What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion · 227 pages
[In this book, the author] explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete sept
Love Is a Mix Tape
Rob Sheffield · 240 pages
In the 1990s, "alternative" was suddenly mainstream, and bands like Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nirvana and R.E.M.--bands that a year before would have been too weird for MTV--were MTV. The boundaries of American culture were exploding, and music was leading the way. It was also the 1990s when a shy music geek named Rob Sheffield met a hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl named Renée, who was way t
Regretting You
Colleen Hoover · 363 pages
Young Widower: A Memoir
John W. Evans · 185 pages
"John W. Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania, when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. In an instant, their life together was shattered. Katie became separated from the group. When Evans finally found her, he could only
Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words
Michael Ausiello · 309 pages
Television industry journalist Michael Ausiello tells the story of his final year with his partner of thirteen years, Kit Cowan--diagnosed with a rare and very aggressive form of neuroendocrine cancer--while revisiting the many memories that preceded it, and describes how their undeniably powerful bond carried them through all manner of difficulties, with humor always front and center of the relat
Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
Madeleine L'Engle · 231 pages
This moving memoir documents a marriage of more than forty years between two gifted people, a long term marriage that was: "full of wonderful things, terrible things, joyous things, grievous things, but ours."
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir
Paul Monette · 342 pages
This "tender and lyrical" memoir (New York Times Book Review) remains one of the most compelling documents of the AIDS era-"searing, shattering, ultimately hope inspiring account of a great love story" (San Francisco Examiner). A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and the winner of the PEN Center West literary award.
Everything We Keep
Kerry Lonsdale · 296 pages
Sous chef Aimee Tierney has the recipe for the perfect life: marry her childhood sweetheart, raise a family, and buy out her parents' restaurant. But when her fiancé, James Donato, vanishes in a boating accident, her well-baked future is swept out to sea. Struggling to reconstruct her life, she delves deeper into James's disappearance. What Aimee uncovers is an ocean of secrets that make her quest
Life's That Way
Jim Beaver · 303 pages
Lifes That Way is a modern-day Book of Job. In August 2003, Jim Beaver, a character actor whom many know from the popular HBO series Deadwood, and his wife Cecily learned what they thought was the worst news possible their daughter Maddie was autistic. Then six weeks later the roof fell inCecily was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. Jim immediately began writing a nightly e-mail as a way to k
From Scratch
Tembi Locke · 352 pages
Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
Mark Doty · 312 pages
The year is 1989 and Mark Doty's life has reached a state of enviable equilibrium. His reputation as a poet of formidable talent is growing, he enjoys his work as a college professor and, perhaps most importantly, he is deeply in love with his partner of many years, Wally Roberts. The harmonious existence these two men share is shattered, however, when they learn that Wally has tested positive for
Let's Roll!: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage
Lisa Beamer, Ken Abraham · 346 pages
Lisa Beamer was thrust into the national spotlight after her husband, Todd, led a counterattack against terrorists on United Flight 93. He -- and all the other passenger heroes -- lost their lives in a Pennsylvania field. But that plane was the only one of the four hijacked planes on 9-11 that didn't hit its target- most likely the white House or the Capitol. Todd's last known words, "Let's rol
Paris: A Love Story
Kati Marton · 269 pages
M Train
Patti Smith · 288 pages
M Train is a journey through eighteen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafâe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin
Goodbye, I Love You
Carol Lynn Pearson · 240 pages
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love
Carole Radziwill · 268 pages
A memoir about a girl from a working class town who becomes an award-winning television producer and marries a prince, Anthony Radziwill, nephew of John F. Kennedy. Carole DiFalco Radziwill grew up in a suburb with a large, eccentric cast of characters. At the age of nineteen, she struck out for New York. Her career at ABC News led her to the refugee camps of Cambodia, a bunker in Tel Aviv, and th
The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon
Donald Hall · 258 pages
From the Publisher: Donald Hall's celebrated book of poems Without was written for his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. Hall returns to this powerful territory in The Best Day the Worst Day, a work of prose that is equally "a work of art, love, and generous genius" (Liz Rosenberg, Boston Globe). Jane Kenyon was nineteen years younger than Donald Hall and a student poet at the University of M
The Pilot's Wife
Anita Shreve · 304 pages
Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to
This Life I Live
Rory Feek · 272 pages
The story she said he was born to write. Her story. His story. The love story of Joey and Rory. By inviting so many into the final months of Joey's life as she battled cancer, Joey and Rory Feek captured hearts around the world with how they handled the diagnosis; the inspiring, simple way they chose to live; and how they loved each other every step of the way. But there is far more to the story.
The Best of Us
Joyce Maynard · 437 pages
"In 2011, when she was in her late fifties, author and journalist Joyce Maynard met the first true partner she had ever known. Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn't mind the mess she made in the kitchen. Before they met, both had believed they were done with marriag
You Will Not Have My Hate
Antoine Leiris · 129 pages
On November 13, 2015, Antoine Leiris’s wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, was killed by terrorists while attending a rock concert at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in the deadliest attack on France since World War II. Three days later, Leiris wrote an open letter addressed directly to his wife’s killers, which he posted on Facebook. He refused to be cowed or to let his seventeen-month-old son’s life be de
Me After You
Lucie Brownlee · 319 pages
Lucie is 37. She is the mother of a young daughter. And she is a widow. Her husband, Mark, died suddenly at the age of just 37. There wasn't even time to say goodbye. This book, inspired by her award-winning blog Wife After Death, is the story of her grief, and how she is (and isn't) coming to terms with Mark's death, and bringing up their daughter on her own. On the evening of February 11, 2012,

