October Recommendations Roundup
Wondering what all the badass women are reading, watching, and listening to this month?
I’m going to start with a book that is getting a lot of love on my Instagram feed…It’s a bold, common-sense reframing of the abortion debate.
The book began as a 63-tweet thread by Gabrielle Blair, a mother of six and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her bishop suggested she use it to launch a legal career; she wrote this book instead.
In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair offers a provocative reframing of the abortion issue in post-Roe America. In a series of 28 brief arguments, she deftly makes the case for moving the abortion debate away from controlling and legislating women’s bodies and instead directs the focus on men’s lack of accountability in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Highly readable, accessible, funny, and unflinching, Blair builds her argument by walking readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile than women), the unfair burden placed on women when it comes to preventing pregnancy (90% of the birth control market is for women), the wrongheaded stigmas around birth control for men (condoms make sex less pleasurable, vasectomies are scary and emasculating), and the counterintuitive reality that men, who are fertile 100% of the time, take little to no responsibility for preventing pregnancy. The result is a compelling and convincing case for placing the responsibility—and burden—of preventing unwanted pregnancies away from women and onto men. You can read more and get your copy here.
And I love this idea from a follower – buy extra copies and leave them in Little Free Libraries! The author suggests ordering extra copies to send to the US Supreme Court!
On to the rest of the recs!
Tis the season for books about families, I guess! Check out these recent releases…The first is from the author of our June 2019 book, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love.
Signal Fires opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of that fatal accident will become the deepest kind of secret, one so dangerous it can never be spoken. On Division Street, time has moved on. When the Shenkmans arrive—a young couple expecting a baby boy—it is as if the accident never happened. But when Waldo, the Shenkmans’ brilliant, lonely son befriends Dr. Wilf, now retired and struggling with his wife’s decline, past events come hurtling back in ways no one could ever have foreseen. You can read more and get your copy here.
Jessi Hempel was raised in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family. But the truth was far from perfect. Her father was constantly away from home, traveling for work, while her stay-at-home mother became increasingly lonely and erratic. Growing up, Jessi and her two siblings struggled to make sense of their family, their world, their changing bodies, and the emotional turmoil each was experiencing. And each, in their own way, was hiding their true self from the world. By the time Jessi reached adulthood, everyone in her family had come out: Jessi as gay, her sister as bisexual, her father as gay, her brother as transgender, and her mother as a survivor of a traumatic experience with an alleged serial killer. Yet coming out was just the beginning, starting a chain reaction of other personal revelations and reckonings that caused each of them to question their place in the world in new and ultimately liberating ways. You can read more and get your copy here.
Elisa Bernick grew up "different" (i.e., Jewish) in the white, Christian suburb of New Hope, Minnesota during the 1960s and early 1970s. At the center of her world was her mother, Arlene, who was a foul-mouthed, red-headed, suburban Samson who ultimately shook the walls of their family until it collapsed. Poignant and provocative, Departure Stories peers through the broader lens of Minnesota's recent history to reveal an intergenerational journey through trauma that unraveled the Bernick family and many others. Deftly interweaving reporting, archival material, memoir, jokes, scrapbook fragments, personal commentary, and one very special Waikiki Meatballs recipe, Bernick explores how the invisible baggage of place and memory, Minnesota's uniquely antisemitic history, and the cultural shifts of feminism and changing marital expectations contributed to her family's eventual implosion. You can read more and get your copy here.
It was 1998 in Nha Trang, Việt Nam, and Liên struggled to care for her newborn twin girls. Hà was taken in by Liên’s sister, and she grew up in a rural village with her aunt, going to school and playing outside with the neighbors. They had sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons. Hà’s twin sister, Loan, was adopted by a wealthy, white American family who renamed her Isabella. Isabella grew up in the suburbs of Chicago with a nonbiological sister, Olivia, also adopted from Việt Nam. Isabella and Olivia attended a predominantly white Catholic school, played soccer, and prepared for college. But when Isabella’s adoptive mother learned of her biological twin back in Việt Nam, all of their lives changed forever. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members. She brings the girls’ experiences to life on the page, told from their own perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life. You can read more and get your copy here.
