A moving, vividly told memoir full of heart, drama, and exquisite comic timing, about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar.
J.R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: It was the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, J.R. would press his ear to a clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of masculinity, and the keys to his own identity. J.R.’s mother was his world, his anchor, but he needed something else, something he couldn’t name.
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A nonfiction She’s Come Undone, Fat Girl is a powerfully honest and darkly riveting memoir of obsession with food and body image, penned by a Guggenheim and NEA award-winning writer. For anyone who’s ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how they look, for anyone who’s ever knowingly or unconsciously used food to fill a hole in their heart, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss.
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Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York. One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
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In a story about love, independence, and the power of women, renowned author Faith Sullivan captures World War II on the home front. It is 1942, only a month after the United States has joined the war, and everything is in upheaval—including the Erhardt family. Arlene has left her husband to pursue a new life in California, taking her sister, Betty, and nine-year-old Lark with her.
Betty and Arlene quickly find jobs in the booming San Diego wartime industry, and a small house to rent in a housing project. In a community full of people with similarly uprooted lives,
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This story is about what happened to me after I met Charlotte, and what happens when you say yes to everything, and how awkward it is when everyone falls in love with the wrong people. It all started on a perfectly ordinary afternoon in November. Charlotte invited me home to tea with Aunt Clare and Harry, and from that moment on, everything changed. At first I don’t think I knew it—after all, when I went to bed that night I was still living with my mother and brother in perpetual chaos in a crumbling estate we couldn’t afford to keep,
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When she was seven, Rachel Manija Brown’s parents, post-60s hippies, left California for an ashram in a cobra-ridden, drought-stricken spot in India to devote themselves to Meher Baba, best known as the guru to Pete Townshend of The Who. Despite the fact that Rachel is the only foreign child within a 100-mile radius, she manages to keep her wits and humor about her when everyone else seems to have lost touch with reality. Filled with eccentric characters, this astutely observed and laugh-out-loud funny debut memoir marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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