Naked, Drunk, and Writing

Author: Adair Lara
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 158008656X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
The material is right there in front of you. You’ve known yourself for, well, a lifetime—and you finally feel ready to share your story with the world. Yet when it actually comes time to put pen to paper, you find that you’re stumped. Enter Adair Lara: award-winning author, seasoned columnist, beloved writing coach, and the answer to all of your autobiographical quandaries. Naked, Drunk, and Writing is the culmination of Lara’s vast experience as a writer, editor, and teacher. It is packed with insights and advice both practical (“writing workshops you pay for are the best--it’s too easy to quit when you’ve made no investment”) and irreverent (“apply Part A [butt] to Part B [chair]”), answering such important questions as: • How do I know where to start my piece and where to end it? • How do I make myself write when I’m too scared or lazy or busy? • What makes a good pitch letter, and how do I get mine noticed? • I’m ready to publish—now where do I find an agent? • If I show my manuscript to my mother, will I ever be invited to a family gathering again? As thorough and instructive as a personal writing coach (and cheaper, too), Naked, Drunk, and Writing is a must-have if you are an aspiring columnist, essayist, or memoirist—or just a writer who needs a bit of help in getting your story told.

Naked, Drunk, and Writing

Author: Adair Lara
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 158008480X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Hold Me Close, Let Me Go

Author: Adair Lara
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767909305
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
What does a mother do when her teenaged daughter is spinning out of control and nothing is bringing her back? Here is a searingly honest memoir of motherhood and a testament to the power of love and family. When Adair Lara’s daughter Morgan turned thirteen, she was transformed, seemingly overnight, from a sweet, loving child into an angry, secretive teenager who would neither listen nor be disciplined. The author, her youngest son, Patrick, her ex-husband, Jim, and her new husband, Bill, all stepped on a five-year roller-coaster ride in which Morgan incarnated the chaos principle in torn jeans and dyed hair. Drinking, drugging, disappearing, suspicious companions, failing and cheating at school, joy riding in a stolen car–there was no variety of adolescent acting out that she didn’t indulge in. For Adair Lara it became an endless sojourn at the end of her rope, a trial immensely complicated by the reappearance in her life of her aging father, a man who had abandoned his wife and seven children decades earlier. Inevitably, Morgan’s misbehavior revives memories of her own headstrong adolescence, while her father’s presence makes agonizingly real for her the consequences of giving up. Paradoxically, he also becomes the source of her best advice. Hold Me Close, Let Me Go is an emotionally charged, often brutally honest memoir that all parents (and anyone who was ever a teenager) will experience shocks of recognition from while reading. It imparts invaluable lessons about holding loved ones close through the roughest passages and about the power of family to overcome the most grievous obstacles. Adair Lara is a clear-eyed and eloquent witness to the complex costs and rewards of motherhood, and her book will redefine for readers their idea of what being “a good enough mother” really means.

This Naked Mind

Author: Annie Grace
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525537236
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
This Naked Mind has ignited a movement across the country, helping thousands of people forever change their relationship with alcohol. Many people question whether drinking has become too big a part of their lives, and worry that it may even be affecting their health. But, they resist change because they fear losing the pleasure and stress-relief associated with alcohol, and assume giving it up will involve deprivation and misery. This Naked Mind offers a new, positive solution. Here, Annie Grace clearly presents the psychological and neurological components of alcohol use based on the latest science, and reveals the cultural, social, and industry factors that support alcohol dependence in all of us. Packed with surprising insight into the reasons we drink, this book will open your eyes to the startling role of alcohol in our culture, and how the stigma of alcoholism and recovery keeps people from getting the help they need. With Annie’s own extraordinary and candid personal story at its heart, this book is a must-read for anyone who drinks. This Naked Mind will give you freedom from alcohol. It removes the psychological dependence so that you will not crave alcohol, allowing you to easily drink less (or stop drinking). With clarity, humor, and a unique blend of science and storytelling, This Naked Mind will open the door to the life you have been waiting for. “You have given me my live back.” —Katy F., Albuquerque, New Mexico “This is an inspiring and groundbreaking must-read. I am forever inspired and changed.” —Kate S., Los Angeles, California “The most selfless and amazing book that I have ever read.” —Bernie M., Dublin, Ireland

