The mother of best-selling memoirists Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, Margaret Robison offers her own version of the events so famously chronicled in her sons' much-talked about works. From one view, Margaret and her husband John's life together began with a sheen of normality: he a successful academic and she an artist, poet, and mother. But when John turns to the bottle, and Margaret sinks farther and farther into mental illness, the...

Guided by the narrative of her mother's tragic loss of a son years earlier, Mira Ptacin confronts an unexpected pregnancy with a child who has no chance of survival outside the womb. At age twenty-eight, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she soon embraced the pregnancy and became engaged to Andrew, the father. Five months later, an ultrasound revealed birth defects that would give the child no chance of survival outside...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes the fascinating story of America's national day of thanks and of the tenacious and inspiring Sarah Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century woman who made establishing this holiday her life's mission-one brought to fruition by the wise support of Abraham Lincoln"--

Collects the author's recent essays exploring motherhood as an older mom, her life as a reader, her relationships with her parents, her newspaper career, and her experiences as a novelist.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Adulting comes a story about how to make something when you're capable of nothing.