The work of award-winning actor and comedian Jenny Slate—whether her stand-up comedy, voice performances (Bob’s Burgers, The Great North), acting (Parks and Recreation, It Ends With Us), or beloved Marcel the Shell With Shoes On multimedia universe—leaves an indelible impression. Unsurprisingly, the prolific creator’s first memoir-in-essays, 2019’s Little Weirds, had the same effect thanks to its inventive language and poignant, poetic takes on her life thus far.
In Lifeform, Slate again beckons readers into her wonderfully idiosyncratic, colorfully kaleidoscopic mind as she recounts her latest adventures in five pivotal phases: Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby and Ongoing. Of course, fans know that despite Lifeform’s organizing principle, the author isn’t inclined to stick to prescribed formats or expectations. Instead, she dances through multifaceted, playful musings that tip over into surrealism, and dwells in quiet spaces alongside her insecurities and fears.
Fabulist inner monologues abound, as in “Stork Dream: Scroll,” wherein the mythical baby-deliverer embodies “how bizarre this experience is of making a lifeform while being a lifeform. I woke myself up laughing, and the laughter was like a string of bells being pulled from inside of me.” Slate tackles waking-hour concerns in her series of whimsical yet pointed “Letters to a Doctor.” In one, she expresses her frustration with traditional dinner-party seating: “Why would you split a couple up against their wills? It is already so incredibly hard to come together and become a couple.”
Intimate and vulnerable revelations simmer throughout, too, such as the bittersweet experience of watching her ailing grandmother and baby Ida “sip soup together, two beings with caretakers who make sure that they stay clean and can get the food into their mouths.” Birth and death, beginnings and ends, are on Slate’s mind (and in her dreams) as she assumes the new role of mother and ponders how she has changed as the phases of her life have unfurled. Fans old and new will revel in Lifeform’s self-effacing humor and imaginative writing style. It’s a delightful, memorable immersion in the lifeform that is Jenny Slate: “Mother/New Wife/Jenny/Wart-Gobbler Goblin/Bad Visual Artist/Fine Clown.”
In her new memoir, Lifeform, Jenny Slate beckons readers into her wonderfully idiosyncratic, colorfully kaleidoscopic mind as she recounts her latest adventures with signature whimsy.
We meet Sarah LaBrie in 2017, when her grandmother calls to tell her that LaBrie’s mother is experiencing delusions and paranoia. Brie is living in Los Angeles, writing commissioned opera libretti that explore generational and racial trauma on a broad scale. Since she eagerly left her childhood home in Houston, Texas, her education and career as a TV writer and librettist have carried her from coast to coast. Now, LaBrie’s focus must shift from her career in California to her mom’s well-being back in Houston. In her poignant debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, LaBrie faces her own generational trauma, and her work gets personal.
LaBrie has often been the subject of her mother’s ire, finding herself banished to a closet as a child and subjected to incessant questioning as an adult. Her family has a history of men leaving, and women and children fending for themselves. As a result, her female relatives have developed a pattern of disassociating or isolating themselves when faced with difficult situations. As LaBrie enters her 30s and life with a partner, she fears that marriage and motherhood will be opportunities to repeat her family history.
As she tries to untangle how her mother’s deteriorating mental illness—she is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia—and her own environment, family history and socioeconomic status have shaped her, LaBrie also writes of her equally tangled unpublished novel. “I’ve become so fixated on not allowing myself to go crazy, I’ve lost touch with the feelings that the story needs to work,” she writes. Her agent suggests, instead, that LaBrie try writing about her mother. But she resists: “Her illness is unfolding according to no rules at all, and no matter how I try to hold it together, the structure falls to pieces.”
She leans into that feeling in the memoir, which ranges widely, leaping across locations and ideas, and threatens to come apart just as the author’s life seems ready to detonate. But thanks to LaBrie’s remarkable intellect and frankness, these multifaceted streams of thought coalesce. Ambitious in scope, No One Gets to Fall Apart examines family dynamics, mental health, Blackness, literature, friendship, the #MeToo movement and more as LaBrie illustrates her desire to embrace her own emotions, even as the temptation to suppress them looms.
With remarkable insight and frankness, TV writer and librettist Sarah LaBrie mines her family history of mental illness in her ambitious debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart.
With incandescent prose and vibrant imagery, André Aciman evokes the rich, kaleidoscopic and sensual experiences of his coming-of-age in his memoir, Roman Year.
Just before the Six Years War broke out between Israel and Egypt, 16-year-old Aciman fled Egypt with his deaf mother and younger brother. Packing all their belongings in 31 suitcases, the once prosperous family moved from an Egyptian mansion to a former brothel on an ill-lit, noisy Roman street. During their first afternoon in that shabby apartment in a strange place, “waves of gloom” wash over the family, and the young Aciman feels a “persistent, undefinable numbness that eventually overtakes you and won’t let go.” Aciman doesn’t like the street, Via Clelia, nor does he like Rome: “I belonged elsewhere, but I didn’t know where.”
While his brother and his mother adapt to their new lives, Aciman buries himself in books and spends much of his year reading: Proust, Woolf and Joyce are among the authors who enchant him. Eventually, as he and his brother explore Rome, Aciman’s affection for the city starts to develop. After he spends Christmas break in Paris, wandering the streets of the City of Light, whiling away time in cafes, visiting Shakespeare and Company and doing research for a study of literary existentialists, Aciman feels as if he might have found his elsewhere. He reluctantly returns to Rome, where he is surprised to find that his love for the Eternal City blossoms, in part because of his intimacy with several women and his connection to the texts that he reads.
