721 Park Avenue Apartment: 9B TENANT: Amanda Crawford, party planner but no party girl SCANDAL: Single, in debt and…late! Millionaire legal eagle Alex Harper had been in hot pursuit of Amanda for months—but she shot him down at every turn. Till he hit her where she lived, hiring her to plan a bigwig bash. But working with Alex was like playing with fire, and Amanda allowed herself one night to let loose. But with a heartbreaker like Alex, once wasn't enough. Her body craved him again—even as she wondered if that one night of passion would come back to haunt her in nine months….
"Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers' snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected. Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday's memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want--safety, happiness, and success--and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday's life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are. Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world--the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood"--
The author of Nine Women, One Dress delivers a charming, unforgettable novel about four women, one little lie, and the big repercussions that unite them all. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. When Eliza Hunt created The Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board fifteen years ago she was happily entrenched in her picture-perfect suburban life with her husband and twin preschoolers. Now, with an empty nest and a crippling case of agoraphobia, the once-fun hobby has become her lifeline. So when a rival parenting forum threatens the site’s existence, she doesn’t think twice before fabricating a salacious rumor to spark things up a bit. It doesn’t take long before that spark becomes a flame. Across town, new mom and site devotee Olivia York is thrown into a tailspin by what she reads on the Bulletin Board. Allison Le is making cyber friends with a woman who isn’t quite who she says she is. And Amanda Cole, Eliza’s childhood friend, may just hold the key to unearthing why Eliza can’t step out of her front door. In all this chaos, one thing is for sure…Hudson Valley will never be the same. Funny, romantic, raw, and hopeful, this is a story about being a woman and of the healing power of sisterhood.
"Mesmerizing... A portrait of something familiar gone wildly, tragically awry." —The New York Times “Sometimes, a child is born to a parent who can’t be a parent, and, like a seedling in the shade, has to grow toward a distant sun. Ariel Leve’s spare and powerful memoir will remind us that family isn’t everything—kindness and nurturing are.” —Gloria Steinem Ariel Leve grew up in Manhattan with an eccentric mother she describes as “a poet, an artist, a self-appointed troublemaker and attention seeker.” Leve learned to become her own parent, taking care of herself and her mother’s needs. There would be uncontrolled, impulsive rages followed with denial, disavowed responsibility, and then extreme outpourings of affection. How does a child learn to feel safe in this topsyturvy world of conditional love? Leve captures the chaos and lasting impact of a child’s life under siege and explores how the coping mechanisms she developed to survive later incapacitated her as an adult. There were material comforts, but no emotional safety, except for summer visits to her father’s home in South East Asia-an escape that was terminated after he attempted to gain custody. Following the death of a loving caretaker, a succession of replacements raised Leve—relationships which resulted in intense attachment and loss. It was not until decades later, when Leve moved to other side of the world, that she could begin to emancipate herself from the past. In a relationship with a man who has children, caring for them yields a clarity of what was missing. In telling her haunting story, Leve seeks to understand the effects of chronic psychological maltreatment on a child’s developing brain, and to discover how to build a life for herself that she never dreamed possible: An unabbreviated life.
“Masterly deftness, funny sentence by funny sentence...a moving and intricately braided story of two mothers.” —Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian This “beguiling, addictive read” (People, Book of the Week) and Belletrist Book Club pick about a blue-blooded single mother raising her daughter in rarefied New York City is a “carefully observed family story [that] rings true to life” (The New York Times Book Review). Laura hails from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, born into old money, drifting aimlessly into her early thirties. One weekend in 1981 she meets a man. The two sleep together. He vanishes. And Laura realizes she’s pregnant. Enter: Emma. “Unputdownable” (Library Journal) and “wryly observed” (Vogue), Laura & Emma follows Laura as she raises Emma in New York City over the next fifteen years. With wit and compassion, Kate Greathead explores the many flaws and quirks that make us human. Laura’s story hosts a cast of effervescent and original characters, including her eccentric mother, who informs her society friends and Emma herself that she was fathered by a Swedish sperm donor; her brother, whose childhood stutter reappears in the presence of their forbidding father; an exceptionally kind male pediatrician; and her overbearing best friend, whose life has followed the Park Avenue script in every way except for childbearing. “Kate Greathead’s debut novel gamely takes on class conflict, single motherhood, and the discreet pretension of the 1980s Upper East Side” (New York magazine) and is a “layered story about mothers and daughters and identity” (Entertainment Weekly). Told in vignettes whose every “restrained and understated sentence has been polished to glittering brightness” (Vox), Laura & Emma is “an incisive comedy of manners about class divides and the ‘burdens’ of being born privileged” (Esquire) and “a thoughtful novel of trying to find oneself despite an assigned place in the world” (Publishers Weekly).
