Books like Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson

Jeannette Walls' memoir chronicles her turbulent childhood in a dysfunctional, itinerant family, detailing poverty, alcoholism, and homelessness across the United States as she seeks stability and personal growth.

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir chronicles his battle with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and his reflections on life, medicine, and mortality.

Posthumously published, Hemingway’s *A Moveable Feast* is a memoir of his Paris years in the 1920s, detailing his early career, intimate relationships, and encounters with other literary figures of the Lost Generation.

A Voice of Her Own invites women to discover their unique voice through journal writing, blending personal insights, psychological study, and excerpts from historic and contemporary women's diaries for deeper self-awareness and creative expression.

A therapist‑led guide that uses structured journal writing to promote self‑actualization, creative expression, and career growth.

Learn how to use everyday journals—personal diaries, dream records, or specialized keepsakes—to speak authentically to your deepest self and unlock creativity, personal growth, and intent.

A discarded red‑leather diary from 1930s New York is rescued by Lily Koppel, who uncovers the life of its teenage author, Florence Wolfson, and revives a forgotten era of glamour and intellectual curiosity.

One to One is a practical guide that blends diary writing, problem‑solving exercises, and therapeutic techniques to foster self‑perception, self‑acceptance, and personal growth for individuals seeking self‑actualization.

A practical guide that teaches travelers to use journals as a creative exercise, offering 50+ exercises to slow down, harness honesty, and overcome writer’s block while documenting their journeys.

Explore Maryjo Koch’s themed collage journals, where antique ephemera, watercolor, sketches, and photos unite in travel, recipe, and nature keepsakes that deepen personal expression through the handmade journal process.

Prologue: Thoughts on a frozen pond -- The view from point sublime -- Provenance notes -- Alien land ethic : the distance between -- Madeline tracing -- What's in a name -- Properties of desire -- Migrating in a bordered land -- Placing Washington, DC, after the Inauguration -- Epilogue: At Crowsnest Pass "Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her--paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land--lie largely eroded and lost. In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the country's still unfolding history, and ideas of 'race, ' have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from 'Indian Territory' and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons"