Nonfiction

April 11, 2012 In his new memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball (written with New York Daily News sportswriter Wayne Coffey), R.A. Dickey recounts his struggles to make it in the major leagues, achieving real success only after he transformed himself from a conventional pitcher into a knuckleballer. Dickey parallels that story with his real subject: how finally confronting the trauma of being sexually molested as a child freed him from self-centeredness and shame. For Dickey, mastering the knuckleball went hand-in-hand with mastering his own demons. Dickey will discuss the book on April 12 at Franklin’s LifeWay Christian Store at 4 p.m. and at Nashville’s Books-A-Million at 7:30 p.m.

March 28, 2012 “On Memorial Day 2002 I woke up and decided to leave my husband,” begins Margaret Overton’s memoir, Good in a Crisis. Her husband of twenty years, a surgeon, does not object to the divorce as it gives him more time to spend with his young girlfriend. As if this situation were not stressful enough, Overton, a Chicago anesthesiologist with two teenaged daughters, suffers a brain aneurysm a few months later. Good in a Crisis is the story of how she survives the dissolution of her marriage and a life-threatening illness at the same time—with the help of her family and friends and a healthy sense of humor—and all the lessons she learns (mostly the hard way) in the process. Margaret Overton will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 4 at 6:30 p.m.