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Stephen A. Schwarzman, WHAT IT TAKES

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Stephen A. Schwarzman, WHAT IT TAKES

Stephen: What It Takes is about what I've learned and would like to pass on to younger people, people working in organizations, people who start organizations, and people who run organizations so that they can do a better job, so they can be more successful, so that they can have fuller lives, and so the world can be a better place. That's why I wrote it. Being successful, it requires a lifetime learning model. I wanted to show people how to do that, and simple skills like how to take an interview. There are so many different things that are experience based where other people are doing them either for the first time, or not so well, or they're anxious about it. It’s a little bit of a how-to. It’s disguised a bit with the story of how I went through things like that. I managed to learn and figured out how to create a culture where people are happy, and productive, and don't leave, and are excellent at what they do.

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Rex Ogle, FREE LUNCH

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Rex Ogle, FREE LUNCH

Rex: When I first started writing it, I had been dabbling in writing short stories about my childhood. I'd write a chapter. Then I'd basically have a panic attack. I was like, I can't keep writing this. Everyone kept saying we need important stories and stories that can help kids live a better life or have a different experience or have hope. When someone said the word hope, I was like, god, I had so little hope as a kid. I wanted to write something that gave hope and showed kids you can live through bad things. You can still come out the other side and be better.

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Michele Filgate, WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON'T TALK ABOUT

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Michele Filgate, WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON'T TALK ABOUT

Michele: The essay was published by Longreads in October of 2017 right after the Weinstein story and Me Too movement took off. It wasn’t originally supposed to be published then, actually. My editor at Longreads, Sari Botton, had slated it for around Thanksgiving since people who have to go home for Thanksgiving who might have complicated relationships with their family members could read it then and possibly relate. As soon as this news story broke, she was like, “Nope. We’re moving this up.” When it came out, I didn't expect it to have the impact that it had. I heard from so many people who related not just to the topic of my essay, but also to the idea of the title of the essay alone, which was “What My Mother and I Don't Talk About.”

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Lisa Perry, LISA PERRY: FASHION - HOMES - DESIGN

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Lisa Perry, LISA PERRY: FASHION - HOMES - DESIGN

Lisa: The thing I'm most proud of over the years is I built a brand DNA. If somebody says Lisa Perry, an image comes to their mind. It’s something that is important in a brand. Young people starting out, if they have a focus, if they like the twenties or they like the fifties or whatever era they like in design, if you stay focused and you're not all over the place, you will become known for something as long as it’s not too narrow. I'm also willing to branch out. You make it modern for today. This is a great way to be able to build on a brand. If I was going to design a bicycle, I know what that's going to look like -- whatever it is, an iPhone cover, anything, lighting -- because it stays within a focus.

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Jack Fairweather, THE VOLUNTEER

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Jack Fairweather, THE VOLUNTEER

Jack: The Volunteer is this extraordinary story about a Polish underground operative who, in 1940, took on a mission to infiltrate Auschwitz, raised a resistance cell inside the camp, and start reporting on Nazi crimes. Incredibly, he succeeded in doing those things, sending out messages to reach the allies that were the first to inform the world about what was happening in Auschwitz. Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that you haven't heard of his story before now because what happened at the end of the story, to cut forwards a little bit, is that he fought against the communist regime that was established after the second world war, was captured and executed, and all trace of his wartime heroics in Auschwitz obliterated by the communist regime. They did not want anyone to know about Pilecki’s story. This great resistance fighter could be an inspiration to people in Poland or beyond.

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Ben Michaelis, YOUR NEXT BIG THING

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Ben Michaelis, YOUR NEXT BIG THING

Ben: The inner critic, usually it comes from a good place, which is an instinct for self-preservation. That's really useful. The problem is that you can't be safe your whole life or else you don't have any life. Part of the process of maturation is figuring out which of those things is right for you and which of those is wrong for you. When you think of the world as dangerous, then you can't be creative. You can't play. You can't explore. Most doors are two-way doors. You could walk in and walk out.

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Heather Hansen, THE ELEGANT WARRIOR

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Heather Hansen, THE ELEGANT WARRIOR

Heather: For twenty years, I've defended doctors and hospitals when they get sued. While it’s been a privilege and an honor, it’s also very stressful and hard in that trials are a zero-sum game. Someone wins. Someone loses. That means that sometimes it can get quite aggressive. I was finding that during those times of trial, I wanted to maintain who I was and be true to the choices that I've made about who I was, even when things get hard and were at the height of the conflict. I’ve found that some of the ways that I could do that in the courtroom also applied outside the courtroom. We are all our strongest advocates and the best person to protect and champion ourselves. If you can take the tools of a trial lawyer and apply them to life so that you can do those things, I think it would be helpful. I wrote the book to help people be able to do that.

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Elissa Altman, MOTHERLAND: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOATHING, AND LONGING

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Elissa Altman, MOTHERLAND: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOATHING, AND LONGING

Elissa: I actually recently described Motherland to someone as a story of what would happen if Anna Wintour gave birth to the Susie character from Mrs. Maisel and the latter had to come back and be the caregiver for Anna. Please forgive me, Anna. I doubt that you will hear me saying these words, but you who knows? I don't know. Motherland is a memoir of moral obligation and certainly a memoir of love. It’s a story about what happens when we are called to make a decision about coming back to the fray, coming back into a relationship from which we have painstakingly extricated ourselves after a very long, arduous and difficult relationship. Do we do it? Do we not do it?

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Candace Bushnell, IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?

