As a 34-year-old memoirist, one of the most frequent questions I get about my genre, delivered with both curiosity and disdain, is: “Why?” After all, why? What could I, the life experience and literary equivalent of a pollywog, have to share about my journey—or, gasp, what I’ve LEARNED? The fun thing is, as someone who once broke my parents’ computer by using dial-up internet to download Napster, I’m used to disappointing people. Even more fun: as a millennial memoirist, I don’t believe in writing books that will tell people what I’ve learned. I hope my writing shows, through both merit and content, that I have indeed learned something.
I wrote...
Cancer Moon: How I Survived the Best Years of My Life
All hail the queen. Sally Rooney makes it look easy, with just the right amount of Irish, nothing-is-easy-you-insufferable-wanker on the side. This book has it all: awkward yet undeniably hot sexual tension! Arguments! Cool names! A house that is bigger than yours!
And within Rooney’s stupidly gorgeous prose, we find ourselves not only yelling “EXACTLY!” out loud, many times, to an empty room but answering the book’s central question: right here. As long as we have a good book, that beautiful world is right here.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get…
I’m sorry, but can we finally remove Frankenstein from every undergraduate Literature 101 course and demand instead that our brightest young minds read THIS? My college boyfriend’s mother gifted it (prescient) during my sophomore year, and I read it on repeat during that whole relationship… and through every major challenge that came after.
I have a particular appreciation for Chödrön, and any Tibetan Buddhist nun for that matter, who can, in one breath, extend the most heartfelt, accessible nugget for finding peace AND relay the experience of throwing a flower pot at her ex-husband's head. Namaste.
Pema Choedroen reveals the vast potential for happiness, wisdom and courage even in the most painful circumstances.
Pema Choedroen teaches that there is a fundamental opportunity for happiness right within our reach, yet we usually miss it - ironically, while we are caught up in attempt to escape pain and suffering.
This accessible guide to compassionate living shows us how we can use painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion and courage, ways of communication that lead to openness and true intimacy with others, practices for reversing our negative habitual patterns, methods for working with chaotic situations and ways to cultivate…
Before Wild, before Reese found her, before I even knew how to do my taxes, Cheryl Strayed was the anonymous voice behind the “Dear Sugar” column in online lit mag The Rumpus. Over her tenure, she answered some of the most achingly beautiful/painful letters that people wrote in, and with such smack-you-upside-the-head affection that one cannot help but fall in love with the human behind each tender inquiry.
Strayed is one of those rare writers whom I believe when she says that she woke in the night to answer these letters simply because she cared so much about the stranger behind them. If I were to get a tattoo, or perhaps just a really nice poster (less commitment), it would likely feature Sugar’s line: “Forgiveness doesn’t sit there like a pretty boy in a bar,” or “The fuck is your life. Answer it.”
NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES •NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • An anniversary edition of the bestselling collection of "Dear Sugar" advice columns written by the author of #1 bestseller Wild—featuring a new preface and six additional columns.
For more than a decade, thousands of people have sought advice from Dear Sugar—the pseudonym of bestselling author Cheryl Strayed—first through her online column at The Rumpus, later through her hit podcast, Dear Sugars, and now through her popular Substack newsletter. Tiny Beautiful Things collects the best of Dear Sugar in one volume, bringing her wisdom to many…
This book oozed into my life, much like the creatures it portrays, at a moment when I desperately needed to read a beautifully written novel about very ugly things. Van Meter holds nothing back and has a spaciousness in writing that gives ample room for one’s own anxieties/fears/weak spots/obsessions to layer over her lush metaphor.
What does the ill-timed, putrid whale carcass offshore represent—our relationship with our mother? Our $60,000 student loan balance? That one cabinet above the sink that we’re too short to reach that hasn’t been cleaned since he moved out? Dealer’s choice.
“[A] kaleidoscopic narrative . . . Tenacious, wildly original, and full of insight.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“An alluring, atmospheric debut.” —People
A Belletrist Book Club Pick
A Most Anticipated Book of the Year: Entertainment Weekly • The Millions • Bustle A Best Book of the Year: NPR's Book Concierge
On the eve of Evangeline’s wedding on Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, the narrative flows back and forth through time…
If I could take one book to a desert island, it might well be this one. I’m hesitant to even describe it, in the same way, I’d hesitate to dole out unsolicited advice to any millennial—or human being, for that matter—who is staring down the kaleidoscope of their identity, asking, “Which one? Which one do I choose?”
Heti’s answer to that question—and to anyone asking her to pigeonhole her writing into one genre—is the same experience I’ve had in the many, many times I’ve read this glimmering text. Whatever you want, darling. Whatever you need.
Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times
"Funny...odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable...unlike any novel I can think of."—David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review
"Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral, and sexy."—San Francisco Chronicle
Named a Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Flavorpill, The New Republic, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post
A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love…
Growing up in Santa Barbara, California, way too close to the Hollywood dream machine, Jenna Tico’s self-worth wanes to invisibility when her identity becomes enmeshed with validation from celebrities and spiritual F-boys...until she claws her way back to empowerment. Here, Tico shares vulnerable personal essays, stories, and poetry—all grouped following the cycles of the moon—chronicling her journey from late bloomer to full grownup. Her self-reflective stories encourage healthy life choices for young women without telling them where, what, or how to live their lives.
Simultaneously hilarious and poignant (without the whiff of morality play), my book invites readers to embrace their twenties—aka the “age of wallowing”—as a humorous and necessary step toward understanding how we become who we want to be in the world.
I grew up a fan of an evening news segment called “On the Road with Charles Kuralt.” Kuralt spotlighted upbeat, affirmative, sometimes nostalgic stories of people and places he discovered as he traveled across the American landscape. The charming stories he told were only part of the appeal; the freedom and adventure of being on the open road ignited a spark that continues to smolder. Some of my fondest memories from childhood are our annual family road trips, and I still jump at the chance to drive across the country.
Head West in 1865 with two life-long friends looking for adventure and who want to see the wilderness before it disappears. One is a wanderer; the other seeks a home he lost. The people they meet on their journey reflect the diverse events of this time period–settlers, adventure seekers, scientific expeditions, and Indigenous peoples–all of whom shape their lives in significant ways.
This is a story of friendship that casts a different look on a time period which often focuses only on wagon trains or gunslingers.
After four years of adventure in the frontier, Win Avery returns to his hometown on the edge of the prairie and tracks down his childhood friend, Jeb Dawson. Jeb has just lost his parents, and, in his efforts to console him, Win convinces his friend to travel west with him―to see the frontier before it is settled, while it is still unspoiled wilderness.
They embark on a free-spirited adventure, but their journey sidetracks when they befriend Meg Jameson, an accomplished horsewoman, lost on the Nebraska prairie. Traveling together through the Rocky Mountain foothills, they run into Gray Wolf, an Arapaho…
