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"An essential, universally resonant new memoir from the #1 bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and Big Magic"-- Provided by publisher. "In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe. What if your most beautiful love story turned into your...

"A poignant and powerful new memoir-in-essays that tackles the big questions of life, death, and existential fear with humor and hope"-- Provided by publisher.

In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion's influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering...

"Growing up, Erika Simpson's mother loomed large, almost biblical in her life. A daughter of sharecroppers, middle child of ten, her origin story served as a kind of Genesis. Her departure from home and a cheating husband, pursuing higher education along the way a kind of Exodus. Her rules for survival, often repeated like the Ten Commandments, guided Erika's own journey into adulthood. And the most important rule? Throughout her life, Sallie Carol...

"On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and...

"In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind, renowned biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora...

As the self-appointed spokeswoman for the forgotten generation of Gen-X women--those who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s--Loh recounts the struggles of leaning in, staying lean, and keeping her family afloat. The burdens of running a household still all-too-often fall to women, but with wit and carefree candor, Loh somehow navigates the realities of what it means to be a middle-aged woman in the twenty-first century. -- Adapted from book jacket....

Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when Gwen was just three years old. Defying the odds, she lived another eight years, during which time she filled a chest with gifts and letters to Gwen and her brother, Jamie, for every major milestone and birthday through age thirty. The day Gwen got her driver's license. The day she graduated from high school. Gwen is now in her thirties and, when Did I Ever Tell You? begins,...

"A heart stopping memoir of a wrenching Appalachian girlhood and a multilayered portrait of a misrepresented people, from Rona Jaffe Writer's Award winner Shawna Kay Rodenberg. When Shawna Kay Rodenberg was four, her father, fresh from a ruinous tour in Vietnam, spirited her family from their home in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to Minnesota, renouncing all of their earthly possessions to live in the Body, an off-the-grid End Times religious community....

"After the dissolution of her marriage, a writer is transformed into a "clam" via typo after her mother keeps texting her to "clam down." The funny if unhelpful command forces her to ask what it means to "clam down" during crises-to retreat, hide, close up, and stay silent. Idiomatically, we are said to "clam up" when we can't speak, and to "come out of our shell" when we reemerge, transformed. In order to understand her path, the clam digs into examples...