This memoir is written by the great poet, Maggie Smith. I could have read You Could Make This Place Beautiful in a single day, but I stretched it into two.
Maggie writes about her life, her divorce, her children, and her work with such unflinching honesty. I was so stunned by her prose that I stopped every few paragraphs to read her words aloud to my boyfriend.
I resonated so deeply with her experiences that I wanted to call Maggie and shout, “Me too, Maggie, Me too!” I devoured every word, and when I finished, I squeezed the book to my chest, as if to make it a permanent part of me. Even though I was done, I did not want to put this book down.
"[Smith]...reminds you that you can...survive deep loss, sink into life's deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new." -Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author
The bestselling poet and author of the "powerful" (People) and "luminous" (Newsweek) Keep Moving offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age.
"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices."
In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins…
I’m not sure what I expected when I picked up Zibby Owens’ memoir, Bookends. The Zibby I know is a book enthusiast who has created multiple platforms to share her favorite author’s work with the world, including a podcast, retreats, newsletters, a magazine, a bookstore, and even a publishing house. But I'd never thought of her as an author - until now.
I inhaled Bookends, hanging on Owens’ every word as she described her very relatable, and at times crippling, social anxiety (shyness she calls it), her love affair with books, which can only be described as a great romance. The tragic loss of her best friend (I cried) and the happiness you’re rooting for her to find that she finally discovers at the end.
Bookends is a true love story; I loved every moment of it.
A deeply personal memoir about one woman's journey to finding her voice and rewriting her story by the creator and host of the award-winning podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books (TM).
Zibby Owens has become a well-known personality in the publishing world. Her infectious energy, tasteful authenticity, and smart, steadfast support of authors started in childhood, a precedent set by the profound effect books and libraries had on her own family.
But after losing her closest friend on 9/11 and later becoming utterly stressed out and overwhelmed by motherhood, Zibby was forgetting what made her her. She turned…
Christie Tate is a New York Times Best Selling Author for a reason: the woman can tell a story!
In BFF, I feel like Tate does something that most of us are too scared to do – examine our friendships with the same persistence and fervor as we do our romances (like her 2020 best seller, Group, which was Reece’s Book Club pick).
BFF is a story about relationships told through the lens of recovery. A POV that I find to be particularly fascinating for obvious reasons. But BFF is truly a book for everyone.
I tore through it and then immediately ordered copies for my two bonus daughters, both of whom have had their own challenges with friendships. BFF is more than a well-told story; it is a manual for how to show up, both for your friends and for yourself.
From the author of Group, a New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club Pick, comes a moving, heartwarming, and powerful memoir about Christie Tate's lifelong struggle to sustain female friendship, and the friend who helps her find the human connection she seeks.
After more than a decade of dead-end dates and dysfunctional relationships, Christie Tate has reclaimed her voice and settled down. Her days of agonizing in group therapy over guys who won't commit are over, the grueling emotional work required to attach to another person tucked neatly into the past.
After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—stockpiling pills in her Louboutins and elaborately scheduling her withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins is running out of places to hide.
She has learned the hard way that even her high-profile marriage and Hollywood lifestyle can’t protect her from the pain she’s keeping bottled up inside. Facing divorce, the possibility of a grueling custody battle, and the insistent voice of internalized racism that nags at her as a Black woman in a startlingly white world, Laura wonders just how much more she can take.
Now, with courageous and candid openness, she reveals how she started the long journey towards sobriety, unexpectedly found new love, and dismantled the wall she had built around herself, brick by brick. With its raw, finely crafted, and engaging prose, Stash is “emotionally riveting…usher[ing] in a new way for us to talk and read about the paradoxes of addiction, race, family, class, and gender.” (Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy).
