Hey friends,
What is a book that helped you through some of your darkest times? Mental illness, loss, you name it.
I’m looking for something fiction but am open to anything. Dealing with bad health anxiety, depression, and OCD layered with past trauma and grief. Life’s hitting hard and could use a good read.
Thank you 🙏🏼
by fuckus_ruckus
4 Comments
Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
I was religious but questioning at the time, coming off a cancer diagnosis and COVID was happening, and learning how to parent a 3 year old. Feeling like you’re losing your faith and identity with all that happening too, was pretty isolating.
That book just helped me to accept the absurdity of … everything, to accept myself and realize the questions are universal, and to stop feeling bad about growing and changing. It didn’t present any ideas I’d never heard before, but it put the questions in such a humorous manner, and with so much heart and empathy.
It will always have a special place for me.
I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for but when I need to retreat from the ‘real world’ for a while, I always return to old favorites, with characters I’ve come to ‘know’. Either things written/set in the past (Helen MacInnes and Mary Stewart books – often featuring regular people caught up in events *Above Suspicion* & *Assignment in Brittany* and *My Brother Michael* and *This Rough Magic*) or a well-loved series like the *Below Stairs* series by Jennifer Ashley, centering on Kat Holloway, a Victorian cook. Jennifer Robson is another favorite author, her books are set in WWI (*After the War is Over*) to the 1950s-ish (*The Gown*). Not earth-shatteringly Deep and Important with Truths and Meaning but well-written and enjoyable.
Old man and the Sea.
Anne of green gables series.
I went through a bad place, worse loss in years…… at the same time I was reading A little life. The trauma all just melted together
And I cried all I needed to… and more