Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books — TBD
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Kari Lizer, AREN'T YOU FORGETTING SOMEONE?

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Kari Lizer, AREN'T YOU FORGETTING SOMEONE?

Kari: It's a collection of essays. There's diversity there, but a lot of them are about my coming to terms with the loss of my identity as a mom, more or less, coming to this place in my life where all three of my kids are out of the house and what it meant. I had stopped working as hard as I was working too. Things sort of came to a screeching halt all of a sudden. My house was empty. I didn't have three kids who I was constantly nagging about getting into college, up in the morning, getting their homework done, figuring out what they were going to be and do with the rest of lives, and also running television shows, working on television shows, writing scripts, trying to do that, sell things. All of that sort of ended all at the same time. I found myself in this void of purpose. I started writing about it and this no-man's-land time of life. Also, it's the same time when my parents are aging. That added to the equation of, who am I and what I am doing with myself? I wrote stories about it.

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Amy Klein, THE TRYING GAME

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Amy Klein, THE TRYING GAME

Amy: I'm a writer and an essayist. I never thought I'd be writing a prescriptive book, but it has a lot of my story when it's relevant in there. I am a health journalist, so I've interviewed a lot of doctors and a lot of patients because I want to help people not make the same mistakes I did. I want to give them answers to the questions. Because there's so much information out there, I want to help them get through the journey. Even if it's something that they show their mother, "Read this book," or show their best friend, "Read this chapter on baby envy. This is why I'm having trouble being happy for you. It's not that I'm not happy for you. It's just that I'm not happy right now, and I want what you have," if that could just make people feel less alone. I say if you think going to all these events is going to make you a better person, like going to a bris, where I had a cry myself in the bathroom stall, if you think going there is going to make you a better person, then go. If you can, try to take care of yourself. I have an article coming out soon about what I learned about infertility is helping me during quarantine.

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R. Eric Thomas, HERE FOR IT

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R. Eric Thomas, HERE FOR IT

Eric: I originally wanted to call the book Why Bother. It was right around the time that Hillary Clinton's book What Happened came out. I was really fascinated by the idea that you could pose a question that maybe was a statement, maybe was a question. For me, Why Bother kind of encapsulated the spirit of the book, which is like why bother to get out of bed in the morning? Why bother to try to make the world a better place? Why bother to try to feel like you belong? Of course, it would've been a harder sell, a book called Why Bother, but I do feel like, particularly in this moment -- I didn't write it for this weird, strange moment that we're in, but I think that spirit still carries through. Why are we trying to reach each other still? Why are we trying to make our mark in the world? Why are we trying to speak truth to power? I think it's because we feel like there must be something better on the other side. That's what the book is about, figuring out what's on the other side or at the end of the book or behind the next page.

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Lisa Damour, UNDER PRESSURE

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Lisa Damour, UNDER PRESSURE

Lisa: Anxiety disorders have always been disproportionally diagnosed in girls and women as opposed to boys and men. The reason for this is we think it's largely socialization, that girls and women are taught that if they're distressed, to sort of collapse in on themselves, depression, anxiety, things like that. Boys and men are taught by the culture when they're distressed, to act out, to mix it up, to get themselves in trouble. It's not that boys and men don't suffer. They don't suffer as often as girls and women suffer in terms of feeling highly anxious and having, the technical term is internalizing disorders, holding it all in. There's that reason. The other thing, though, if we think about why is it getting worse, what's happening now, why does this feel like it's taken this particular shape? I worry that we keep adding stuff to girls' plates and nothing's coming off. Girls are crushing it academically. And they're incredible athletes. And they're incredible musicians. And they're starting businesses. And they're still supposed to be cute. And they're still supposed to be nice. And they're supposed to still make everyone feel comfortable and maintain a whole lot of social ties and be agreeable doing the things we ask them to do. I think that piece, not that I want to go back to some retrograde moment when girls don't have all the opportunities they have available, but all of this opportunity without the permission to excuse oneself from culture pressures to be adorable or thin or pleasant all the time isn't a great recipe for girls.

