The bestselling, beloved writer of romantic comedies like You've Got Mail tells her own late-in-life love story in her "resplendent memoir," complete with a tragic second act and joyous resolution. Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She'd lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry's death, she decided to make one small change in her life -- she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell. She channeled her grief the best way she knew: by writing a New York Times op-ed. The piece caught the attention of Peter, a Bay Area psychiatrist, who emailed her to commiserate. Recently widowed himself, he reminded her that they had shared a few dates fifty-four years before, set up by Nora. Delia did not remember him, but after several weeks of exchanging emails and sixties folk songs, he flew east to see her. They were crazy, utterly, in love. But this was not a rom-com: four months later she was diagnosed with AML, a fierce leukemia. In Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron enchants as she seesaws us between tears and laughter, navigating the suicidal lows of enduring cutting-edge treatment and the giddy highs of a second chance at love. With Peter and her close girlfriends by her side, with startling clarity, warmth, and honesty about facing death, Ephron invites us to join her team of warriors and become believers ourselves.

"The New York Times bestselling author and star of Little House on the Prairie returns with a new memoir -- both hilarious and heartfelt -- chronicling her journey from Hollywood to a ramshackle house in the Catskills during the COVID-19 pandemic. Known for her childhood role as Laura Ingalls Wilder on the classic NBC television show Little House on the Prairie, Melissa Gilbert has spent nearly her entire life in Hollywood. From Dancing with the Stars to a turn in politics, she has always been on the lookout for her next project. She just had no idea that her latest one would be completely life-changing. When her husband introduces her to the wilds of rural Michigan, Melissa begins to fall back in love with nature. And when work takes them to New York, they find a rustic cottage in the Catskills to call home. But 'rustic' is a generous description for the state of the house, which requires a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from the newlyweds to make it habitable. Then the coronavirus pandemic descends upon the world, further nudging Melissa out of the spotlight and into the woods. She trades Botox treatments for DIY projects, power-lunching for gardening and raising chickens, and soon her life is once again rediscovered, in her own little house in the mountains." --

Everyone knows Dr. Ruth as the most famous and trusted sex therapist, but few people know she narrowly escaped death from the Holocaust, was raised in an orphanage in Switzerland, or that she was a sniper during Israel's War of Independence. After years spent as a student in Paris, Dr. Ruth came to America dreaming of a new life though never expecting the dramatic turns that would take place. And at the age of eighty-seven, she is as spirited as ever. Through intimate and funny stories, Dr. Ruth sheds light on how she's learned to live a life filled with joie de vivre. And she shows readers how they too can learn to deal with tragedy and loss, challenges and success, all while nourishing an intellectual and emotional spark, and, above all, having fun! Hilarious, inspiring, and profound, The Doctor Is In will change the way you think about life and love, in all their limitless possibilities.

What a century of life experience can teach us about happiness, ambition, courage, love and how to make the most of the lives we've been given. How many people do you know grew up as a poor immigrant in America during the Great Depression, won a scholarship to Harvard Law School, landed on the beaches of Normandy on D Day, were present at the liberation of concentration camps including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenburg, held leading Nazis to account at the Nuremberg trials and have fought for an International Criminal Court to hold war criminals to account the world over? Now you know one. Benjamin Ferencz turned 100 in 2020. In this extraordinary book, he shares his remarkable life story and the nine humble, compelling and life-affirming lessons he's learned along the way that we can all harness for ourselves.

'The most life-affirming book ever written about death.' Sandi Toksvig 'One of the most powerful and helpful books about grief that you will ever read.' Anita Anand 'Grief is more than the price of love. It is love. We must learn not just to live with it, but to make it welcome.' Mother and daughter Anne Mayer Bird and Catherine Mayer were widowed within 41 days of each other on the eve of the pandemic, then locked down alone. Their profound isolation was broken just once a week, when Catherine visited Anne to care for her, at distance and in a mask. Together they found ways to navigate their loss and the startling questions and challenges that confronted them. In this memoir, Catherine also investigates the possibility that her husband, renowned musician Andy Gill, contracted Covid-19 when his band, Gang of Four, toured China in late 2019. Her main focus, however, is not on death, but on life and love. This is a captivating account of lives well lived, moving and spiked with black humour. It is interwoven with letters Anne wrote to her husband John to tell him of the astonishing and heartrending events since his death and her small triumphs in living independently. In sharing their insights and experiences, Catherine and Anne aim to help those who have lost or will lose people or who wish to know how best to support others in such circumstances. They also celebrate love--for John and Andy and each other. 'We are extraordinarily lucky, my mother and I. We have each other and we have this room. 'In this living room, we are learning to embrace the things we can't touch, each other and the lovely dead.'

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of" Fierce Attachments "and "The End of the Novel of Love"All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question "The Situation and the Story" asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.