By Jennifer Niesslein
I’m taking the week off to spend some quality time with my allergies.
But you know how, sometimes, you comment that you’d like to read a whole book by an essayist? Well, here you go!
Terry Barr: Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warning Labels from My Alabama Mother reflects on the life of a boy growing up in 1960’s small town Alabama. Negotiating racial, religious, and social conflict, author Terry Barr also faces witches, swimming pool dead men, and red crosses in his neighborhood.
William Bradley: Fractals is an essay collection focused on pop culture, illness, love, and the things that connect us.
Sarah Einstein: Mot: A Memoir is the story of an unlikely friendship between a middle-aged, middle-class woman and a homeless, mentally ill elderly veteran.
Allison Green: The Ghosts Who Travel with Me is an unconventional memoir about literal and literary ancestry.
Penny Guisinger: Postcards from Here is a capturing of community, a harsh and beautiful place, a family, and the internal experience of its author in the form of micro-essays. It tells stories that are both intensely personal and entirely communal, and create a portrait of one person’s attempt to do a good job at this business of being human.
Jane Eaton Hamilton: Weekend, a queer crip reimagining of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
Catherine Newman: Catastrophic Happiness is a book about being crazy in love, and also just kind of crazy, while your kids are that weird, long age between toddlers and teenagers. The mundane heartbreak of it.
Seema Reza: When the World Breaks Open is a non-linear narrative memoir that traces Seema Reza’s journey from being a suburban mom to using her own lessons to build a unique writing and art program in military hospitals. Reza exposes her triumphs and fears and regret through the dissolution of a dysfunctional marriage, and investigates her own experiences and societal attitudes towards loss, love, motherhood and community, undermining the idea that strength requires silence.
Tracy Sutton Schorn: Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life—The Chump Lady’s Survival Guide (Running Press). Snark, gallows humor, cartoons, and real advice about how to keep your sanity after infidelity.
And, in case you missed it, Full Grown People has two collections out: Greatest Hits, Volume 1 and Soul Mate 101 and Other Essays on Love and Sex, both edited by yours truly. If you like FGP, you’ll love the anthologies.
Happy reading!
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JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is the editor of Full Grown People. You might have known that already.
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These all sound terrific! I am adding them all to my list. 🙂
Great list. My memoir, Immortal Highway, was released last November.