And here’s two new thrillers…
Narrated by Liz Miller, a penniless Ph.D. candidate desperate to finish her dissertation, the novel begins when Liz's boyfriend abruptly ditches her, rendering Liz homeless and reduced to couch-surfing. Trying to find an affordable living space, she stumbles across a Craigslist posting that will change her life: a room with a view in a pre-war Greenwich Village apartment. The rent is a pittance, but in exchange, the tenant must be willing to read aloud daily to the apartment's sight-impaired landlady. Liz quickly figures out that the sight-impaired landlady is none other than Anne Taussig Weil, author of the 1965 international blockbuster The Vengeance of Catherine Clark and the very woman whose refusal to cooperate for the past four years has held up Liz's dissertation on the feminist works of mid-century women novelists. Access to Weil is the key to completing her doctorate at Columbia and finally getting her academic career back on track. Liz sets scruples aside and presents herself as a quiet young woman still finding her way in life. Once settled in, Liz learns from Weil that her need for a reader stems from a desire to revisit a key episode in her life. That episode, recorded in the scrawled journals Weil kept since she was a young girl, turns out to be the story of her passionate, disastrous, secret love affair with a celebrated pianist—the affair, in fact, which gave rise to the plot of Vengeance. You can read more and get your copy here.
WHAT'S RIGHT IS RIGHT. Sonya Kantor knows this slogan—she lived by it for most of her life. For decades, everyone in the Seattle-Portland megalopolis lived under it, as well as constant surveillance in the form of the Insight, an ocular implant that tracked every word and every action, rewarding or punishing by a rigid moral code set forth by the Delegation. Then there was a revolution. The Delegation fell. Its most valuable members were locked in the Aperture, a prison on the outskirts of the city. And everyone else, now free from the Insight’s monitoring, went on with their lives. Sonya, former poster girl for the Delegation, has been imprisoned for ten years when an old enemy comes to her with a deal: find a missing girl who was stolen from her parents by the old regime, and earn her freedom. The path Sonya takes to find the child will lead her through an unfamiliar, crooked post-Delegation world where she finds herself digging deeper into the past—and her family’s dark secrets—than she ever wanted to. You can read more and get your copy here.
And - what a fun surprise – an Elin Hilderbrand book in the middle of fall!
Bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand revisits her most treasured and iconic characters in this magical collection of stories. Collected in a single volume for the first time, Endless Summer ranges from fan favorites to original, never-before-seen works. With exclusive, behind-the-scenes introductions to each story, this page-turning volume blends Hilderbrand’s irresistible love of Nantucket with her longtime affection for short stories. You can read more and get your copy here.
More Badassness = More Lizzo
I love the Celebrity Memoir Book Club – and I especially enjoyed the recent episode featuring Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died. You can listen to it here.
In related news, it was just announced that McCurdy signed a two-book deal with Penguin Random House’s Ballantine Books. Don’t expect another memoir – this deal is for fiction books!
Our August 2018 author Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud) is hosting a new podcast from HGTV. It’s called Townsizing – and the first episode features my favorite HGTV stars, Ben and Erin Napier of Hometown! You can listen to that episode here.
Soledad O'Brien, the award-winning journalist and producer, has just executive produced the first ever full-length documentary on the Civil Rights icon, titled “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.” based on the book by Jeanne Theoharis. You can watch the trailer here.
It’s been a minute since I’ve done a Badass Woman of the Week. This is a great one!
Jess Wade is a physicist AND a prolific Wikipedia author. The 33-year-old from England has written over 1,750 Wikipedia pages for female and minority scientists, all in her pursuit of giving them the credit they are due. You can read more about all she’s done here.