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.

From the New York times best-selling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage--an exploration of motherhood, art and new love.

"The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays"-- ""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious...

Builds on the author's popular food-centric blog to recount her unconventional upbringing and her unusually happy and occasionally sorrowful life of literary and culinary sensuality.

""Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself." So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar"--

""Mothers of Sparta is a superbly written book, at times gently poetic, at times devastating. I was spellbound from start to finish." -Tim O'Brien "Beautiful and painful all at once. A heartbreakingly honest book that I couldn't put down." - Jenny Lawson, #1 NYT bestselling author "In Mothers of Sparta, Dawn Davies writes like an avenging angel. Her stories are poetic, moving, provocative, and bracingly honest as she trains her lucid gaze on some...

"Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this "viscerally elegant" and "intimately edgy" memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an unraveling and hostile America. Randa Jarrar is a fearless voice of dissent who has been called "politically incorrect." As an American raised for a time in Egypt, and finding herself captivated by the story of a celebrated Egyptian belly...

"A raucous, stunningly candid, deliriously smart diary of two years in the life of the incomparable Heidi Julavits. Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she'd since become. Instead, 'The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor.' The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about...

"When aspiring author Charlotte Kingsley finally gets published, she thinks all her dreams have come true. But the trouble begins when her publicity firm reinvents her quirky online presence into a perfectly curated dream life. Gone are the days of sweatpant posts and ice cream binges with her best friend, Anders, replaced instead with beautiful clothes, orchestrated selfies, and no boyfriend. Only, that carefully curated fairy tale life is ruining...

This is not your mother's memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman's developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her...