At the time of his death, he had suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years and was almost completely paralyzed, but his wonderful, playful mind remained quite undimmed. In the ten sections of Stories I Forgot to Tell You, Gallagher moves freely and intuitively between the present and the past to evoke the life they shared together and her life after his death, alone and yet at the same time never without thoughts of him, in a present that is haunted but also comforted by the recollection of their common past. She talks—the whole book is written conversationally, confidingly, unpretentiously—about small things, such as moving into a new apartment and setting it up, growing tomatoes on a new deck, and as she does she recalls her missing husband’s elegant clothes and English affectations, what she knew about him and didn’t know, the devastating toll of his disease and the ways the two of them found to deal with it. She talks about their two dogs and their cat, Bones, and the role that a photograph she never took had in bringing her together with her husband. Her mother, eventually succumbing to dementia, is also here, along with friends, an old typewriter, episodes from a writing life, and her husband’s last days. The stories Gallagher has to tell, as quirky as they are profound, could not be more ordinary, and yet her glancing, wry approach to memory and life give them an extraordinary resonance that makes the reader feel both the logic and the mystery of a couple’s common existence. Her prose is perfectly pitched and her eye for detail unerring. This slim book about irremediable loss and unending love distills the essence of a lifetime.

    Lauren Slater’s rocky childhood left her cold to the idea of ever creating a family of her own, but a husband, two dogs, two children, and three houses later, she came around to the challenges, trials, and unexpected rewards of playing house. In these autobiographical pieces, Slater presents snapshots of domestic life, populating them with the gritty details and jarring realities of sharing home, life, and body in the curious institution called “family.” She asks difficult questions and probes unsettling truths about sex, love, and parenting. In these pages, Slater introduces us to her struggles with her mother, her determination to make a home of her own, her compromises in deciding to marry (her conflicts manifesting as an affair on the eve of her wedding), her initial struggle to connect with her newborn child, and the dilemmas of mothering with a mental illness. She writes openly about her decision to abort her second pregnancy and her later decision to have a second child after all. She tells us about the searing decision to have elective double mastectomy and how her love for her husband was magically rekindled after she saw him catch fire in a chemical accident. It’s not all mastectomies and chemical fires, though. Slater digs into the everyday challenges of family living, from buying a lemon of a car and fighting back menacing weeds to gaining weight and being jealous of the nanny. Beautifully written, often humorous, and always revealing, these stories scrutinize the complex questions surrounding family life, offering up sometimes uncomfortable truths.

    Bobby was a force--irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at ninety, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life.Recounting both family lore and family secrets, Bobby brings us four generations of indomitable women and the men who loved them. There's Bobby's mother, who traveled solo from Belarus to America in the 1880s to escape the pogroms, and Bess's mother, a 1970s rebel who always fought against convention. Then there's Bess, who grew up in New York and entered the rough-and-tumble world of L.A. television. Her grandma Bobby was with her all the way--she was the light of Bess's childhood and her fiercest supporter, giving Bess unequivocal love, even if sometimes of the toughest kind.In Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, Bobby reminds Bess of the experiences they shared, and she delivers--in phone calls, texts, and unforgettable heart-to-hearts brought vividly to the page--her signature wisdom:If the earth is cracking behind you, you put one foot in front of the other. Never. Buy. Fake. Anything.I swear on your life every word of this is true.With humor and poignancy, Bess Kalb gives us proof of the special bond that can skip a generation and endure beyond death. This book is a feat of extraordinary ventriloquism and imagination by a remarkably talented writer.

    Edited by award-winning poet and essayist Mary Oliver, the latest edition of this "rich and thoughtful collection" (Publishers Weekly) offers the finest essays "judiciously selected from countless publications" (Chicago Tribune).

    Through it took all of her courage, she delved into her memories, good and bad, to retrieve him, and began to write. You Can't Catch Death is a frank, courageous, heartbreaking reflection on both a remarkable man and the child he left behind.

    This exuberant memoir shifts between her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of mysterious new hungers and herself as a teenager–when she last experienced life with such heightened sensitivity and longing. From her hilarious chapter titles (“How to Have Sex with Your Husband of Seventeen Years”) to her subjects–from the boyfriend she dumped at fourteen the moment she learned how to give herself an orgasm, to the girls who ruled her elite private school (“when I left Oberlin I thought I had done with them forever, but it turned out …they also edited all the newspapers and magazines, and wrote all the books”), to raising a teenage daughter herself–Dederer writes with an electrifying blend of wry wit and raw honesty. She exposes herself utterly, and in doing so captures something universal about the experience of being a woman, a daughter, a wife.

    She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. This is the story at the heart of My Life on the Road.

    Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

    A book of letters to a friend, in which Jurgenson discusses different aspects of her bereavement after her two young daughters are killed in a car accident, The Disappearance combines raw honesty with the solidly balanced craft of the French epistolary novel.

    It is a story of mid-life longings and discoveries, of lessons learned in the search for home and a new sense of purpose, and the bittersweet intensity of life with teenagers--holding on, letting go. Poised on the threshold between family life as she's always known it and her older son's departure for college, Kenison is surprised to find that the times she treasures most are the ordinary, unremarkable moments of everyday life, the very moments that she once took for granted, or rushed right through without noticing at all. The relationships, hopes, and dreams that Kenison illuminates will touch women's hearts, and her words will inspire mothers everywhere as they try to make peace with the inevitable changes in store.

    

    . . ."   With the candor and often hilarious outlook that have made her a beloved commentator on NPR, Marion Winik takes the reader on an unforgettable journey through modern parenthood, with all of its attendant anxieties and joys.        A single mother with two small boys, Winik knows exactly what she's talking about, from battles over breakfast and bedtime to the virtues of pre-packaged food and weightier issues like sex education and sibling rivalry. Part memoir and part survival guide, The Lunch-Box Chronicles is an engaging philosophy of parenting from a staunch realist, who knows that kids and their parents both will inevitably fall far short of perfection, and that a "good enough mom" really is, in fact, good enough.

    And even though he was as unwilling to commit to a place or a job as Talbot was to marrying him, he insisted that she keep the baby when a pregnancy surprised them during their fourth year together. As it turned out, Kenny wasn't able to commit to a child either, so when the court ordered visitation and support for their four-month-old daughter, he vanished. His disappearing act was the catalyst for Talbot’s own, as she moved her daughter through nine states in as many years—running from the memory of their failed relationship and the hope of an impossible reunion, all the while raising a daughter on her own. Then, one day while packing boxes, she found a photograph that changed everything.In this memoir-in-essays, Talbot attempts to set the record straight, even as she argues that our shared histories are merely competing stories we choose to tell ourselves. A bold look at the challenges of love and the struggles of a single mother in America today, The Way We Weren't tells a complex, unforgettable story of loss and leaving, and of how Talbot learned that writing can't bring anything back, but that because of it, nothing is ever really lost.

    "These hags, these great beauties, these mermaids who taunt, who feast, who slash, who steal, these succubae who cannot rest, my mothers, my sisters, my unborn friends, my keepers, my guardians": Powerhouse Jenny Zhang on identity, love, art, and living with rage.

    And that’s heaven.”—poet, essayist and performer Eileen Myles’ chronicle transmits an energy and vividness that will not soon leave its readers. Her story of a young female writer, discovering both her sexuality and her own creative drive in the meditative and raucous environment that was New York City in its punk and indie heyday, is engrossing, poignant, and funny. This is a voice from the underground that redefines the meaning of the word.