question and answer form on how to deal with alcoholism in the home.

It's 1959. Sixteen year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his fourteenth car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working class, father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy Plant in Detroit, looking forward to the flask in his glove compartment, and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan home. Abandoned and alone, father and son struggle to express a deep love for each other, even as Alex fills his day juggling cheap thrills...

Widowed, pregnant, and penniless, Marilee returns home to Cross Roads, New Mexico, only to find that her father has been dead for six months and that her mother hasn't been sober since. But Marilee's determined to make a good life for herself and her baby. Her first order of business: fix up the family's Wayside 66 Motor Court, now rundown and overrun by outlaws. It's dangerous with bootlegger Jeb Pierce around; he'd taken charge of the place and...

Journalist Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary and their four children lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing...

Abandoned by the alcoholic father who idealized the natural world without imparting any survival skills to his children, three siblings in 1970s New York embark on difficult adult lives before their father attempts a reconciliation. Western New York, 1978. Terrance Thurber spends this year teaching his children, Jamie, Lewis, and Connor, about the natural world: they listen to the heartbeat of trees, track animal footprints, sleep under the star-filled...

Jules never knew her father, and her ex-addict mother has always been more interested in artistic endeavors than in bonding with her only daughter. Her life and future look as flat and unchanging as her small Illinois town. A simple quest to find a baby picture for the senior yearbook leads to the discovery that for most of the first two years of her life, Jules lived in foster care. As Jules sets out to learn the truth about her past, what she finds...

The story of how one little boy found the courage to survive years of physical abuse-- and how the human spirit can triumph over even the most severe of circumstances. The Pelzer family's secret life of fear and abuse was first revealed in Dave Pelzer's inspiring New York Times bestseller, A Child Called "It," followed by The Lost Child and A Man Called Dave. Here, for the first time, Richard Pelzer tells the courageous and moving story of his abusive...