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Candace Bushnell, IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?

Candace: To me [Is There Still Sex in the City?] it’s really about a journey that I had in my fifties. My fifties were not anything like I thought they were going to look. For one thing, I got divorced . I really didn’t want to live in New York all the time anymore. Something was happening in my brain. My brain was changing. I really spent three years pretty much alone. I rode horses. I didn't date. I really just wrote all the time. That actually is a phase of what I would call middle age madness.

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Mary Laura Philpott, I MISS YOU WHEN I BLINK

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Mary Laura Philpott, I MISS YOU WHEN I BLINK

Mary Laura: I Miss You When I Blink is a memoir told in essays. You could pick it up and put it down at any point, and any single essay would make sense on its own. They're arranged in such a way that if you read it from start to finish in order, there's a narrative arch to how these stories stack up. You see it in beginning, how I became a baby perfectionistic as a child and then quickly how I took those tendencies into adulthood and tried to apply them to real life, as if there's any such thing as getting a right answer to anything in adulthood. You see me trying again and again to get things right, to be the best student, the best worker, the best friend, the best artist, the best parent, everything.

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William Dameron, THE LIE

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William Dameron, THE LIE

William: A decade prior, I had pretended to be somebody I was not to my wife, to my daughters, and to myself. I was a gay man in a straight marriage. That experience caused me to take a look at what we do when we put on these false identities and become someone we’re not. It forced me to take a look not just at my actions, but how my actions affected everybody else. It’s a book about what we do with all of that pain and lost hope when our supposed truths are unmasked for lies.

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Lori Gottlieb, MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE

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Lori Gottlieb, MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE

Lori: I wasn’t originally supposed to be writing this book. I was supposed to be writing a book about happiness. Ironically, the happiness book was making me miserable and depressed. Eventually, I cancelled that book contract. I didn't think I would write another book. I had no idea what I would write. Then one day I started writing about what was going on in my own therapy and what was going on with me as a clinician. I decided to bring people behind the scenes into the therapy room. That is what became Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. We follow the stories of four very different patients as they're going through various struggles in their lives. Then I'm going through an upheaval in my own life. I become the fifth patient. We see me go through my own therapy.

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Dr. Michael Reichert, HOW TO RAISE A BOY: THE POWER OF CONNECTION TO BUILD GOOD MEN

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Dr. Michael Reichert, HOW TO RAISE A BOY: THE POWER OF CONNECTION TO BUILD GOOD MEN

Michael: What I wanted to do was to be more rigorous about the science of human development and how it applies to male development in particular and to make the connection between the outcomes we’re not happy with, the broken outcomes, and violations of boys’ fundamental human natures. That's really the thrust of the book that I wrote.

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Lisa Taddeo, THREE WOMEN

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Lisa Taddeo, THREE WOMEN

Lisa: The two things that I'm the most interested in and the two things that I think drive most of our lives are sex and death. I had a lot of loss in my twenties. I lost my parents, my dog, my aunt, my uncle. Almost all my entire family was decimated. It was a lot of loss. This project started very differently than how it ended. When I started finding people that I really thought were both narratively interesting and relatable on a human level, because I had so much loss, I think that I was drawn to the aloneness that one can feel in desire. I didn't want people to feel alone.

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Eva Hagberg Fisher, HOW TO BE LOVED

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Eva Hagberg Fisher, HOW TO BE LOVED

Eva Hagberg Fisher: It’s actually a critique of capitalism dressed up as a narrative about friendship with a little bit of chronic illness and non-chronic illness to move the plot along. That's one answer. Another answer is that it is a memoir about how three friends in particular saved my life when I needed it to be saved in various and extremely different ways.

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Emily Oster, CRIBSHEET

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Emily Oster, CRIBSHEET

Emily: Cribsheet is about parenting. It’s about using evidence to make parenting choices. It’s about breastfeeding and vaccinations and sleep training and co-sleeping, and all the big things that come up in the first few years of life and also some of the smaller things that come up, and really about looking at what does the evidence say about these choices?

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Dena Moes, THE BUDDHA SAT RIGHT HERE: A Family Odyssey Through India and Nepal

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Dena Moes, THE BUDDHA SAT RIGHT HERE: A Family Odyssey Through India and Nepal

Dena: My book is a memoir of adventure, motherhood, and love woven into a spiritual journey… In 2014 I was a mother who pretty much had it all. I was a busy home birth midwife with a very successful practice. I had two amazing daughters who were thriving. I had a marriage, a house, a yard, a dog, a cat, etc. From the looks of it, it looks like everything was swell. Inside, something deep inside me was eroding. I felt hollow.

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Neil Pasricha, THE HAPPINESS EQUATION

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Neil Pasricha, THE HAPPINESS EQUATION

Neil: After reviewing over three hundred positive psychology studies to write the book, I can now tell you without a shadow of a doubt that model is fundamentally reversed. Actually, we shouldn't tell our kids, “Great work leads to big success, leads to being happy.” We should say, “Being happy leads to doing great work, which leads to the big success.”

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Julie Morgenstern, TIME TO PARENT

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Julie Morgenstern, TIME TO PARENT

Julie: Time to Parent is basically a manual -- I think it’s the manual that's been missing from society for generations -- of how a parent can think about how to organize their time to cover everything that really needs to be done. We all want to be there for our kids but not lose ourselves in the process. We want to spend time in our relationships but also have time for ourselves. Parenting is the biggest, most challenging, most noble job in the world. There's never been a manual of how to manage your time.

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