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The winners of the Shebooks/Good Housekeeping memoir contest offer three slices of life as a mother. In “People Don’t Get Me, Mom,” Jackie Mercurio carries a troubling secret that will change the life of her brilliant, misunderstood boy. Then a family trip to the Butterfly Garden takes them to a place of healing and wonder. In “Coyote Tales,” Jacinta Hart Kehoe recovers from an accident she wasn’t supposed to survive but struggles to help her adopted daughter learn to love and trust again. And in “Pulling Rabbits from a Hat,” Cynthia Leonard tells her fascinating story of growing up in a magical act, with a mother who disappeared and reappeared nightly.
Every mother—and every daughter—has a story, and four of the best appear in the second volume of this Shebooks/Good Housekeeping collaboration. Heartwrenching and heartwarming, these top picks trace the twisting contradictions in the relationships between four very different sets of mothers and daughters. In Yo-yo Mama, Laura Hurwitz describes the summer her mom introduced her to dieting, and the unintended consequences her new body sparked. In Happy Mommy Pills, Kathleen Founds tells what happens when the worst doesn’t happen to her young, pregnant self. Deborah Batterman’s Diamonds and Manicures considers the crossroads between femininity and feminism, and realizes that pampering herself does not mean giving up her principles. And, in The $25,000 Pyramid, Mashaw McGuinnis takes us on a rollicking ride in her almost-unbelievable tale of sneaking out of the house to audition for a TV game show—and transforming bitterness into a date with Betty White. True lives, deep emotions, compelling stories we all can relate to.
Dr. Mary Lake Polan takes us on a compelling journey into Eritrea, where she started a surgical clinic to offer life-changing care to African women. She and her team repair fistulas, a condition that results from traumatic births and leads many African women to lives of stigma and shame. Dr. Polan describes how she and her surgical team offered the care and compassion that forever changed the lives of their African patients, in a story that will inspire readers to believe that they, too, can make a difference.
“The road,” Kerouac wrote, “is life,” and the women in these three stories hit the road looking for a fuller, richer life than the ones they have at home. Molly Giles, whose many awards for fiction include two Pushcart Prizes and an NEA grant, is a charming and sharp-witted guide to these women's adventures. One flies to Ireland to land a husband; one, who hoped to find shelter in paradise, realizes her journey isn’t over; and one loses a lover, a friend, and a few precious illusions about herself as she drives across America.
Pregnant from her first sexual encounter, a teenager living in a town of 3,000 Catholics keeps her secret from everyone until six weeks before the baby’s due date. Hustled out of town and hidden in the Iowa countryside within hours of finally confiding in her mother, she concocts a scheme that will allow her to raise her child, but can she win over any of the people who might help her? As her pregnancy and its looming consequences unfold, she realizes that her life of lies and secrets has only just begun.
She’ll do anything to become a mother—including stalking prospective egg donors’ profiles on Facebook. In this hilarious yet poignant memoir of one woman’s quest to conceive, the brave new world of artificial baby-making takes an unexpected turn when social media comes into play. As the not-quite-young-enough author obsessively examines the online antics of her nubile egg donor wannabes, she questions what it means to be a mother and, in the process, discovers the meaning of love.
As a young girl, Deborah Jiang-Stein discovered a shattering secret—she was born in prison and her birth mother, a heroin addict, kept her inside for the first year of her life. This book is the story of how Jiang-Stein came to terms with these traumatic facts and eventually began to dedicate herself to working with women in prisons. By enabling readers to hear the voices of the women she met, she hopes to “shed light on a universal truth: that if we look at someone long enough, we discover their humanity.”
A cross between Nora Ephron and David Sedaris, longtime NPR commentator Marion Winik has a uniquely hilarious and relatable way of looking at life. Her stories of being single in middle age, marked by stylish writing and stunning candor, left readers bent double with laughter when they appeared in her column, rated "Best of Baltimore" by Baltimore Magazine. Highs in the Low Fifties follows Winik’s attempt to rebuild her world as a once-widowed, once-divorced single mom. With her signature optimism, resilience, and poor judgment, Winik dives into a series of ill-starred romantic experiences. Her clarity about her mistakes and ability to find humor in the darkest moments—in love, and in all parts of life—has won her a growing crowd of devoted followers . . . and a few voyeurs.
Susan Ito is a struggling college student, a young adult on the cusp of parental independence, when she meets her birth mother for the first time. Instead of launching into adulthood, she finds herself entangled in longing for this new kind of mother love where she sees her own self, mirrored in mysterious and tantalizing ways. At the same time that she explores the genetic threads that bind her to this stranger, she works as the "mouse girl," caring for hundreds of experimental mice in a medical research laboratory. The relationship with her birth mother is as tormented as any partially requited love story: waiting by the phone, haunting the mailbox, and pacing the floor wondering about a promised visit that may or may not happen. Meanwhile, she tracks the intricate family trees of the hordes of squeaky rodents in her care. Memoirist, fiction writer, and solo performer Susan Ito explores themes of family, identity, DNA, and love in this unique and poignant story...
When Laura Fraser's husband leaves her for his high school sweetheart, she takes off, on impulse, for Italy, and discovers not only a lasting sense of pleasure, but a more fully recovered sense of her emotional and sexual self. “Sweet, smart. We are smitten from the start.” —O: The Oprah Magazine When Laura Fraser's husband leaves her for his high school sweetheart, she takes off, on impulse, for Italy, hoping to leave some of her sadness behind. There, on the island of Ischia, she meets M., an aesthetics professor from Paris with an oversized love of life. What they both assume will be a casual vacation tryst turns into a passionate, transatlantic love affair, as they rendezvous in Lo...