Chicken Soup for the Soul

A long time ago, in 1993, Chicken Soup for the Soul, an anthology of stories compiled by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, was published. They chose the included tales based on their inspirational and motivational value, and they chose the book's title for the reputation of chicken soup as a rejuvenating home remedy for various ills and for the desire to market the book as being chicken soup's counterpart for the soul. Chicken Soup for the Soul was a great success to the point where it became the #1 New York Times bestseller. Its popularity then inspired multiple spin-off anthologies, all listed on an entire page, courtesy of The Other Wiki.

This series contains examples of:

• Coming Out Story
• Driven to Suicide: A great many of the contributors, but given that they survived to write about it, they are usually …
  • Happily-Failed Suicide and
  • Interrupted Suicide
  • One particular story involves the narrator talking about how he befriended a new kid at school by helping him pick up his dropped books. That same new kid would go on to confess during his graduation speech that he'd been planning to kill himself that day, but changed his mind when the narrator held out his hand.
  • Another story involved a worried girl calling her best friend and leaving a voice message. Said best friend had been incredibly depressed lately, and admitted that she had been about to shoot herself in the head when she heard the message. This made her put the gun down and call the girl back.
  • There is one poem, however, that reveals a bullied kid did kill himself and that's why he's not at graduation.
• Drugs Are Bad
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: A lot of the stories are inspirational memoirs written by disabled people, or by people without disabilities who were taught a Very Special Lesson by a disabled person.
• Lampshade Hanging: One poem has the narrator saying they don't want to be "another statistic", then goes on to describe a drug-addicted kid, a pregnant teenager, and a rape victim in addition to others.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: Quite a few Chicken Soup stories involve one of these.
• Teen Pregnancy: One story was written by a woman who got pregnant at 15 and gave the baby up for adoption. Another involves a teenage boy deciding to participate in True Love Waits to avoid this fate, which his parents unfortunately suffered. A poem written by a teenage girl in one of the "For The Teenage Soul" spinoffs infers this trope when she mentions her old friend's jeans look tighter than usual.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth