All Happy Families: A Memoir

Please Disable Adblock to Show Download Link
DOWNLOAD eBooks
Author : Hervé Le Tellier
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : New York Times Bestselling and Goncourt Prize-Winning Author of The Anomaly A prominent French writer delves into his own history in this eloquent reflection on dysfunctional family relationships. Hervé Le Tellier did not consider himself to have been an unhappy child—he was not deprived, or beaten, or abused. And yet he understood from a young age that something was wrong, and longed to leave. Children sometimes have only the option of escaping, driven by their even greater love of life. Having reached a certain emotional distance at sixty years old, and with his father and stepfather dead and his mother suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, Le Tellier finally felt able to write the story of his family. Abandoned early by his father and raised in part by his grandparents, he was profoundly affected by his relationship with his mother, a troubled woman with damaging views on love. In this perceptive, deeply personal account, Le Tellier attempts to look back on trying times without anger or regret, and sometimes even with humor.

Please Disable Adblock to Show Download Link
DOWNLOAD eBooks
Author : Hervé Le Tellier
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : New York Times Bestselling and Goncourt Prize-Winning Author of The Anomaly A prominent French writer delves into his own history in this eloquent reflection on dysfunctional family relationships. Hervé Le Tellier did not consider himself to have been an unhappy child—he was not deprived, or beaten, or abused. And yet he understood from a young age that something was wrong, and longed to leave. Children sometimes have only the option of escaping, driven by their even greater love of life. Having reached a certain emotional distance at sixty years old, and with his father and stepfather dead and his mother suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, Le Tellier finally felt able to write the story of his family. Abandoned early by his father and raised in part by his grandparents, he was profoundly affected by his relationship with his mother, a troubled woman with damaging views on love. In this perceptive, deeply personal account, Le Tellier attempts to look back on trying times without anger or regret, and sometimes even with humor.

Please Disable Adblock to Show Download Link
DOWNLOAD eBooks
Author : Jeanne McCulloch
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : The Glass Castle meets The Nest in this stunning debut, an intimate family memoir that gracefully brings us behind the dappled beachfront vista of privilege, to reveal the inner lives of two wonderfully colorful, unforgettable families. On a mid-August weekend, two families assemble for a wedding at a rambling family mansion on the beach in East Hampton, in the last days of the area’s quietly refined country splendor, before traffic jams and high-end boutiques morphed the peaceful enclave into the "Hamptons." The weather is perfect, the tent is in place on the lawn. But as the festivities are readied, the father of the bride, and "pater familias" of the beachfront manse, suffers a massive stroke from alcohol withdrawal, and lies in a coma in the hospital in the next town. So begins Jeanne McCulloch’s vivid memoir of her wedding weekend in 1983 and its after effects on her family, and the family of the groom. In a society defined by appearance and protocol, the wedding goes on at the insistence of McCulloch’s theatrical mother. Instead of a planned honeymoon, wedding presents are stashed in the attic, arrangements are made for a funeral, and a team of lawyers arrive armed with papers for McCulloch and her siblings to sign. As McCulloch reveals, the repercussions from that weekend will ripple throughout her own family, and that of her in-law’s lives as they grapple with questions of loyalty, tradition, marital honor, hope, and loss. Five years later, her own brief marriage ended, she returns to East Hampton with her mother to divide the wedding presents that were never opened. Impressionistic and lyrical, at turns both witty and poignant, All Happy Families is McCulloch’s clear-eyed account of her struggle to hear her own voice amid the noise of social mores and family dysfunction, in a world where all that glitters on the surface is not gold, and each unhappy family is ultimately unhappy in its own unique way.

