6 Books Your Future Self Will Be Happy You Preordered
Plus a giveway!
I will never stop being delighted and amazed that I get to read beautiful, funny, curious, perspective-challenging books as part of my job. I will never stop feeling like I’m getting away with murder when galleys arrive on my doorstep. And I will never stop preaching about how important pre-orders are to authors’ ability to not only flourish but to write more books!
Prior to becoming a writer, I don’t think I had ever even heard of preorders. I bought my books in person or I ordered my books online when a friend shared a recommendation. But preorders are critical to a book’s success and if you love books and you love writers, preorders are one of the easiest way to provide meaningful support. If you’re gonna buy a book anyway, it’s ALWAYS lovely to preorder rather than waiting for it come out. Read all about why that is here. Bonus points if you preorder from your favorite indie bookstore!
So if you want to give a gift to your future self (and who doesn’t?), here are six spring books to get excited about and some of my favorite passages from each. These are all affiliate links which is one of the ways you can support THIS writer with no extra cost to you 💃💃💃 Thank you!
In classic Leslie Jamison fashion, Splinters is part cultural criticism, part personal excavation, and all sparkling, ever-questioning prose. Tracing her obsession with the epiphany of love alongside her entry to motherhood, Jamison digs into divorce, togetherness, and the nonstop work of creating oneself and one’s life.
I wanted to be the exception to his pattern, the woman he ultimately decided to commit to. Some part of me still believed this was the ultimate measure of love–how much it turned you into someone you hadn’t been before. The twenty-two-year-old in me believed in love as an unstoppable engine of transformation, capable of excavating new selves from the ashes of our old incinerated stories. The thirty-six-year-old me didn’t want to pick up another round of antibiotics. The thirsty-six-year-old me needed to buy more peanut butter and baby wipes.
I first fell in love with Alexandra Tanner’s voice through her incredible piece about Qanon momfluencers and conspiritualist momfluencers and alt right boss babe momfluencers. In a searing indictment of modern ennui, disconnection, the shape of work, and financial precarity, Tanner continues to interrogate our internet obsessions and how they both color and get in the way of our IRL lives. Plus sisters! I will always want to read about sisters! AND A DOG NAMED AMY KLOBUCHAR.
I open my computer and sit down to write for the first time all year. I flip through a folder full of screenshots of the mommies, willing an intelligent thought about America to come to me. Not a single one does; I’m not surprised. I never really thought there’d be a project, a website, an essay about the Internet and femininity and identity and personhood and capitalism and nationalism and anti-Semitism. I just wanted an excuse to feel like the way I looked at the Internet was different than the way everyone else looked at the Internet; like the way I wasted my time was special.
Speaking of internet culture and conspirituality and the stories we tell ourselves to get through the day,
has (once again!) catapulted herself down various rabbit holes in order to write a book that seeks to make sense of our exhausting, bewildering, too-much-all-the-time lives. If you loved Cultish (which I wrote about here) you will adore Amanda’s new book. Stay tuned for an interview with Amanda this spring!After five years working in the beauty industry, I jubilantly quit with high hopes of making a living reporting on subjects other than eye cream. At long last, I naively presumed, I was emancipated from comparison purgatory. I let my roots grow out. I broke up with my lash artist. I unfollowed all the pouty influencers whose immaculate images had always made me feel dweebish. I was so happy . . . for precisely three weeks. Then my Instagram algorithm figured me out. It could tell I”d shuffled my priorities. Rapidly, my feed adjusted from promoting beauty editors in midi dresses on press trips in Tulum to young Brooklyn-based writers with stern bobs whose debut page-turners had just cracked the New York Times bestseller list. This was patently worse.
PREORDER THE AGE OF MAGICAL OVERTHINKING HERE!
Do you like mouth-watering descriptions of Italian food? Do you like mysteries? Do you like love stories? Do you like thoughtful explorations of women’s lives? Based on a true story in
’s own family tree, this multi-generational saga is a fucking BLAST of a read. It’s a uniquely delicious blend of suspense, escapism, historical insight, and adventure that really offers something for everyone. Fun bonus - Jo (because she’s Jo) also created a companion podcast that I can’t wait to gobble up with my ears! Vulture listed it as one of the podcasts they were most excited to listen to in 2024 here.There are stories we tell about women. The same stories get retold over and over with different characters in different times, but all containing striking similarities. The story I knew about my family’s matriarch was the story of a saint, a martry, a mother, a wife. A stock character really. A duty-bound woman who waited patiently for her wandering husband. How many of those kinds of women populate history books and great novels? A sexless bneing, free of passion. She was a vessel of purity that bore and raised strong children. For generations, we passed down the parts of her that the storytellers found appealing.
But none of that was true. Or all of it was true, but it was only one part of the story.
PREORDER SICILLIAN INHERITANCE HERE!
The concerns of the women who write to me are as different as their demographics. For some, it is the fear of becoming irrelevant and dismissed. Those older than I have pragmatic reasons for not wanting to be invisible, like “not being bumped into on the street,” or being ignored in a store or other place where they want to get service. Some older women rant about the injustice of feeling less valued and treated differently than older men. There are those who suggest that some older women are less valued than other older women. Some have experienced themselves as invisible their entire lives, and so this was nothing new. Some weep with gratitude just to have survived long enough to be old. Some reveal that, even when they are seen, they are often perceived inaccurately. To this I can relate.
I’ve been a fan of
since I was a newborn lamb of a writer wondering if I could do something with all of my motherhood-induced angry feminism. Reading Lyz in those early days convinced me that not only could my writing be a THING but that there was an audience for moms needing to make sense of their rage. I interviewed Lyz about her new book for next week’s newsletter, and it’s proving to be a real beast to edit simply because everything Lyz said was solid gold. It’s one of those times I wish I recorded my interviews with legit equipment and platforms and stuff so I could share it. She’s a delight, This American Ex-Wife is paradigm-changing, and here’s a little sneak peak of the book every woman who’s ever been in a relationship needs to read.The primacy of stable romantic partnerships in our narratives is necessary for maintaining the social order of our American experiment. We need women weeded to their romantic partnerships so much that they’ll quit their jobs and abandon their dreams so that men can pursue theirs and someone will be there to raise the kids. In sum, we need women to buy into romantic partnerships so that they will become the social safety net that our leaders and politicians refuse to create.
PREORDER THIS AMERICAN EX-WIFE HERE!
Happy shopping, and if you’d like to enter a giveaway to win any of the the following books, just comment in the thread with the title of your first choice and I’ll choose a winner at random on Saturday morning. You can read my interview with Kate Kennedy here, my interview with here, check out ’s work here, and join in me in saying “fuck off” to Sean on ’s behalf HERE.
I actually have not read Momfluenced yet 🙈and I would love to. I try to preorder a few books a year, but I use the library for the rest when possible. Have to balance book buying with book shelf space. Sometimes I’ll buy my most favorite after a library borrow.
ONE IN A MILLENNIAL
Sara, you just added so many books to my TBR list...I have recently decided the pre-orders are a joy, since I usually forget I ordered them and then a surprise arrives.