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UNFIT PARENT

One of our recommended books is Unfit Parent by Jessica Slice

Navigating the joys, stigma, and discrimination of disabled parenting—and how the solutions offered by disability culture can transform the way we all raise our kids

In Unfit Parent, Slice debunks the exclusionary myths that deem disabled people “unfit” to care for their children, instead showing how disabled parents and disability culture provide valuable lessons for rejecting societal rules that encourage perfectionism and lead to isolation.

Combining her personal experiences with interviews, research-backed evidence, and disability studies, Slice shares insight into what the landscape is like for disabled parents—one that is scattered with unpredictable obstacles and inaccessible barriers.

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MAD WIFE

One of our recommended books is Mad Wife by Kate Hamilton

In this electrifying literary memoir, Kate Hamilton deftly traces her complicated journey from loving wife to gaslit victim to furious feminist with an urgent goal: to expose how women are pressured to uphold the institutions of marriage and family, no matter the cost.

In the tradition of Know My Name and The Argonauts, Hamilton braids her own story with cultural criticism to argue that we must face the misogyny lurking in the shadows of marriage in the 21st century. She examines the beliefs and conditioning that held her in an increasingly destructive marriage and unflinchingly documents what she did to keep her family together—therapy,

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ALL IN HER HEAD

A surprising, groundbreaking, and fiercely entertaining medical history that is both a collective narrative of women’s bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around women’s health.

For as long as medicine has been a practice, women’s bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of women’s healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless—a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species,

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YEAR OF PLENTY

One of our recommended books is Year of Plenty by B.J. Hollars

In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. “When will you be home?” Steve asked. “I have news.” So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives.

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FRAGMENTED

One of our recommended books is Fragmented by Ilana Yurkiewicz, MD

An award-winning physician-writer exposes how pervasive cracks in the health care system cost us time, energy, and lives—and how we can fix them.

There’s an unspoken assumption when we go to see a doctor: the doctor knows our medical story and is making decisions based on that story. But reality frequently falls short. Medical records vanish when we switch doctors. Critical details of life-saving treatment plans get lost in muddled electronic charts. The doctors we see change according to specialty, hospital shifts, or an insurer’s whims. Physician Ilana Yurkiewicz calls this phenomenon fragmentation, and, she argues,

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NEARLY DEPARTED

A heartbreakingly hilarious memoir of losing both parents to cancer and making daring choices to avoid the same early demise.

By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family. A blood test confirmed she carried the BRCA1 gene—which put her at high risk of developing breast cancer herself. Determined to break the cycle of early death in her family, Gila decides to undergo an elective double mastectomy.

This memoir follows her path as she becomes a reluctant expert on how to sit shiva, finds love, and becomes a mother,

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