A Life of One's Own

December 1, 2022

In Why Fathers Cry at Night, Newbery Medalist and New York Times best-selling author Alexander (Swing) blends memoir and love poems, recalling his parent and his first years of marriage and fatherhood as he ponders learning to love (50,000-copy first printing). After abandoning her marriage as the wrong path, Biggs looked at women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Zora Neale Hurston to Elena Ferrante as she considered how to find A Life of One's Own. A celebrated New York-based carpenter (e.g., his iconic Sky House was named best apartment of the decade by Interior Design), self-described serial dropout Ellison recounts how he found his path to Building. Shot five times at age 19 by a Pittsburgh police officer (a case of mistaken identity that amounted to racial profiling), Ford awoke paralyzed from the waist down and learned he was a new father; a decade later, he recounts his path to social activism and An Unspeakable Hope for himself and his son. From the first Black American female designer to win a CFDA Award, Wildflower takes James from high school dropout to designer of a sustainable fashion line showcasing traditional African design to founder of the booming social justice nonprofit Fifteen Percent Pledge (businesses pledge to dedicate 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned brands). Minka's fans will proclaim Tell Me Everything when they pick up her hand-to-mouth-to Hollywood memoir (30,000-copy first printing). In Whistles from the Graveyard, which aims to capture the experience of confused young millennials in the U.S. Marines, Lagoze recalls serving as a combat cameraman in the Afghan War and witnessing both bonding with locals against the Taliban and brutality toward innocent people by young men too practiced in violence. To cement ties with his eldest son, star of Netflix's hit Dead to Me, veteran actor and New York Times best-selling author McCarthy found himself Walking with Sam along Spain's 500-mile Camino de Santiago. A first-generation Chinese American with a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, Pen/Faulkner Award finalist Ng (Bone) recounts being raised in San Francisco's Chinatown by the community's Orphan Bachelors, older men without wives or children owing to the infamous Exclusion Act. Thought-provoking novelist Pittard (Reunion) turns to nonfiction with We Are Too Many, an expansion of her attention-getting Sewanee Review essay about her husband's affair with her best friend (80,000-copy first printing). Delighted by all the queer stories she encountered when she moved to Brooklyn, book publicist Possanza uses Lesbian Love Story to recover the personal histories of lesbians in the 20th century and muse about replacing contemporary misogynistic society with something markedly lesbian. In Uncle of the Year, Tony, Drama Desk, and Critics Choice Award nominee Rannells wonders at age 40 what success means and whether he wants a husband and family; 19 original essays and one published in the New York Times. Describing himself as Uneducated (he was tossed out of high school and never went to college), Zara ended up as senior editor at Fast Company, among other leading journalist stints; here's how he did it (30,000 copy first printing.)

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April 1, 2023
Biggs wonders how to begin again after divorce, turning for advice to the women writers who kept her company through processing her new freedom. In this mixture of memoir and literary criticism, featuring moments in the lives of writers who thrived in moments of transition, the author begins with a series of rapid-fire questions, clearly seeking urgent answers. To find them, she begins exploring the ways in which the women writers she has felt kinship with have had to start over in their own lives as well as how their work during those transitions continues to help readers through their own rebirths. Biggs delves into the experiences of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. Biggs excels at tying the lives and the works of these women together, showing how Eliot was influenced by Wollstonecraft, Woolf by Eliot, and so forth. As a result, the author creates a powerful collective portrait of women writers who are often only studied via their isolated exceptionalism. "Women might draw benefit from thinking of themselves as being involved in a long conversation," writes Biggs, "in which they both listen and talk, and even manage in this way, over time, to establish a tradition." Naturally, the author is unable to find answers to all of her questions, but her journey did allow her to cultivate a sense of being free that doesn't require isolation but instead leans into community--sometimes with the women writers in this book, other times with various people in her daily life. Ultimately, though Biggs may not be sure of her success in beginning again, she is sure of her freedom and lucid in her assessments of how these nine authors helped her find it. An enlightening meditation on the intersections of art and freedom.

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May 1, 2023
In this finely tuned blend of memoir, literary criticism, and biography, Biggs (All Day Long), an editor at Harper’s Magazine, finds inspiration in the lives and work of eight women writers (the author is the ninth in the subtitle). She recounts how, in her 30s, she felt unmoored by her faltering marriage and her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, prompting her to reconsider her life and turn to books by women who questioned societal expectations of love, autonomy, and creative expression. During the dissolution of Biggs’s marriage, she gravitated toward Mary Wollstonecraft, whose decision to buck social norms and spend most of her life happily unmarried reminded Biggs “to listen to my feelings, even if they scared or embarrassed me.” She also takes heart from the example of George Eliot, who found love and literary success in midlife after romantic disappointment and the death of her parents, as well as from Janie Crawford, the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, who refused to settle for a lackluster relationship. The sharp analysis and biographical sketches testify to how literature has long served as a site of reinvention for women: “The ultimate freedom might be to take the wreckage of your life and write your own story with it.” Book lovers will swoon over this smart meditation on life and writing.