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Amy Fish, I WANTED FRIES WITH THAT

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Amy Fish, I WANTED FRIES WITH THAT

Amy: My number-one tip for when someone is running late is that it's not fixable by you. No alarm clock that you're going to get them or no gadget that's going to help them organize their keys is going to help get them get out the door on time to meet you. That is where I talk about the serenity prayer, which is accepting the things you can change and knowing what you can't change and knowing the difference, I think. It's not in front of me, but it's a very beautiful quote that has always resonated with me. I can't make you on time. That's the story in the book where someone has a family member who's always, always late. It drives her crazy, but she can control what time dinner starts. If you invite people to your house and you have a recurring family event, let's say Passover's coming up and every year you have the Seder or you have your Easter dinner, whatever your family celebrates, Spring Solstice, and people are always late, then you don't have to wait for them. You can start dinner when you start dinner. That's how you cope with someone who's always late. You don't change them. You just decide what you're willing to live with and what you're not willing.

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Rachel Bertsche, THE KIDS ARE IN BED

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Rachel Bertsche, THE KIDS ARE IN BED

Rachel: I always say if you're lying on the massage table and you're thinking about the emails you need to return and the birthday presents you need to buy and diapers you need to order, then that time doesn't really feel that relaxing even if you're doing the ultimate relaxing activity. I think when people say, oh, you should just take me-time, it can feel so nebulous and endless. There's dishes in the sink waiting for you. It can feel sort of intimidating, so they don't do it. I talk in my book about what I call pockets of indulgence which are literally pockets of time with a beginning and an end. I think the end part is the important part where you can really lean into doing something for yourself. That doesn't have to be two hours. It can be twenty minutes.

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Adrienne Miller, IN THE LAND OF MEN

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Adrienne Miller, IN THE LAND OF MEN

Adrienne: I got the job as an editorial assistant at GQ because a professor of mine knew someone who knew Granger who was an editor at GQ. I had no sparkling CV at the age of twenty-two. I'd had an internship in New York. That was it. I was an English major like everyone else. I was a women's studies minor like everyone else. There was nothing, really, to distinguish me, but I studied before my interview, back issues of GQ. I went to the library at school, pre-internet obviously, mid-nineties. I studied like a Koranic scholar, back issues of GQ for like ten years. I was able, when I went to New York for my interviews, actually able to talk about what I had read in GQ. The writers who wrote the pieces, I knew their names. I stylistically was vaguely able to talk about them. That's the only reason I got the job. Granger finally admitted years later that he had hired me because I was the only candidate for the job who’d bother, even, to open the magazine. I think that's an important part, also, of my story and really any professional story. Be overprepared.

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Fanny Singer, ALWAYS HOME

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Fanny Singer, ALWAYS HOME

Fanny: What I think is really wonderful about people adopting it now is the quality of the experience of those things, being more sensuously acquainted with your food and cooking more, which I think everyone's doing now and realizing how much pleasure there is there. It's getting back into the kitchen. Really using your senses too I think gives you this reprieve from, especially in this moment, all the anxiety and all the other preoccupations around work or homeschooling, I can imagine, and all those things. I'm happy that this book comes at -- a lot of people have been telling me that it feels like a very sense-activated kind of text. There's a lot of sensory material. It's easy to go into this other place, not just travel to some of the destinations that are spoken about in the book like the South of France where we used to go when I was a kid, but also just traveling through the sense descriptions around food or around smells and flowers or nature.

