The story of a 1,100 mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe--and built her back up again. In the wake of her mother's death, Strayed's family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. With nothing to lose, she made an impulsive decision: to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State. And she would do it alone. This is...

"From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling memoir about unlocking and embracing her creativity-and how it saved her life"-- Attenberg reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life and a voice she could claim for herself. Drawn to a life on the road, her wanderlust led her across the country and eventually around the globe. She began to reflect on the experiences of her youth, and began writing: researching...

Drawing on her own experiences, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir "Whip Smart" discusses how to confront the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing about our most intimate lives.

"... a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world."--

"Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents' lives-or so he was told. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. Fitzgerald's memoir-in-essays...

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met, a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves...

"In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help. The Shapeless Unease is Harvey's darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness,...

"In the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Ruth Reichl, [this book] is a narrative in which food--eating it, cooking it, reflecting on it--becomes the vehicle for unpacking a life. Christensen explores her history of hunger--not just for food but for love and confidence and a sense of belonging--with a profound honesty, starting with her unorthodox childhood in 1960s Berkeley as the daughter of a mercurial legal activist who ruled the...

"Sebald meets Maggie Nelson in this autobiographical narrative of embodiment, visual art, history, and loss"--

"When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it, so she and her brother finally did. Nick, an absent father, was a hippie and would-be Beat writer who lived off the grid in Northern California. Nick's own father, Gawen-also absent-had been a well-born Englishman who...