JOIN AWARD-WINNING PODCASTER ZIBBY OWENS OF MOMS DON’T HAVE TIME TO READ BOOKS ON A JOURNEY FILLED WITH FOOD, EXERCISE, SEX, BOOKS, AND MORE. It’s impossible to ignore how life has changed since COVID-19 spread across the world. People from all over quarantined and did their best to keep on going during the pandemic. Zibby Owens, host of the award-winning podcast MomsDon’t Have Time to Read Books and a mother of four herself, wanted to do something to help people carry on and to give them something to focus on other than the horrors of their news feeds. So she launched an online magazine called We Found Time. Authors who had been on her podcast wrote original, brilliant essays for busy readers. Zibby organized these profound pieces into themes inspired by five things moms don’t have time to do: eat, read, work out, breathe, and have sex. Now compiled as an anthology named Moms Don’t Have Time To, these beautiful, original essays by dozens of bestselling and acclaimed authors speak to the ever-increasing demands on our time, especially during the quarantine, in a unique, literary way. Actress Evangeline Lilly writes about the importance and impact of film. Bestselling author Rene Denfeld focuses on her relationship with food after growing up homeless. Screenwriter and author Lea Carpenter and Suzanne Falter, author, speaker, and podcast host, focus on loss. New York Times bestselling authors Chris Bohjalian and Gretchen Rubin write about the importance of reading. Others write about working out, love and sex, eating and cooking, and more. Join Zibby on her journey through the winding road of quarantine and perhaps you, too, will find time.
The perfect gift for Brooke Shields fans, There Was a Little Girl explores Brooke's relationship with her unforgettable mother, Teri, in this extraordinary, heartfelt memoir that became a New York Times bestseller. Brooke Shields never had what anyone would consider an ordinary life. She was raised by her Newark-tough single mom, Teri, a woman who loved the world of show business and was often a media sensation all by herself. Brooke's iconic modeling career began by chance when she was only eleven months old, and Teri's skills as both Brooke's mother and her manager were formidable. But in private she was troubled and drank heavily. As Brooke became an adult the pair made choices and sacrifices that would affect their relationship forever. And when Brooke’s own daughters were born she found that her experience as a mother was shaped in every way by the woman who raised her. But despite the many ups and downs, Brooke was by Teri’s side when she died in 2012, a loving daughter until the end. Only Brooke knows the truth of the remarkable, difficult, complicated woman who was her mother. And now, in an honest, open memoir about her life growing up, Brooke will reveal stories and feelings that are relatable to anyone who has been a mother or daughter.
Social Development provides a comprehensive introduction to the multiple factors that shape a child’s behavior, interaction with others, feelings about themselves, and how and why behaviors change over time. Delving into the biological, cognitive, and perceptual aspects of development and their influence on behavior, socialization, and self-image, this text also recognizes the significance of cultural and societal distinctions by emphasizing the value of context and identifying cultural variation’s role in social development. Special pedagogical features in each chapter enhance the learning experience and promote student understanding: counter-intuitive examples cases challenge reader assumptions, coverage of extreme cases tell the story behind historical advancements, and profiles of current leaders in the field highlight the many paths to a career in social development. With a focus on real-world application, coupled with coverage of cutting-edge methodologies and the latest research findings, this book gives students a strong, highly relevant foundation in core concepts and practices central to the study of social development.
A mother and her child, lost and then found again after four decades: this extraordinary story of love, loss, and reunion is told in alternating voices by the two women, each relating her own powerful experience. For the mother, its the tale of an unhappy marriage followed by betrayal, a pregnancy of uncertain paternity, and the heartrending decision to give up her newborn. The daughters search begins 40 years later, as she slowly, painstakingly, stitches together her story. These intertwined tales give us two unforgettable points of view of a remarkable journey-and of the multiple meanings of motherhood.
