Hamster Island First edition

Hamster Island is Heartwell's story of growing up ordinary in family that embodied dysfunction. Her childlike shame for her special needs siblings is balanced by a fierce love that, occasionally, enabled her to shed her diffidence and perform extraordinary feats of pluck and valor. Funny and heartbreaking simultaneously, Hamster Island is a coming-of-age in the tradition of such darkly comic memoirs as Mary Karr's The Liars Club and Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors; it delights while exploring issues of identity, transformation, and responsibility.

What people are saying:

"Bittersweet, engagingly written, and populated by a household of strong-willed, idiosyncratic characters, Hamster Island has, at its core, a conflict familiar to us all: How can we be good to others while also being good to ourselves? ... This tale of caregiving and self-actualization is unique, but it abounds with insights for us all."
~ Rachel Simon, New York Times bestselling author of Riding The Bus With My Sister and The Story of Beautiful Girl

"Joan Heartwell invites us into her life on Hamster Island with great honesty and humor and warmth. This memoir will resonate deeply with anyone who ever longed for a 'normal' family, anyone who ever escaped the chaos of their childhood home, anyone who was ever bound by love to return."
~ Gayle Brandeis, novelist, winner of Barbara Kingsolver s Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of Literature of Social Change