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Marisa Meltzer, THIS IS BIG

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Marisa Meltzer, THIS IS BIG

Marisa: I'm a New York Times reader and writer. I was reading the obituaries. I saw the one for Jean Nidetch. I admit I had never heard of her or had any idea of who she was. I had this sense of, oh, I can't wait to read this because this is the woman who I can finally put a face to all of my rage. I can sort of blame her for messing up my life. Instead, I read it and I saw this rags-to-riches story. I saw a woman who was about the same age that I was at the time also reckoning with her forties and changing her life, a Jewish woman in Brooklyn. We even look a little bit alike. I thought, we have so much in common, I want to know so much more, and just had so many questions that I wanted answered about her life, about mine. That's kind of the impetus. Then just couldn't get it out of my head and finally decided to write about it.

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Janny Scott, THE BENEFICIARY

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Janny Scott, THE BENEFICIARY

Janny: The Beneficiary is a family memoir spanning roughly three generations in my father's wealthy, aristocratic, Pennsylvania family. It's set almost entirely on a roughly eight-hundred acre, British-style country estate a half hour outside of Philadelphia, a place that has been compared to an American Downton Abbey sort of plucked from the pages of Henry James or Jane Austen and floated across the Atlantic and wedged in among the swimming pools of Updike and Cheever. It's also a kind of detective story, one child's attempt to understand a captivating but opaque parent and the family that produced them both. The question that drives that is how did the seemingly charmed life of my appealing, accomplished, but enigmatic father arrive at its self-destructive and perplexing end?

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Tara Schuster, BUY YOURSELF THE F*CKING LILLIES

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Tara Schuster, BUY YOURSELF THE F*CKING LILLIES

Tara: By the time I was twenty-five, I was this mess, wreck, disaster of a person suffering from chronic anxiety and depression which felt really physical. This would've, I think, kept going on had I not hit rock bottom at twenty-five when I drunk-dialed my therapist on my twenty-fifth birthday threatening to hurt myself. That next morning I played back the voicemails that she had left me. When I heard the worry in her voice, the concern for my safety, I got really worried. I realized this is not a sustainable life. I'm not going to make it if I don't make some radical changes, but how do I move forward? I don't have any mentors to go to. I don't have parents I can ask. I don't even know how to change a vacuum cleaner filter, so how exactly am I supposed to change my life? I also kind of felt like I shouldn't feel this bad, that in a lot of ways I was privileged. I had gone to really good schools. My parents had gone into credit card debt to keep me in private schools. I had student loans, so I went to a really good college. I was always really good at work. That was where I shined, but I was just so bad at life. That next morning I decided it really didn't matter if I should or shouldn't feel this way. The only thing that was real was that I hated my life and wanted a new one. I wondered, what would happen if I reparented myself? What would happen if I became my own parents and I gave myself the nurturing I never had? What would that look like?

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Dibs Baer, LADY TIGERS IN THE CONCRETE JUNGLE

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Dibs Baer, LADY TIGERS IN THE CONCRETE JUNGLE

Dibs: [Lady Tigers] is about a guy named Chris Astacio who got his first job as a PE teacher at one of the most dangerous, poverty-stricken neighborhoods in America, really, in the South Bronx. When he got to the school, it was his first job, and he noticed the girls were going after each other in such a vicious, violent way. He had never seen anything like it. He was so shocked by it. He was like, how can I help the girls? There was no extracurriculars for the girls at the school. They didn't have the money for it. He decided just to start this softball team. The first tryout, four girls showed up. He said, "I don't care who it is. Bring all your friends back so we can have a team." The next day fifteen of the worst girls in school who all hated each other walked through the door. It was because they didn't want to go home and they didn't have anywhere to go. They couldn't go outside in the neighborhood. They just wanted to be in the gym. They didn't care about softball. They just showed up to hang out in the gym. It's about how he turned that group into a team of sisters, really. It's just this crazy year of him finding out all of them have an issue in their personal life. It was about him navigating that. They weren’t doing well in school, most of them. It's really not about softball, the book. It's really about girls coming together and learning how to be a team.

