Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life. The idea that some women and men prefer not to have children is often met with sharp criticism and incredulity by the public and mainstream media.In this provocative and controversial collection of essays, curated by writer Meghan Daum, sixteen acclaimed writers explain why they have chosen to eschew parenthood. Contributors Lionel Shriver, Sigrid Nunez, Kate Christiensen, Elliott Holt, Geoff Dyer, and Tim Kreider, among others, offer a unique perspective on the overwhelming cultural pressure of parenthood.Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed makes a thoughtful and passionate case for why parenthood is not the only path in life, taking our parent-centric, kid-fixated, baby-bump-patrolling culture to task in the process. What emerges is a more nuanced, diverse view of what it means to live a full, satisfying life.

    What, she asks, does this whole mess of bones, muscles, organs, and soul mean? Searching for answers, she turns her keen narrative sense to body image, gender, ethnic history, and familial legacy, exploring what it means to live in our bodies and to leave them behind.   Over the course of twelve essays, Shinner holds a mirror up to the complex desires, fears, confusions, and mysteries that shape our bodily perceptions. Driven by the collision between herself and the larger world, she examines her feet through the often-skewed lens of history to understand what makes them, in the eyes of some, decidedly Jewish; considers bras, breasts, and the storied skills of the bra fitter; asks, from the perspective of a confused and grieving daughter, what it means to cut the body open; and takes a reeling time-trip through myth, culture, and history to look at women’s hair in ancient Rome, Laos, France, Syria, Cuba, India, and her own past. Some pieces investigate the body under emotional or physical duress, while others use the body to consider personal heritage and legacy. Throughout, Shinner writes with elegance and assurance, weaving her wide-ranging thoughts into a firm and fascinating fabric.   Turning the category of body books on, well, its ear, You Feel So Mortal offers a probing view of our preoccupation with the body that is both idiosyncratic and universal, leaving us with the deep satisfaction of our shared humanity.

    You won’t find it in books. And you certainly won’t find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy Castro’s unmoored life of searching and striving that she’s turned to account with literary alchemy in Island of Bones. In personal essays that plumb the depths of not-belonging, Castro takes the all-too-raw materials of her adolescence and young adulthood and views them through the prism of time. The result is an exquisitely rendered, richly detailed perspective on a uniquely troubled young life that reflects on the larger questions each of us faces in a world where diversity and singularity are forever at odds. In the experiences of her past—hunger and abuse, flight as a fourteen-year-old runaway, single motherhood, the revelations of her “true” ethnic identity, the suicide of her father—Castro finds the “jagged, smashed place of edges and fragments” that she pieces together to create an island all her own. Hers is a complicated but very real depiction of what it is to “jump class,” to not belong but to find one’s voice in the interstices of identity.

    Examples abound in popular culture, from actress Cynthia Nixon, who left her male partner of 15 years to be with a woman, to writer and comedienne Carol Leifer, who divorced her husband for the same reason.In a culture increasingly open to accepting this fluidity, Dear John, I Love Jane is a timely, fiercely candid exploration of female sexuality and personal choice. The book is comprised of essays written by a broad spectrum of women, including a number of well-known writers and personalities. Their stories are sometimes funny, sometimes painful—but always achingly honest—accounts of leaving a man for a woman, and the consequences of making such a choice.Arousing, inspiring, bawdy, bold, and heartfelt, Dear John, I Love Jane is an engrossing reflection of a new era of female sexuality.

    How did I know the President of the United States would be on the flight that day?”Where flight attendant Marsha Marks goes, funny things happen, and she tells them all in this hilarious and insightful chronicle of her career as a naive flight attendant and a struggling author. From missed flights to missing uniforms, miracle babies to indecipherable southern accents, Flying by the Seat of My Pants is a laugh-out-loud reminder of what is important and what keeps us steady through the turbulence of life.

    The result is riveting, compelling, incontestable. Impossible to put down. This book provides all anyone needs to know about the reality of prostitution in moving, insightful prose that engages and disposes of every argument ever raised in its favor.” —Catharine A. MacKinnon, law professor, University of Michigan and Harvard UniversityBorn to mentally unstable parents, Rachel Moran left home at the age of fourteen. Being homeless, she became prostituted to survive. With intelligence and empathy, she describes the fears she and others had working on the streets and in the brothels. Moran also speaks to the psychological damage that accompanies prostitution and the estrangement from one’s body. At the age of twenty-two, Moran escaped prostitution. She has since become a writer and an abolitionist activist.

    From from the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll diet to how to cure a broken heart, there is no better, funnier, truer guide to life, love, and the pursuit of men!

    It was "broken glass ceilings" and Girls Gone Wild infomercials. With a vague aim toward sexual empowerment, she set out to become what men wanted--or, at least, understand it.In her moving, fresh, and darkly humorous memoir, she shares the thrilling and heartbreaking events that led to discovering conflicting truths about her own desire, first as a woman coming of age and then as a veteran journalist covering the sex beat. Tracing her experiences on adult film sets, at fetish conventions, and during an orgasmic meditation retreat (to name just a few), Clark-Flory weaves in statistics and expert voices to reckon with our views on sexual freedom.Want Me is about looking for love, sex, and power as a woman in a culture that is "freer" than ever, yet defined by unprecedented pressures and enduring constraints. This is a first-hand example of one woman who navigated the mixed messages of sexual expectation, only to discover the complexity of her own wants and our collective need to change the limitations of that journey.

    NYU MFA candidate and Goldwater Fellow Alisson Wood's BEING LOLITA, a memoir of the author's two-year relationship with her high school English teacher who seduced her by teaching her Lolita, a story he had her believe was the greatest love story of our time, which she only later learned was anything but, and how revisiting Nabokov's masterpiece allowed her to grapple with what it means to have been an unreliable narrator of her own life, exploring our shifting views of consent, male dominance, and self-perception, to Sarah Murphy at Flatiron Books.

    Here, word for word is that amazing speech to inspire you to find what it is that you "Love".

    Miraculously, his daughter was unharmed, but his wife faced a series of life-threatening injuries, including the same one that famously left Christopher Reeve paralyzed. Following the accident, Segal began sending regular email updates to their circle of friends and family—a list that continued to grow as others heard of the event and were moved by the many emotional and spiritual issues it raised. Segal's compelling memoir is an intimate and honest chronicle built around these email updates, and is a profound example of how people show up for one another in times of crisis.Alternatingly harrowing, humorous, heartbreaking, and hopeful, this is an uplifting tribute to love, determination, and how the compassion of community holds the power to heal, serving as an inspiring testament to the resilience of the human spirit when faced with pain and adversity.

    Fiction is matched in excitement by graphic novel excerpts and personal essays. Certain to become a literary touchstone for a new generation of writers and readers, Baby Remember My Name speaks to the broad range of queer girl experiences in work that is brave, irreverent, funny, sensitive, and hot.