Fearless Confessions

Author: Sue William Silverman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336068
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Everyone has a story to tell. Fearless Confessions is a guidebook for people who want to take possession of their lives by putting their experiences down on paper—or in a Web site or e-book. Enhanced with illustrative examples from many different writers as well as writing exercises, this guide helps writers navigate a range of issues from craft to ethics to marketing and will be useful to both beginners and more accomplished writers. The rise of interest in memoir recognizes the power of the genre to move and affect not just individual readers but society at large. Sue William Silverman covers traditional writing topics such as metaphor, theme, plot, and voice and also includes chapters on trusting memory and cultivating the courage to tell one's truth in the face of forces—from family members to the media—who would prefer that people with inconvenient pasts and views remain silent. Silverman, an award-winning memoirist, draws upon her own personal and professional experience to provide an essential resource for transforming life into words that matter. Fearless Confessions is an atlas that contains maps to the remarkable places in each person's life that have yet to be explored.

Bird by Bird

Author: Anne Lamott
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307424987
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An essential volume for generations of writers young and old. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this modern classic will continue to spark creative minds for years to come. Anne Lamott is "a warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps" (Los Angeles Times). “Superb writing advice…. Hilarious, helpful, and provocative.” —The New York Times Book Review For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title: “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453234098
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “astonishing” debut novel, about a son’s struggle to find his own identity and integrity (The New York Times). Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Moonglow, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is one of the most acclaimed talents in contemporary fiction. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published when Chabon was just twenty-five, is the beautifully crafted debut that propelled him into the literary stratosphere. Art Bechstein may be too young to know what he wants to do with his life, but he knows what he doesn’t want: the life of his father, a man who laundered money for the mob. He spends the summer after graduation finding his own way, experimenting with a group of brilliant and seductive new friends: erudite Arthur Lecomte, who opens up new horizons for Art; mercurial Phlox, who confounds him at every turn; and Cleveland, a poetry-reciting biker who pulls him inevitably back into his father’s mobbed-up world. A New York Times bestseller, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was called “astonishing” by Alice McDermott, and heralded the arrival of one of our era’s great voices. This ebook features a biography of the author.

Naked Edge

Author: Pamela Clare
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101185775
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
What do you do when desire drives you to the very brink? Someone wants the Native Americans off their sacred land. And when Navajo journalist Katherine James and park ranger Gabriel Rossiter team up to investigate why, their passion for the truth-and each other-makes them targets for those desperate enough to kill.

Someone Could Get Hurt

Author: Drew Magary
Publisher: Avery
ISBN: 1592408761
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
A sharp, funny, and heartfelt memoir from the author of The Night the Lights Went Out, The Hike, and The Postmortal about fatherhood and the ups and downs of raising a family in modern America No one writes about family quite like Drew Magary. In Someone Could Get Hurt, he reflects on his own parenting experiences to explore the anxiety, rationalizations, compromises, and overpowering love that come with raising children. In brutally honest and funny stories, Magary reveals how American mothers and fathers cope with being in over their heads—from getting drunk while trick-or-treating and telling dirty jokes to make bath time go smoothly to committing petty vandalism to bond with a five-year-old. Someone Could Get Hurt offers a hilarious and heartfelt look at child rearing with a glimpse into the genuine love and compassion that accompany the missteps and flawed logic. It’s the story of head lice, almost-dirty words, flat head syndrome, and a man trying to commit the ultimate act of selflessness in a selfish world.

Inappropriate

Author: Vi Keeland
Publisher: C. Scott Publishing
ISBN: 195104505X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
A new, sexy standalone novel from #1 New York Times Bestseller, Vi Keeland. Terminated for inappropriate behavior. I couldn’t believe the letter in my hands. Nine years. Nine damn years I’d worked my butt off for one of the largest companies in America, and I was fired with a form letter when I returned home from a week in Aruba. All because of a video taken when I was on vacation with my friends—a private video made on my private time. Or so I thought… Pissed off, I cracked open a bottle of wine and wrote my own letter to the gazillionaire CEO telling him what I thought of his company and its practices. I didn’t think he’d actually respond. I certainly never thought I’d suddenly become pen pals with the rich jerk. Eventually, he realized I’d been wronged and made sure I got my job back. Only…it wasn’t the only thing Grant Lexington wanted to do for me. But there was no way I was getting involved with my boss’s boss’s boss. Even if he was ridiculously gorgeous, confident, and charming. It would be completely wrong, inappropriate even. Sort of like the video that got me into trouble to begin with. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But sometimes it’s twice as fun.