I knew in my heart that if I was going to stay sober, if I was going to be a loving dad, I would have to open the psychic suitcase I’d been dragging around with me.
“With mere words we are driven to paint the portrait of a man,” says Colin Broderick. “By placing one simple character after another we attempt to transcribe the universe. And somewhere amid the line breaks and punctuation marks that we have chosen to use we try to mold for the reader the very essence of an emotional existence. That’s That is my meager attempt at rendering a recognizable portrait of my own childhood.”
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We were thrilled to sit down with Jennifer Finney Boylan and ask her a few questions about reading, writing, and her new book, Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders. Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Packing for Mars, says “No other memoirist I’ve read so perfectly blends intimacy and witty remove, soul-searching and slapstick, joy and pain. As a child – or as a reader – one could not ask for a wiser, warmer, more engaging companion than Jennifer Finny Boylan.” As always, you can read it first on Read It Forward: Stuck in the Middle with You hits bookshelves on April 23, 2013.
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Meet the Saturday Night Widows: ringleader Becky, an unsentimental journalist who lost her husband to cancer; Tara, a polished mother of two, whose husband died in the throes of alcoholism after she filed for divorce; Denise, a widow of just five months, now struggling to get by; Marcia, a hard-driving corporate lawyer; Dawn, an alluring self-made entrepreneur whose husband was killed in a sporting accident, leaving two small children behind; and Lesley, a housewife who returned home one day to find that her husband had committed suicide. The women meet once a month, and over the course of a year, they strike out on ever more far-flung adventures, learning to live past the worst thing they thought could happen.
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To celebrate Halloween, we asked some of our favorite authors to tell us what terrifies them. Here’s what Brian McGrory – author of the memoir Buddy – told us. (We’re surprised that Buddy didn’t make the list!) What terrifies you, RIFers? Leave a comment!
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“I’ve been deeply touched by letters, emails, and other messages from people who have read fathermothergod,” says author Lucia Greenhouse. “Some of these letters read like condolence notes – beautifully crafted and heartfelt, some from people who knew my family growing up, and others from total strangers. Many letters have come from those with their own complicated stories of growing up in a controlling religion – or sometimes a rigid family dynamic – that they needed to flee. The most moving messages have come from others raised in Christian Science. These have been both reassuring (we are not alone) and agonizing to read.”
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“One day I woke up and the reality dawned on me that, good God, I’m living with a rooster; how did this happen to me?” writes Brian McGrory, author of Buddy. “I knew how it happened. I fell for a woman unlike anyone I had ever met. She lived in the suburbs, while I had spent my adult life in the city. She had two daughters. The older of those daughters incubated eggs at an elementary school science fair, and from one of those eggs came a little chick they called Buddy. The chick grew up watching television in their laps and sleeping in a little cage in the living room . . . . When Pam and I bought a house and we all moved in together, the rooster came with the whole package deal.”
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