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Of This Much I'm Sure
At twenty-two, Chicagoan Nadine Kenney is thrilled to meet her future husband, Jamie, while vacationing in Florida. After a whirlwind, long-distance romance, Nadine leaves her friends, family, and city to join Jamie in suburban Massachusetts. Once married, they begin trying for a baby without knowing how hard that road will become. Nadine soon faces the little-known horrors of IVF when a procedure causes severe internal bleeding, and she wakes up from emergency surgery with a six-inch scar instead of a baby bump. In the difficult year that follows, anxiety and additional failed fertility treatments threaten her new marriage and her mental state. By some saving grace, she eventually becomes pregnant naturally, but the horrors are not over: her son is diagnosed with potentially terminal kidney complications. Ultimately, Nadine learns that in an unpredictable life, the only thing she can be sure of is the healing power of hope.
Sushi Tuesdays
After taking her sons on a hike with the family dog one beautiful fall afternoon, Charlotte returned home to find a policewoman, a policeman, and a priest in her driveway—there to deliver the news of her husband’s suicide. Charlotte knew her husband had been stressed about work, but she had no idea he was suicidal. She thought he had stayed home to take a nap. As a young widow, Charlotte cried, cursed, meditated, medicated, downward-dogged, and ran as a way to make sense of her husband’s suicide. As the mother of two bereft sons, she summoned her inner strength and clarity in order to provide steady guidance for them to navigate their own ways through the ensuing months and years. Her story offers intimate moments, powerful lessons, as well as practical ways through which not only suicide survivors but any of us experiencing loss can move forward to live lives of joy and purpose.
The Magic of Memoir
The Magic of Memoir is a memoirist’s companion for when the going gets tough. Editors Linda Joy Myers and Brooke Warner have taught and coached hundreds of memoirists to the completion of their memoirs, and they know that the journey is fraught with belittling messages from both the inner critic and naysayers, voices that make it hard to stay on course with the writing and completion of a book. In The Magic of Memoir, 38 writers share their hard-won wisdom, stories, and writing tips. Included are Myers's and Warner's interviews with best-selling and widely renown memoirists Mary Karr, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dr. Azar Nafisi, Dani Shapiro, Margo Jefferson, Raquel Cepeda, Jessica Valenti, Daisy H...
The Girl in the White Cape
Fifteen-year-old Elena lives in a church attic in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood, where she is cared for by her guardian, a kind Russian priest named Father Al. Six days a week, Father Al sends her out of Our Lady, across the meadows and ponds of Golden Gate Park, and all the way to Baba Vera’s house on Taraval Street for Baba’s version of school. Unlike regular school, however, Elena’s learning is unnerving. Baba Vera’s preposterous demands, dizzying antics, and house—which is full of skeletons, brooms, strange implements, and guinea pigs, among other oddities—seem straight out of a Russian fairy tale Father Al used to read to Elena . . . not life in 2020. If not for he...
Living a Motivated Life
What if, as psychologists and adult educators advocate, a person chose a life where his motivation for the work itself determined what he did? Living a Motivated Life: A Memoir and Activities follows the author through forty years, revealing how he selected vocational pursuits guided by his understanding of intrinsic motivation and transformative learning. As a compass for relevant decisions, these ideas gave energy and purpose to how he lived, and an instinct as sure as sight for the future. Written with nuance, humor, and unpredictability, this story renders how he came to appreciate learning for the pleasure of learning. Facing similar challenges as those of today’s first generation col...
Heartsong
Anita Swanson Speake’s story begins with a diagnosis: idiopathic cardiomyopathy. At sixty-five, she had just found out that her heart was dying. When she got the news, she was in her late sixties. Her girls were raised and gone. Her three decades of high-stress nursing was behind her. She was living with her hopefully last, and certainly best, husband in a big, contemporary house with lots of glass on a lake in rural Northern California. She loved her life. But she didn’t love her scary new medical condition—or the many awful side effects of the medications her doctor promised would serve as a crutch for her heart. As she struggled with all this, Speake began to see herself as a member...
Test of Faith
Bonnie S. Hirst is a woman of faith who has always believed that everything in life works out for the best. So, when her daughter, Lacey, is accused of a terrible crime, although Bonnie is devastated, she is also convinced that God will protect her family from harm. He always has, after all. But when her prayers are not answered and Lacey is sentenced to life in prison, Bonnie questions every aspect of her existence: her beliefs, her role as a mother, and the purpose behind the events that are tearing her family apart. As Bonnie and her family navigate the complicated labyrinth of the legal system, she struggles with the duality of presenting a façade of being okay on the outside and screaming for air on the inside. Finally, she is guided to ask for help—a concept previously foreign to her—and is rewarded with a bubble of friends who surround her and her family with love. Poignant, hopeful, and ultimately uplifting, Test of Faith is the story of one mother’s spiritual journey of awareness—and her discovery that even when your life seems to have radically veered off course, there are always blessings to be found, if you can just keep your heart open enough to receive them.
A Fierce Belief in Miracles
When faced with overwhelming hardship, what we believe makes all the difference. At age twenty-six, Anne Reeder Heck was attacked by a stranger and brutally raped. Years later, still seeking to heal the remnants of this trauma, Anne stands alone in her living room one winter day and claims her desired belief aloud: “This is my year of strength.” Her clear intention results in a phone call; her rapist has been identified—fourteen years after the crime. Offering all the gripping and uplifting details of a story that sparked national interest—Heck appeared on the front page of The Washington Post and was interviewed by Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America—A Fierce Belief in Miracles lights the way for those seeking to heal from life’s traumas by demonstrating the importance of clear intention and trusting inner guidance, and the transformative power of forgiveness.
Dragons in My Classroom
As a young book lover with dyslexia, Barbara found the solution to her reading struggles in Miss Gluding, her first grade teacher, who showed compassion for her student’s plight—and knew how to help her. From that time on, Barbara knew what she wanted to be: a teacher, just like Miss Gluding. Unfortunately, Barbara also had some bad teachers in the years that ensued—including her sixth grade teacher, an exacting woman who called attention to Barbara’s learning disabilities in front of classmates. Still wanting to follow in Miss Gluding’s footsteps in 1964, Barbara vowed she would be a better one than her sixth grade teacher; instead, however, she became very much like her, with una...
Driving in Cars with Homeless Men
A Library Journal Best Book of 2019 Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence. These linked stories are set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio apartment of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages. Homeless Men is the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure to succeed and fail again.