Please Disable Adblock to Show Download Link
DOWNLOAD eBooks
Author : Bruce Feiler
Genre : Family & Relationships

Summary : Bestselling author and New York Times family columnist Bruce Feiler found himself squeezed between caring for ageing parents and raising his children. So he set out on a three-year journey to find the smartest ideas and the most cutting-edge research about families of all varieties, novel solutions to make his own family happier. Instead of the usual psychologists and family 'experts', he sought out the most creative minds - from Silicon Valley to the set of Modern Family, from top negotiators to the army - and asked them what team-building exercises and problem-solving techniques they use. Feiler then tested these ideas with his wife and kids. The result is a fun, completely original look at how families can draw closer together. Felier's life-changing discoveries include a radical plan to reshape your family in twenty minutes a week, Warren Buffett's guide for setting an allowance, and the Harvard handbook for resolving conflict. The Secrets of Happy Families is a timely, counterintuitive book that answers the questions countless parents are asking: how do we manage the chaos of our lives? How do we teach our kids values? How do we make our family happier? Written in a charming, accessible style, The Secrets of Happy Families is smart, funny and fresh, and will forever change how your family lives every day.

Please Disable Adblock to Show Download Link
DOWNLOAD eBooks
Author : Heather Harpham
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine’s April 2018 book pick A shirt-grabbing, page-turning love story that follows a one-of-a-kind family through twists of fate that require nearly unimaginable choices. Happiness begins with a charming courtship between hopelessly attracted opposites: Heather, a world-roaming California girl, and Brian, an intellectual, homebody writer, kind and slyly funny, but loath to leave his Upper West Side studio. Their magical interlude ends, full stop, when Heather becomes pregnant—Brian is sure he loves her, only he doesn't want kids. Heather returns to California to deliver their daughter alone, buoyed by family and friends. Mere hours after Gracie's arrival, Heather's bliss is interrupted when a nurse wakes her, "Get dressed, your baby is in trouble." This is not how Heather had imagined new motherhood – alone, heartsick, an unexpectedly solo caretaker of a baby who smelled "like sliced apples and salted pretzels" but might be perilously ill. Brian reappears as Gracie's condition grows dire; together Heather and Brian have to decide what they are willing to risk to ensure their girl sees adulthood. The grace and humor that ripple through Harpham's writing transform the dross of heartbreak and parental fears into a clear-eyed, warm-hearted view of the world. Profoundly moving and subtly written, Happiness radiates in many directions--new, romantic love; gratitude for a beautiful, inscrutable world; deep, abiding friendship; the passion a parent has for a child; and the many unlikely ways to build a family. Ultimately it's a story about love and happiness, in their many crooked configurations.

Please Disable Adblock to Show Download Link
DOWNLOAD eBooks
Author : Angela Mollard
Genre : Communication in families

Summary : From the high profile and popular journalist Angela Mollard, this is a wholly delightful, funny and charming book - part memoir, part how - to manual - about giving your kids a real childhood. Childhood, Mum had once said to me, is not preparation for life, it is life. But in the tussle between home and work I'd forgotten what a privilege it is to be a parent - to have in my hands and heart two small souls I have for only a short time to guide and teach and enjoy. If I pressed on, driven by deadlines and bosses and a stultifying work ethic, then I would miss everything that really mattered. As a journalist, Angela Mollard never left home without her passport, contact lenses and a spare pair of knickers - not because she was incontinent but in case she had to drop everything and fly overseas for a story. But then she had a baby, and this new hand luggage was as compatible with her job as a ham and jam sandwich. By the time one child became two, work was seeping into every corner of her life and turning her into the sort of person she loathed. She was suffering an integrity crisis. Yet what she wanted was quite simple - time to enjoy her children, sufficient cash to keep everyone in food, nappies and wine, and the energy to be a half - decent wife. So why was it all so hard? From popular columnist and commentator, Angela Mollard, comes the story of how she learned to aim wide, not high, and to enjoy her children again. Part memoir, part manual, The Smallest Things is for all parents trying to reconcile their various roles and create a childhood for their kids that incorporates both Minecraft and The Famous Five. Offering parents ideas and hope (plus plenty of parenting pitfalls to make them feel better about their own), The Smallest Things is a funny, charming and movingly candid story of putting family first, and why the smallest things in life matter the most.

Please Disable Adblock to Show Download Link
DOWNLOAD eBooks
Author : Gina Frangello
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.