In this tender, funny, and sharp companion to her acclaimed memoir-in-essays Amateur Hour, Kimberly Harrington explores and confronts expectations, marriage, failure, a sort-of-divorce and the ways love, loss, and longing shape a life.Six weeks after she and her husband announced their divorce, Kimberly Harrington began writing a book she thought would be about divorce, heavy on the dark humor. After all, she and her future ex had chosen to still live together in the same house with their kids as they slowly transitioned from being a married couple to single people (someday) living separately. Over the course of two years of what was supposed to be a temporary period of transition, Harrington sifted through her past—how she formed her ideas about relationships, sex, marriage, divorce—and dug back into the history of her marriage—how they met, what it felt like to be in love, how she and her husband had changed over time, the...

An emotionally honest, arresting, and funny collection of essays about motherhood and adulthood in the vein of Operating Instructions from a rising literary star."Being a mother is a gift."Where's my receipt?Welcome to essayist Kimberly Harrington's poetic, hysterically funny (and occasionally just hysterical) world of motherhood, womanhood, and humanhood, not necessarily in that order. It's a place of loud parenting, fierce loving, too much ice cream, too much social media, and occasional inner monologues in which light is shed on topics such as Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure ("PRO: Skim the crappiest brownies for myself. CON: They're really crappy.") With accessibility and wit, she captures the emotions around parenthood in artful and earnest ways, highlighting this time in the middle—midlife, the middle years of childhood, how women are stuck in the middle of so much. It's a place of...