From a bestselling memoirist, a thoughtful and provocative story of changing identity, complex sexuality, and enduring family relationships
At age 36, while serving on a jury, author Molly Wizenberg found herself drawn to a female attorney she hardly knew. Married to a man for nearly a decade and mother to a toddler, Wizenberg tried to return to her life as she knew it, but something inside her had changed irredeemably. Instead, she would discover that the trajectory of our lives is rarely as smooth or as logical as we’d like to believe.
Like many of us, Wizenberg had long understood sexual orientation as a stable part of ourselves: we’re “born this way.” Suddenly she realized that her story was more complicated. Who was she, she wondered, if something at her very core could change so radically? The Fixed Stars explores timely and timeless questions about desire, identity, and the limits and possibilities of family. In honest and searing prose, Wizenberg forges a new path: through the murk of separation and divorce, coming out to family and friends, learning to co-parent a young child, and realizing a new vision of love. The result is a frank and moving story about letting go of rigid definitions and ideals that no longer fit, and learning instead who we really are.
When I started to write A Homemade Life, I thought I was writing a cookbook. (It does have fifty recipes.) But more than that, it’s a story about growing up in a family of avid home cooks in the suburbs of Oklahoma, about my father’s abrupt death to cancer when I was in my early twenties, and about entering adulthood in the wake of loss.
Simon & Schuster, 2009
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In 2007, when I married a man named Brandon Pettit, he was a composer and doctoral candidate in music, and I was a newly full-time writer. Less than two years later, we were both professional cooks, 17 hours a day, in the kitchen of our own restaurant. Delancey is the story of how that came to pass—how two mostly clueless people opened a restaurant on a harrowingly slim budget with lots of help from friends and strangers, much elbow grease, and countless mistakes that seem funny now but weren’t funny then.
Simon & Schuster, 2014
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