Curated reading

Reading

These are books and texts we return to – not as prescriptions, but as tools for thinking more clearly. They are chosen because they help people understand themselves, their relationships, and the structures that shape both. None of them are self-help in the conventional sense. All of them are honest.

Neurodivergence

Understanding neurodivergence – particularly late-identified ADHD and autism – is central to much of the identity work we do. These texts approach the subject with intelligence and without condescension.

• ADHD: An A to Z – Leanne Maskell. Practical, warm, and genuinely useful for people navigating late diagnosis.
• Unmasking Autism – Devon Price. A rigorous and compassionate account of autistic masking and identity.
• Dirty Laundry – Richard Pink & Roxanne Emery. An honest account of ADHD in relationships – readable and real.

Trauma & Embodiment

Trauma shapes identity in ways that are often invisible until they are named. These texts make the invisible visible – without pathologising, and without false comfort.

• The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk. The foundational text on trauma, embodiment, and the nervous system.
• It Didn't Start With You – Mark Wolynn. On inherited family trauma and the patterns we carry without knowing it.
• What My Mother and I Don't Talk About – ed. Michele Filgate. Essays on family, silence, and the stories we inherit.

Identity & Meaning

Identity is not fixed. These texts explore how it is constructed, disrupted, and rebuilt – across culture, relationship, and time.

• Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl. On meaning-making under the most extreme conditions. Still essential.
• The Examined Life – Stephen Grosz. Short, precise psychoanalytic case studies. Quietly devastating.
• Attached – Amir Levine & Rachel Heller. Attachment theory made accessible – useful for understanding relational patterns.

Substance Use & Harm Reduction

These texts approach substance use without moralising – as a human behaviour with context, meaning, and consequence. We are particularly drawn to accounts that hold complexity: the relief substances can provide alongside the cost they exact, and the identity questions that sit underneath both.

• In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts – Gabor Maté. Compassionate, rigorous, and essential reading for anyone working in this area. Maté's central argument – that addiction is not a moral failing but a response to pain – is one we return to constantly.
• Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing – Matthew Perry. A searingly honest memoir from someone who had everything and still couldn't find solid ground. Perry's account of addiction, identity, and the search for genuine connection is one of the most human documents of its kind. We miss him.
• Beautiful Boy – David Sheff. A father's account of his son's methamphetamine addiction – unflinching, loving, and structurally honest about the limits of what love alone can do.
• Tweak – Nic Sheff. The companion memoir to Beautiful Boy, written by the son. Two perspectives on the same story; both essential.

Memoir & Lived Experience

We believe in the power of first-person accounts – not as instruction manuals, but as evidence that the experiences people bring to us are real, survivable, and worth taking seriously.

• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath. Still the most precise literary account of a mental breakdown and the identity rupture that surrounds it.
• Educated – Tara Westover. On identity construction under extreme conditions – and the cost of choosing yourself when your family doesn't recognise who you've become.
• Know My Name – Chanel Miller. On reclaiming identity after assault. Extraordinary writing; essential reading.
• The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion. On grief, identity, and the way loss restructures the self. Precise and devastating in equal measure.