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Casey Schwartz, ATTENTION: A LOVE STORY

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Casey Schwartz, ATTENTION: A LOVE STORY

Casey: Totally. This book is highly personal for me. In a sense, it started when I went off to college around the year 2000 and a friend handed me a little blue pill called Adderall, which had only been on the market for about four years at that point. I wound up spending ten-plus years kind of addicted to this so-called attention pill thinking this pill is necessary for me to succeed and achieve and pay attention. It was only when I was about thirty that I was able to get off because I understood that it had had, ironically, the opposite effect for me. It had shattered my attention. It was in that period of time that I became kind of fascinated by attention itself. Then a couple years later, I had this thought one day. It was such an emotional thought. Why are we giving away our attention so casually? This was about 2015, well into when screens had invaded, but I think before we'd all gotten a little disillusioned with Silicon Valley. It felt like such a pointless thought to have. The fight was over. Silicon Valley had won. It was still the one thing I felt like it was worth devoting my time to do my next book on. It was the one thing that I felt that groundswell of emotion; thought, I could live with this subject for years.

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Laura Prepon, YOU AND I, AS MOTHERS

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Laura Prepon, YOU AND I, AS MOTHERS

Laura: For sure. Especially now with the self-isolation that's going on, community is more important than ever. I really hope that how I speak to that in the book will hopefully help inspire people to build that community even more through things like this, through our social media platforms, through FaceTime and Zoom and all these great platforms that we can use now to connect. It really is so important. My mom squad is, they're such an amazing support system for me. Because I want the book to speak to many different ages and types of women, my mom squad is women of all ages, background, ethnicities, professions because I wanted this book to relate to many different people. From the feedback, that's been coming across and helping a lot of people, so it's really exciting.

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Bess Kalb, NOBODY WILL TELL YOU THIS BUT ME

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Bess Kalb, NOBODY WILL TELL YOU THIS BUT ME

Bess: This book is about my beloved grandmother. I was inspired to write it because she started telling me her life story from the time I was a baby. She passed away in 2017. In an effort to feel close to her again and to bring her back, I decided to tell her life story in her own words in her voice. For me, it was partially a grief-processing exercise and a cathartic way to reconnect to the woman that I loved so much. The real moment when I realized that maybe I am able to channel her in a way that is meaningful to the people who really knew her best was right after she died. I was given the task of delivering a eulogy at her funeral. I tried several different versions of speeches. I remember feeling really frustrated that they were just sort of platitudes. The way that we talk about death can feel almost trite sometimes because we stick to a script. We have a certain vocabulary in discussing the deceased. I found the way to be most authentic about it and the way to really honor her and really be true to her was to deliver the eulogy. I spoke about what she would think of her funeral in her voice to my family. It was such a sad day. The fact that she was a very, very old woman at her passing doesn't at all diminish the enormity of her loss and how very tragic it was. Everyone was upset. No one was coming in ready to laugh, of course. This is a funeral. I skipped mascara. By the end of eulogy, my family was wiping away laughter tears because I knew how my grandmother would've reacted to everybody coming out, having to get dressed, having to figure out what to wear, what to say. I just wise-cracked as her and threw this sort of family roast and brought her back to the people who needed her the most. I realized, wow, I do have her voice. I'm able to bring her back. Maybe there's a bigger literary project here. That's what the book is.

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Stephanie Danler, STRAY: A MEMOIR

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Stephanie Danler, STRAY: A MEMOIR

Stephanie: Stray is a memoir about the months when I returned home to California. I moved there from New York City. I had a reckoning with my past, with my parents, with my childhood in California. It is about being the child of addicts and the inheritance of damage. I think that so often when we look at the genetic factors of addiction, we're looking at a one-to-one ratio, which is, my mom's an alcoholic; therefore, I'm an alcoholic. While that wasn't my story, the period of time I'm writing about in Stray is when I realized that I had inherited a lot of their darkness and their recklessness and their propensity for self-harm even if I wasn't technically an alcoholic or a crystal meth addict. The book is about trying to move past that and give myself a different life or a possibility for a different life.

