Memoir
--Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero. Kendra's parents taught their children to thrive in this beautiful, if harsh, landscape, prone to wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Above all, they were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. After Kendra's mother died of a rare autoimmune disease when Kendra was just sixteen, however, her once-beloved desert world came to feel empty and hostile, as climate change, drought, and wildfires intensified. The Atleework family fell apart, even as her father tried to keep them together. Kendra escaped to Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis, land of tall trees, full lakes, water everywhere you look. But after years of avoiding her troubled hometown, she realized that she needed to come to terms with its past and present and had to go back. Miracle Country is a moving and unforgettable memoir of flight and return, emptiness and bounty, the realities of a harsh and changing climate, and the true meaning of home. For readers of Cheryl Strayed, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, this is a breathtaking debut by a remarkable writer.
An inspiring memoir of life, love, loss, and new beginnings by the widower of bestselling children's author and filmmaker Amy Krouse Rosenthal, whose last of act of love before her death was setting the stage for her husband's life without her in the viral New York Times Modern Love column, "You May Want to Marry My Husband."
On March 3, 2017, Amy Krouse Rosenthal penned an op-ed piece for the New York Times' "Modern Love" column --"You May Want to Marry My Husband." It appeared ten days before her death from ovarian cancer. A heartbreaking, wry, brutally honest, and creative play on a personal ad--in which a dying wife encouraged her husband to go on and find happiness after her demise--the column quickly went viral, reaching more than five million people worldwide.
In My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me, Jason describes what came next: his commitment to respecting Amy's wish, even as he struggled with her loss. Surveying his life before, with, and after Amy, Jason ruminates on love, the pain of watching a loved one suffer, and what it means to heal--how he and their three children, despite their profound sorrow, went on. Jason's emotional journey offers insights on dying and death and the excruciating pain of losing a soulmate, and illuminates the lessons he learned.
As he reflects on Amy's gift to him--a fresh start to fill his empty space with a new story--Jason describes how he continues to honor Amy's life and her last wish, and how he seeks to appreciate every day and live in the moment while trying to help others coping with loss. My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me is the poignant, unreserved, and inspiring story of a great love, the aftermath of a marriage ended too soon, and how a surviving partner eventually found a new perspective on life's joys in the wake of tremendous loss.
Carrie: If you missed Amy Krouse Rosenthal's essay "You May Want to Marry My Husband" published in the NYT Modern Love column in 2017, right before she died, start there. With Kleenex. (online but also included in the book pgs. 102-105) This book will make much more sense! Her intention was to give her husband Jason space to move forward and that is the theme and focus of this book. Thankfully it was not about his foray back into the dating world! Instead it was about his efforts to live without the love of his life. Amy and Jason were married for 26 years (me too, this month! which feels timely, but hopefully a different trajectory) and raised 3 kids together and had great plans to proceed with an empty nest when Amy was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This book is both a chronicle of their love story and an examination of grief and death in our culture. Jason frequently repeats his intention to be honest and open in speaking about his experience and does a good job narrating through illness, caretaking and the three years after Amy's death of trying to regain equilibrium. What is so endearing (besides their amazing relationship) is all the little artifacts that are included here: notes and photos and captions and drawings that show the deeply personal level of sharing with the world they were both accustomed to. Chicago connection is a plus too! And I am a big fan of AKR's children's book Little Pea and her memoir TextBook. This rounded out the picture for me.
VOGUE - FORBES - BOOKPAGE - NEW YORK POST - WIRED "I have not been as profoundly moved by a book in years." --Jodi Picoult Even after she left home for Hollywood, Emmy-nominated TV writer Bess Kalb saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force--irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at ninety, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life. Recounting both family lore and family secrets, Bobby brings us four generations of indomitable women and the men who loved them. There's Bobby's mother, who traveled solo from Belarus to America in the 1880s to escape the pogroms, and Bess's mother, a 1970s rebel who always fought against convention. But it was Bobby and Bess who always had the most powerful bond: Bobby her granddaughter's fiercest supporter, giving Bess unequivocal love, even if sometimes of the toughest kind. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me marks the creation of a totally new, virtuosic form of memoir: a reconstruction of a beloved grandmother's words and wisdom to tell her family's story with equal parts poignancy and hilarity.
OOh this one. Perfect for Mother’s Day Bess Kalb honors her grandma Bobby’s inimitable character in this endearing and fresh take on the family memoir (with photos just where your curiosity wants them). Bobby helped raise Kalb and their relationship was immensely close; to capture Bobby’s voice Kalb interviews her mother and grandfather, quotes beloved Bobby-voicemails, and sorts through nostalgic memorabilia to bring her to life. Bobby was at once brash and beloved and you will love every minute of her life-story; she was the child of a Russian immigrant escaping anti-Semitism and yet she rises from the tenements to a summer house on the Vineyard “My mother fled through Europe,” Bobby marvels, “and half a century later I danced through it, Kir Royale in hand. How do you like that?” You’ll delight in Bobby’s joy and shake your head when she says things like -- after Kalb gets a job writing for Jimmy Kimmel: “get a blowout for your hair. The rest you can handle.” One of a kind. - Sandy
A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.
Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.
Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn't fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.
Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.
There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn't it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent--even from ourselves. For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice--the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world's expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living. Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member's ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is. Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.
Jenny: I read recently in my latest favorite book, Untamed by Glennon Doyle, about the importance of following our hearts, even when it’s hard. Doyle says that a lot of times people will say to her: “I wish I could learn more about injustice…I wish I could visit that sick friend…I wish I could get involved with that cause…I wish I could read that article…but I can’t bear to because it’ll break my heart.” And this is what she tells them:
“What is it that affects you so deeply that whenever you encounter it, you feel the need to look away?
Look there.
Where is the pain in the world that you just cannot stand?
Stand there.
The thing that breaks your heart is the very thing you were born to help heal. Racial injustice? Bullying? Animal cruelty? Hunger? War? The environment? Every world changer’s work begins with a broken heart.”
So today, I am “looking there” and “standing there.” What’s breaking your heart?
Look there. Stand there.