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Asperger's is a mild form of autism and those who have it are socially awkward, have feelings of self-doubt, problems dealing with change, and managing their emotions. The author puts a human face on Asperger's syndrome and helps readers understand what it means to see the world through the prism of autism.

At the end of his life, an old man regresses into his memories of his New England youth, where he is reunited with his father--who was an epileptic traveling salesman--and revisits old wounds, feelings of love, and melancholy.

Reflections from Elizabeth Edwards about everything in her life. As her cancer progressed and she dealt with the very public affair of her husband and the death of her oldest son, she chose to write down her thoughts.

After the grief of losing her mother to cancer as a teenager, Sarah Gabriel had learned to appreciate "the charms of simple happiness." With a career as a journalist, a home in Oxford, England, a husband, and two young daughters, she was content. But then at age forty-four, she was diagnosed with breast cancer---the result of M18T, an inherited mutation on the BRCA1 gene that had taken the lives of her mother and countless female ancestors. Eating Pomegranates is Gabriel's candid and incredibly intimate story of being forced to acknowledge that while you can try to overcome the loss of a parent, you can never escape your genetic legacy. When she was diagnosed with the same disease that killed her mother, Gabriel began her treatments and wrote her story.

Hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, or HED, is an inherited condition (from a damaged chromosome) that brings sparse hair, peg- or cone-shaped teeth, and the inability to sweat. This is because the defective chromosome damages the ecoderm, the embryonic layer that becomes skin, hair, and teeth. Mothers have only X chromosomes to give. Fathers can give an X for a girl (who then has two XX's and will use the undamaged one to build her ecoderm) and a Y for a boy, who has no choice but to use the damaged X since he has only one. So the women in Bonnie Rough's family lived with guilt each time they had a son.

The summer before entering sixth grade, Sammy, who was bright and inquisitive, suddenly began to exhibit disturbing behavior. He walked with his eyes shut, refused to bathe, and used his limbs instead of his hands to touch doorknobs and faucets. Diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive behavior (OCD), and later Tourette's Syndrome, Sammy slipped further from reality. But his mother refused to accept the diagnosis and her research took her to the medical community's raging debate whether mental illness can be caused by infection.

Ben was an extraordinarily gifted child. He spoke in full sentences before the age of one and was reading completely by age two. But Ben also had a crippling social aloofness and fear of change. He suffered from Asperger's Syndrome, a neurological condition considered a high-functioning form of autism. His mother's journey as a parent to Ben has gone from love, to bitterness, to learning to love her child and herself once again.

Elizabeth Wurtzel published her memoir of depression, Prozac Nation, to widespread literary acclaim. By age twenty-six she had everything she always wanted except happiness. Although professionally successful, she felt like a failure. She was unable to focus on anything. But when her doctor prescribed Ritalin she became a new person. The Ritalin worked so well it became the "sweetness in the days that have none". Soon she began grinding up the Ritalin, interspersed it with cocaine, and was on her way to drug addiction. In order to heal, she had to break free of her relationship with Ritalin and learn how to love life and herself.

Blaze Ginsberg creates titles and categories for the different periods and moments in his life, creating a list of episodes that exist in various stages of production as his life progresses and the days of his existence roll on.