Central Skagit Library District

Thirty years ago Tobias Wolff wrote a memoir that changed the form. This Boys Life is the story of the young, tough-on-the-outside but vulnerable Toby Wolff. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother travel from Florida to Utah to a small village in Washington state, with many stops along the way. As each place doesnt quite work out, they pick up to find somewhere new. In the story of their journey, Wolff masterfully recreates...

Skinny and suffering from diabetes, Ralph Moody is ordered by a Boston doctor to seek a more healthful climate. Going west again is a delightful prospect. His childhood adventures on a Colorado ranch were described in Little Britches and Man of the Family, also Bison Books. Now nineteen years old, he strikes out into new territory, hustling odd jobs, facing the problem of getting fresh milk and leafy green vegetables. He scrapes around to survive,...

A #1 best-selling author shows how a boy from small-town New York made it to literary stardom.

"Explores the surprising truth about women's most popular body part with vulnerable, witty frankness and true nuggets of American culture that will resonate with everyone who has breasts--or loves them. ...At turns funny and heartbreaking, A Boob's Life explores both the joys and hazards inherent to living in a woman's body. Lehr deftly blends her personal narrative with national history, starting in the 1960s with the women's liberation movement...

BIOGRAPHY: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT. An intimate, authorized yet totally frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925-2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century. The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self digs behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful career to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truths underlying his celebrity-strewn...

"CJ Hauser expands on her viral essay sensation, "The Crane Wife," in a brilliant collection of essays that echo the work of Cheryl Strayed in their revelatory observations of romantic love. CJ Hauser uses her now-beloved title essay as an anchor around which to explore the narratives of romantic love we are taught and which we tell ourselves, and the need to often rewrite those narratives to find an accurate version of ourselves in them. Told with...

Presents a literary memoir of poems, essays, and intimate family photos that reflect on the author's complicated relationship with his mother and his disadvantaged childhood on a Native American reservation.

"Still known to millions only as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remains curiously absent from the American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author behind such classics as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Placing Jackson...

"The writer of the viral New York Magazine piece 'I Was Caroline Calloway' presents an absurdist and comical memoir-in-essays about the frenzied journey to adulthood in a world gone mad"-- "Natalie Beach became an internet sensation when her essay on her toxic friendship with Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway went viral. Now, for the first time, and in her own indelible voice, Beach offers a revelatory glimpse into her own life alongside a broader...

Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is Florence King's classic memoir of her upbringing in an eccentric Southern family, told with all the uproarious wit and gusto that has made her one of the most admired writers in the country. Florence may have been a disappointment to her Granny, whose dream of rearing a Perfect Southern Lady would never be quite fulfilled. But after all, as Florence reminds us, "no matter which sex I went to bed with,

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