"Letters, photographs, and diaries from the author of A Manual for Cleaning Women"--

The mother of the bestselling memoirists Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison finally tells her own heartbreaking story of her Southern Gothic childhood, tormented marriage, motherhood, mental breakdown, and journey back to sanity and contentment, in luminous, evocative prose.

"An inspiring and revelatory memoir of juggling marriage, motherhood and politics as she worked to become a successful writer and self-fulfilled woman"--

"Bird Cloud" is the name the author gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four hundred foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. She also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy,...

Chronicles the year that the author and her family lived in Paris, describing her walking tours of the city, her school-age children's attempts to navigate foreign language schools, and her thoughts on the pleasures and eccentricities of French living.

"In Scream, her first memoir, Janowitz recalls the quirky literary world of young downtown New York in the go-go 1980s and reflects on her life today far away from the city indelible to her work. As in Slaves of New York and A Certain Age, Janowitz turns a critical eye towards life, this time her own, recounting the vagaries of fame and fortune as a writer devoted to her art. Here, too, is Tama as daughter, wife, and mother, wrestling with aging,...

"Ella Young (1867-1956), an Irish storyteller of Celtic heroes and magic curses, had a fascinating, overlooked life story. She guarded weapons hidden under floorboards for Dublin rebels during the 1920s, hobnobbed with W.B. Yeats, shared a flat with Maud Gonne, talked to spirits in the windswept dunes of California's Pacific Coast, and lectured to overflow crowds at the University of California at Berkeley. A mystical, whimsical woman, she gathered...

"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"--

"National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having...

"Elissa and Rita have forever struggled to find their place in each other's worlds. Rita, an overreaching, makeup-addicted, narcissistic Manhattan singer couldn't be more different from Elissa, her gay, taciturn New England writer daughter. Stuck in an outrageous maelstrom of codependency, mother and daughter cannot seem to extricate themselves from the center of each other's lives. Motherland is their universal story: a kaleidoscopic journey built...