Scarlett Johansson would make a perfect Odette.Īgain, I know from our Most Popular Century Club books that almost all of you read Kate Quinn’s novel “The Alice Network” last year. I’m calling it now: This will be a movie. “Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII's Most Highly Decorated Spy” by Larry Loftis. This one is by a man, but the story is, uniquely, a woman’s struggle. Heartbreaking both in its unflinching honesty, and the realization that Land’s story is one of countless similar tales. Not when I was moving into a place with rules that suggested that I was an addict, dirty, or just so messed up in life that I needed an enforced curfew and pee tests.” This is life on food stamps, of doing the best you can with that you have, of living in housing complexes that double as halfway houses that ask for your urine sample.Īt one point, a caseworker calls her “lucky” for finding shelter. This is American life below the poverty line, in a fresh new voice. She became a housekeeper, or “a nameless ghost," she writes, noting that most of her upper middle-class clients don’t know her from any other house cleaner. Suddenly she was another single mom, struggling to make ends meet. Land's plans of going to college and becoming a writer were cut short when, at 28, a fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. In fact, Ehrenreich writes the forward here. One of the most-read books by our Century Club members last year was Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir, “Educated.”Īlready a New York Times bestseller, “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive” by Stephanie Land, has drawn comparisons to “Educated” and “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich (2011). My history, my history…By the time I went to bed that night, my entire history- the life I had lived - had crumbled beneath me, like the buried ruins of an ancient forgotten city.” I looked at my hand, for example, and I knew it was my hand. There were certain things I thought I could count on. “I woke up one morning and life was as I had always known it to be. With a few clicks, her entire life story changed completely. Her results? Her father was not her biological father. In 2016, Shapiro - who has published various memoirs and books on identity - submitted her DNA for analysis to a genealogy website. “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love,” by Dani Shapiro. In the age of 23andMe, and commercial home DNA tests, it may be no surprise that this one is already a New York Times Bestseller: Personality’ and it did not feel like a superlative.” Thick where I should have been thin, more when I should have been less, a high school teacher nicknamed me ‘Ms.
I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine…I was… too much for white teachers and white classrooms and white study groups and white Girls Scout troops and so on. How else would I have ended up in a place called Rudean’s?… You ordered your fish at the bar.”Īnother great passage: “Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life. Her opening lines grab you the by the collar: In eight essays, the award-winning professor and acclaimed author of “Lower Ed” weighs in on everything from “Saturday Night Live” to LinkedIn.
Recommended by a spectrum of outlets, from the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post to Entertainment Weekly and BuzzFeed, Cottom has her finger on the pulse of what it means to be black, female and American in 2019.Ĭottom excavates and sheds light on today’s society like a modern archaeologist. “Thick: And Other Essays,” by Tressie McMillan Cottomįor fans of Roxane Gay’s “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body,” this is a must-read. So, if your book club is looking for a Women’s History Month-themed pick, my picks here all tell stories of women’s present, past and timeless struggles.
It didn’t occur to me until after I selected these books that almost all are written by women - with one by a man about a woman. Alright, BookLovers, last week I had my picks for novels, and so here’s Part II: My picks for the Best New Non-fiction of 2019 So Far.