Книги, похожие на «Melanie Reid, The World I Fell Out Of»

From the award-winning writer of The Times Magazine's 'Spinal Column': a deeply moving and often darkly funny memoir about disaster and triumphWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW MARRIs this what it feels like, I thought, losing everything? Steel shutters were clanging down in my head: I dared not even think about my son, just emerging from his teenage years, or of my sorry future.But I could safely bear witness and carry on writing in my head. A correspondent from a hidden war.On Good Friday, 2010 Melanie Reid fell from her horse, breaking her neck and fracturing her lower back. She was 52.Paralysed from the top of her chest down, she was to spend almost a full year in hospital, determinedly working towards gaining as much movement in her limbs as possible, and learning to navigate her way through a world that had previously been invisible to her.As a journalist Melanie had always turned to words and now, on a spinal ward peopled by an extraordinary array of individuals who were similarly at sea, she decided that writing would be her life-line. The World I Fell Out Of is an account of that year, and of those that followed. It is the untold ‘back story’ behind Melanie’s award-winning ‘Spinal Column’ in The Times Magazine and a testament to ‘the art of getting on with it’.Unflinchingly honest and beautifully observed, this is a memoir about the joy – and the risks – of riding horses, the complicated nature of heroism, the bonds of family and the comfort of strangers. Above all, The World I Fell Out Of is a reminder that at any moment the life we know can be turned upside down – and a plea to start appreciating what we have while we have it.

I don't think anyone can have written an autobiography without at some point thinking «Why would anyone want to know this shit?» I've always read them thinking «I don't want to know where Steve Tyler grew up, just tell me how many groupies he f**ked!»'So begins Frankie's outrageous, laugh-out loud, cynical rant on life as he knows it. From growing up in Pollokshaws, Glasgow (‘it was an aching cement void, a slap in the face to Childhood, and for the family it was a step up'), to his rampant teenage sex drive (‘in those days if you glimpsed a nipple on T.V. it was like porn Christmas'), and first job working in a mental hospital ('where most evenings were spent persuading an old man in his pants not to eat a family sized block of cheese'), nothing is out of bounds.Outspoken, outrageous and brilliantly inappropriate, Frankie Boyle says the unsayable as only he can. From the TV programmes he would like to see made ('Celebrities On Acid On Ice: just like Celebrity Dancing On Ice, but with an opening sequence where Graham Norton hoses the celebrities down with liquid LSD'), to his native Scotland and the Mayor of London ('voting for Boris Johnson wasn't that different to voting for a Labrador wearing a Wonder Woman costume'), nothing and no one is safe from Frankie's fearless, sharp-tongued assault.Sharply observed and full of taboo-busting, we-really-shouldn't-be-laughing-at-this humour, My Shit Life So Far shows why Frankie Boyle really is the blackest man in show business.In 2010, MY SHIT LIFE SO FAR won the title of Scotland's favourite summer read, coming top of a list of 20 other books from the likes of Ian Rankin, Iain Banks and Carol Ann Duffy.