Memoir Relationship

From the author of the popular newsletter That’s What She Said, Nobody Cares is a frank, funny personal essay collection about work, failure, friendship, and the messy business of being alive in your 20s and 30s. As she shares her hard-won insights from screwing up, growing up, and trying to find her own path, Anne T. Donahue’s debut book offers all the honesty, laughs, and reassurance of a late-night phone call with your best friend.

In 1962, Jerry Sherwood gave up her newborn son, Dennis, for adoption. Twenty years later, she set out to find him - only to discover he had died before his fourth birthday. Harold and Lois Jurgens, a middle-class, churchgoing couple in picturesque White Bear Lake, Minnesota, had adopted Dennis and five other foster children. To all appearances, they were a normal Midwestern family, but Jerry suspected that something sinister had happened in the Jurgens household. She demanded to know the truth about her son's death.

A collection of celebrated columns from The Rumpus with new material and never-before-told tales, OG Dad finds Jerry Stahl fighting a terminal disease - not to mention mortality, sleeplessness, and the soul-crushing weirdness of preschool drop-offs with parents half his age. Square is the last frontier.

This gripping memoir details a California woman's quest to adopt a baby girl from Guatemala in the face of overwhelming adversity. At only 32 years old, Jessica O'Dwyer experiences early menopause, seemingly ending her chances of becoming a mother. Years later, married but childless, she comes across a photo of a two-month-old girl on a Guatemalan adoption website and feels an instant connection. When the process drags on for more than a year, Jessica quits her job at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and moves to Antigua, Guatemala, to finish the adoption herself.

Following a long fight with breast cancer, Tracy's death ended their 13-year marriage. In the months after his loss, Frederick Marx wrote about their time together (falling in love, their shortcomings, her illness, and how they made each other better). Marx recounts his relationship with his partner - not as a saint, but as a person. Then he describes his struggle to go on without her.

This is not how this was supposed to go! I had envisioned many more decades with my husband Robb in the complicated, beautiful life of marriage. But in the course of 12 hours, our family of four became a trio, and since that day my boys and I have been creating a new life in an upside-down world. This new book is in a lot of ways is a sequel to And Life Comes Back, to answer the question: “And then what happened - after the crisis became reality and your life began again?”

The true, inspiring tales in Random Acts of Kindness spotlight ordinary people from ages nine to 100 who have found unique ways to show compassion and make a difference. Some of these stories will warm your heart and make you laugh; others will make you smile; and a few might make you cry—in a good way—with the joy of knowing there is so much goodness and generosity in the world.

Discover a story of healing and personal transformation. Marlena’s childhood was full of contradictions. Her father was both a heroic doctor for people with leprosy and an abusive parent. Her Mennonite missionary community was both a devoted tribe and a controlling society. And Marlena longed to both be accepted in Paraguay and escape to somewhere new. In Nothing Bad Between Us, follow Marlena’s journey as she takes control of her life and learns to be her authentic self, scars and imperfections included.

What if your soulmate died…and then came back to help you find love again? Alison and Bhima found true, once-in-a-lifetime love for the first time in their 50’s. It was the kind of love that changes everything. Then he died. Six weeks later, Bhima appeared at Alison’s kitchen table, as charming as ever, with one clear purpose: to help her find love again. It's imaginary of course. Or is it?

In the tradition of Cynthia Heimel and Chelsea Handler, and with the boisterous iconoclasm of Amy Sedaris, Julie Klausner's candid and funny debut I Don't Care about Your Band sheds light on the humiliations we endure to find love - and the lessons that can be culled from the wreckage. I Don't Care about Your Band posits that lately the worst guys to date are the ones who seem sensitive. It's the jerks in nice guy clothing, not the players in Ed Hardy, who break the hearts of modern girls.

Feminism was a religion in Alisa Valdes’s childhood home. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem took the place of Barbies and left Valdes impressed with a feminist ideology that guided a prolific writing career - at 22 Valdes was named one of the top feminist writers under thirty by the editor of Ms. Magazine. Yet despite her professional success, Valdes hit forty-two a single mom and a serial dater of inadequate men in tweed jackets - until she met the Cowboy. A conservative rancher, the Cowboy held the traditional views on gender roles that Valdes was raised to reject.

What does the end of life teach us about living well now? How can significant threshold moments in our own lives catapult us into richer, more meaningful livs? The key to moving with ease and grace through life’s thresholds is knowing how deeply loved and supported we are by the Source of our being. This love is so great that its one constant invitation is to BeLoved. When we know ourselves as resting in perfect Love, all things are made new.

A remarkable teenager who went from public assistance to a million dollar net worth shares his story and offers nine key principles to success. Farrah Gray is no ordinary teenager. He wears a suit and tie; he has an office on Wall Street and another one in Los Angeles...and he sold his first business at the age of 14 for more than a million dollars.

The founder of Boss Women Media and Black Girl Magic summit shares tips on how to stop playing it safe—and start creating a life that's truly your own. Marty McDonald’s pivotal career moment was nothing if not audacious: she stopped the CEO of a candy company in a hallway, pitched her idea...

Fuelled by methamphetamines and deviant motives, nothing was off limits for James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud. Not even their own children. Living out of a specially rigged minivan (a mobile torture chamber that included ropes, hooks, curling irons, duct tape, etc), this cold-blooded murdering duo kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed young girls from Reno, Nevada, to Sacramento, California.

n this unforgettable meet-cute, Samantha Allen traces her story of self-discovery during gender transition and the life-altering partnership that began with a simple hello in an elevator. Feeling “unfinished” at the liminal age of twenty-six, the author had already accumulated decades of emotional baggage growing up in a Mormon family and living with gender dysphoria. When she met Corey midtransition, she felt even more like an awkward shape-shifter. Now Samantha shares how taking a chance on that fortuitous encounter meant having the courage to be herself.

Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter.

This unforgettable and “beautifully written” (The Seattle Times) memoir explores first love, unthinkable loss, and the toll of grief. Kareem Rosser and Lee Lee Jones were young, beautiful, and deeply in love. Their love was a real-world romance that felt like a fairy tale: Kareem was raised...

This honest and emotional memoir presents much needed lessons and advice for navigating uncertainty in the worst of times. Amy Low resides in a room that is her last—her medical team is clear-eyed with her: there is no cure for Stage IV metastatic colon cancer, and the odds of long-term...

Since the publication of their successful book Real Life, Real Love, DJ Envy and Gia, collectively known as the Caseys, have constantly been inundated with questions from people all around the world wondering how they create and maintain the patience, focus, and time to raise happy and successful children after all these years. In Real Life, Real Family, they dive deeper into how they’ve created a family unit that’s filled with unwavering love and share with listeners the ways they manage to raise low-stress children while nurturing a solid and thriving partnership together.