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Dr. Madeline Levine, READY OR NOT

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Dr. Madeline Levine, READY OR NOT

Madeline: I think we get stuck in what's happening in the moment being incredibly important. I can remember when my kids were young, every decision seemed like a big decision, select soccer or travelling soccer or local soccer or whatever. We get stuck in that in a way that our kids don't, necessarily. We'd go to a soccer game. There’d be a bad call. The kids would lose. Everybody would be really mad. Then we'd go out for pizza, and the kids were fine. The parents were still sitting at a table kind of bitching about the bad call. To the extent to which we can let go of things and stay ahead, it's helpful. Once you've learned what you needed to learn from something that didn't work, it's time just to move on. My favorite line, actually, is from Carol Dweck who is at Stanford who's known for mindset. She uses the word yet. A kid will say, "I'll never be good at that." She says, "Not yet." A kid will say, "I just can't get calculus," or whatever it is. "Well, not yet." I think that’s a good tonic for this idea that you get things quickly because you don't.

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Special Re-Release: Carla Naumburg, HOW TO STOP LOSING YOUR SH*T WITH YOUR KIDS

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Special Re-Release: Carla Naumburg, HOW TO STOP LOSING YOUR SH*T WITH YOUR KIDS

Carla: I met a mom once who was like, “You know, I just decided to stop yelling at my kids, and I stopped.” What? Are we speaking the same language? Are you a human? If I turn you around and open the little door on your back, will I push buttons and there's little wires? I don't understand how that works. If I could've done that, I would've done that. That's what I call a coulda/woulda strategy. Willpower is like a muscle. When we use it too much or even at all, over time, it gets tired. By the end of the day, it basically doesn't work, which is why we stand in front of the fridge trying to decide what to eat and we end up eating chips for dinner. It even takes willpower to make a decision like, should I eat this or that? Should I get out of bed or should I hit the snooze alarm? All these little things we do during the day. Am I going to fight with my kid about the shoes or let them wear flip flops to school?

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Eilene Zimmerman, SMACKED

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Eilene Zimmerman, SMACKED

Eilene: From that and the shock of learning that it was not a heart attack from working too hard as I thought it was, that it was actually this infection from drug abuse and that he had been addicted for at least a year probably, I started to examine what happened in terms of what happened to him and how I missed it. I am a journalist. I'm used to asking questions. I'm a smart person. Yet I decided it was not that, whether consciously or unconsciously. I decided it was going to be everything else, bipolar disorder, a cognitive disorder. Maybe he was psychotic. Maybe he had an eating disorder instead of the very obvious thing; oh, he's a drug addict. He's struggling with a drug addiction is a better way to say it. The book grew out of that investigation and also looking at myself and my own culpability and what was happening to our family, the fallout -- we had two children -- and then an investigation a little bit into what's going on in the white-collar professional world that you know so well in terms of unhappiness, depression, anxiety, substance use, and substance abuse. It was a very sobering exploration for me. I ended the book sort of looking at what's coming for all of our kids in the next generation of white-collar professionals and societal leaders and judges and lawyers and things like that.

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Gene Luen Yang, DRAGON HOOPS

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Gene Luen Yang, DRAGON HOOPS

Gene: It's my first nonfiction graphic novel. I followed a high school basketball team. I used to be a high school teacher. I followed the varsity men's team of that school for a season, and the book is about that. It seems like when you have a group of people and they're all chasing after the same goal, that it kind of automatically bonds them even if they're from really different places, even if they're from really different backgrounds. It really bonds them. I saw that. I saw that with this particular team. Some of those players had played on varsity for a couple years already, so they were really good friends. Then there were other players. There's a kid named Alex Zhou who was an exchange student from China. He came here specifically because he was good at basketball. He wanted to experience what American basketball was like. This was his first year on varsity. I watched as the season went on. He slowly bonded with the other guys on the team. I think it's kind of neat to see that you can find common ground with people who might, at least on the surface, seem very different from you as long as you're all pursuing the same goal.

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