Here is a list of sick humor nonfiction titles. Please add your own in the Comments section.
Note: Not all of these are laff-a-minute, but we’ve experienced chuckles at least, or a laugh of recognition.
*= by a panel member
Suzy Becker, I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse: An Illustrated Memoir
Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors
Mary Cappello, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life
Emily Colas, Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive-Compulsive
Shawn Decker, My Pet Virus: The Story of a Rebel Without a Cure
Miriam Engelberg, Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person
Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
Brendan Halpin, It Takes a Worried Man
Evan Handler, Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors
John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, And Declarations Of Independence (disability as a result of an accident; do we count disability?)
*Marya Hornbacher, Wasted and Madness
*Paula Kamen, All in My Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally
Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache
Tania Katan, My One-Night Stand With Cancer: A Memoir
Lois Keith, ed., What Happened to You? Writing by Disabled Women
Shelley Lewis, Five Lessons I Didn’t Learn from Breast Cancer (and One Big One I Did)
Betty MacDonald, The Plague and I
Sarah Manguso, Two Kinds of Decay
Michael McColly, The After-Death Room
Meredith Norton, Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting
Gary Presley, Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio
Emily Rapp, Poster Child: A Memoir
Katherine Russell Rich, The Red Devil: A Memoir About Beating the Odds
Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary and Lying
Joyce Wadler, My Breast: One Woman’s Cancer Story
*S.L. Wisenberg, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch
