Having moved squarely out of the mommy phase and back into the work-obsessed phase, I thought I was done with "mom lit." Then I read the first five pages of This Little Mommy Stayed Home...

THIS LITTLE MOMMY STAYED HOME

By Samantha Wilde

New mom Joy McGuire hasn’t changed her sweatpants since her baby was born. Of course she’s crazy about her newborn son; it’s her distracted, work-obsessed husband and his impossible mother she can’t stand. Joy turns to her own mom for support, but she’s too busy planning her fourth wedding to a suspicious self-help guru. Sure, Joy’s a woman on the brink, but it’s nothing a little sleep, sanity, and chocolate can’t fix.

Until her old college boyfriend shows up at their ten-year reunion. The one she was still in love with when she married her husband. It must be the lack of sleep, because Joy is starting to think she might have ended up with the wrong man. Not to mention she’s obsessed with her sexy yoga instructor, who might just be interested in her. Joy used to be single, skinny, and able to speak in complete sentences, but who is she now? As she’s trying to figure that out, her husband goes missing….

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I went to a reading series at Happy Endings last month and Mara Altman stole the show. I bought this book on my way out the door and I've been talking about it ever since.  I get a lot of queries for memoir and I tell writers it's tough category right now. But Mara Altman gets it right with her combination of brutal honesty, humor, and quasi-investigative approach. 

THANKS FOR COMING: One Young Woman's Quest for an Orgasm

By Mara Altman

Twenty-six-year-old Mara Altman wanted to know what all the screaming was about. She'd lost her virginity at seventeen; grown up in southern California with sexually free parents; had lovers in India, Burma, and Peru; and spent a year in Bangkok observing all manner of depravity. And yet she was an attractive, successful, single woman in New York who'd never had an orgasm.

And so she embarked on a wildly funny, emotionally resonant odyssey—a journey both inside and outside herself—only to discover that, for Mara, orgasm was connected to a part of her that no vibrator could reach. Thanks for Coming is one woman's look at our obsession with and anxiety over the female orgasm. Her quest to get her own yields poignant results that will surprise even the sexually awakened among us. From sex shows to sex conventions, from a therapist's couch to her own couch, from the bedroom to the bar, Mara Altman proves to be a guide as hilarious as she is investigative.

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I don't know how I missed this book when it came out last spring -- totally my bad. I just started it and can't think about any other reading. It's that holy grail of novels: fun but good. It will be out in paperback in a few weeks if you want to wait -- just make sure you don't want too long:

ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING

By Janelle Brown

When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for — until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune. Meanwhile, four hundred miles south in Los Angeles, the Millers’ older daughter, Margaret, has been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her fledgling post-feminist magazine, Snatch. Sliding toward bankruptcy and dogged by creditors, she flees for home where her younger sister Lizzie, 14, is struggling with problems of her own. Formerly chubby, Lizzie has been enjoying her newfound popularity until some bathroom graffiti alerts her to the fact that she’s become the school slut.

The three Miller women retreat behind the walls of their Georgian colonial to wage battle with divorce lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, mean girls, country club ladies, evangelical neighbors, their own demons, and each other, and in the process they become achingly sympathetic characters we can’t help but root for, even as the world they live in epitomizes everything wrong with the American Dream

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March 8 , 2009

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BITCH: IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN

By Elizabeth Wurtzel

This is an oldy but goody: Elizabeth Wurtzel explores (in a voice like no other) the way in which women who veer from the expected paths are punished by society for their free-thinking ways. Some of the pop culture references are dated (and in the case of her reference to the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, quite eerie) but her use of examples from film and literature are timless and fascinating. For any woman who has felt conflicted about thinking -- and living -- outside the box, I highly recommend.

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Opps -- I've been remiss. I keep meaning to update this each week and then the next thing you know a month has gone by. The good news is I've had lots of time to read books and find the right one to focus on for the week. So I'm recommending The Reincarnationist:, a thriller by M.J. Rose.  M.J. is a friend of an author friend -- she's very active in the writing community and it made me curious to read one of her novels. I hadn't gotten around to it until now and I wish I'd done it sooner.

THE REINCARNATIONIST

by M.J. ROSE

A bomb in Rome, a flash of bluish-white and photojournalist Josh Ryder's world exploded. Nothing would ever be the same. As Josh recovers, his mind is invaded with thoughts that have the emotion, the intensity, the intimacy of memories.

But these are not his memories. They are ancient… and violent. There's an urgency to them he can't ignore—pulling him to save a woman named Sabina… and the treasures she protects. But who is Sabina?

Desperate for answers, Josh turns to the world-renowned Phoenix Foundation—a research facility that scientifically documents cases of past life experiences. He is led to an archaeological dig and to Professor Gabriella Chase, who has discovered an ancient, powerful secret that threatens to merge the past with the present. Here, the dead call out to the living, and murders of the past become murders of the present.

Until next week (or next month, depending...) happy reading.

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Happy February, gmb-ers.

Last week was a particularly disturbing week in the land of publishing. Aside from the seemingly endless layoffs at publishing houses, the magazine Publishers Weekly let go of editor-in-chief Sara Nelson. An agent friend of mine emailed, "her essay was the first thing I read every issue!" and I think we all feel that way. I'm sure Sara will re-appear somewhere amazing, but in the meantime her smart, spot-on weekly observations will be missed. In the interim, I want to direct you to her 2004 book So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading. It turned me on to a few great novels (like The Crimson Petal and the White) and I'm sure everyone will find a gem in here.

Until next week, happy reading.