The Call Me By Your Name author glories in the little moments when “there were colors everywhere, everything and everyone was beautiful.” At the end of the year, as he and his family prepare to move to New York City, he finds that “Rome never asked to be loved . . . and I wouldn’t know that I loved it or wanted to love it until I was about to lose it.” Roman Year is a gem of a memoir that sparkles with light that reflects off every facet of Aciman’s pivotal year.
Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman recounts his pivotal coming-of-age in Rome in his sparkling memoir, Roman Year.
It all began with a T-shirt. On her 32nd birthday, Glory Edim was surprised by a gift from her ex-partner, a custom-made T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Well-Read Black Girl.” When she wore it on the streets of Brooklyn, she was again surprised: People stopped her to talk about books.
Thus began an evolving conversation, first with her fledgling book club, Well-Read Black Girl, which soon attracted acclaimed authors like Tayari Jones (An American Marriage) and Angela Flournoy (The Turner House); then with her premiere virtual literary festival, attended by more than 800 people. Her podcast, Well-Read With Glory Edim, followed. Now, in her plucky, intimate memoir, Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me, Edim offers her own story, tethering the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery. It’s reader catnip.
Edim begins each chapter with a list of the authors and books that most influenced her as she came of age, from childhood (My Book of Bible Stories, The Berenstain Bears) through experiencing romantic love for the first time (Romeo and Juliet, Beloved) to her fraught relationship with her aging mother (Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River). She finds solace, wisdom, grace, humor and, especially, support in these tomes as she navigates hard times, and her own writing grows more poignant.
Yet Gather Me is more than an ode to writers spun from a respectful distance: This is a hands-on guidebook to getting by in good (literary) company. Through reading, Edim found stable ground within her fracturing Nigerian immigrant family, and later as a single mom. Writers like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, bell hooks, James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston became her community.
The title borrows a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. . . . It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” Edim writes, “I am never alone. The T-shirt, the books, the authors, the club, the community: Those things are now my bright and roaring fire, my blessed and beautiful universe.” Gather Me is a powerful invitation to join her there.
In her plucky, intimate memoir, Glory Edim, the creator of the Well-Read Black Girl book club, tethers the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery—it’s reader catnip.
Born in the American South to a banking family, Jennifer Neal has been traveling across continents, reinventing and reimagining herself for most of her life. Her migration story spans the American South, Japan, Australia and Germany in My Pisces Heart: A Black Immigrant’s Search for Home Across Four Continents. Neal (Notes on Her Color) is both a lyrical writer and an astute historian, studying the complexities of race and Blackness with tenderness and reverence in each place she has lived.
Neal unpacks imperialism through a queer, Black, American lens as she navigates love, friendship and career. Some of the best essays in My Pisces Heart describe her college years in Japan and her search for solidarity among Black and Japanese people. She finds allies and mentors in academia, connects with a coalition of Black studies enthusiasts and visits the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. She explores how racist Western philosophies were brought to Japan, yet doesn’t shy away from Japan’s problematic history of colorism. Other heartbreaking and nuanced essays follow her time in Australia, where she battles casual racism and experiences a difficult romantic relationship. Here, she explores how the Aboriginal people of Australia keep their communities alive through protests and demonstrations. While white Australians often sought to isolate Neal from this community, she felt a kinship with them due to the similar histories of Australia’s and America’s anti-miscegenation laws.
In lovely astrology interstitials that appear as vignettes before each section, Neal analyzes her birth chart to provide a framework through which to view the world beyond herself, without borders. These sections inspire the reader to look outward—and up—in search of their own guiding light.
Throughout, Neal is quick to direct the reader to the hidden histories of Black people all over the world. Though racial homogeneity is accepted as the norm in places like Japan and Germany, Neal proves that Black people exist everywhere and, in many cases, always have. In an age when we can see the devastating impacts of colonialism on devices in the palms of our hands, My Pisces Heart is an essential read for anyone curious about cultural differences and eager to explore what it means to be in solidarity with those oppressed across the globe.
Jennifer Neal’s essential memoir and travelogue, My Pisces Heart, proves that Black people exist all over the world and, in many cases, always have.
In Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers, Ruthie, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child, disappears from a farm in Maine where her migrant family is employed during the ...
Leigh Ann Henion is the bestselling author of Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World (2015), a lyrical memoir of seeking a fulfilling life. Her second book, Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark, is just as personal and personable, this time focusing on the wisdom she has found in darkness.
We are, unfortunately, obsessed with illuminating the night. Henion explains that 99% of people in the U.S. live under the influence of “skyglow—diffuse, artificial brightening of the night sky,” and she shares data about how light pollution causes health problems for humans and destroys ecosystems and the migratory patterns of birds. “Darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own,” she writes.
Henion’s nocturnal investigation takes her to Appalachia for synchronous lightning bugs, Ohio for a moth festival and soggy, foggy Grandfather Mountain for glowworms. She hunts for migrating salamanders with a professor and his class, and she describes the harm that streetlights cause to owl habitats. She meets with specialists and scientists, and in her cheerful, thoughtful style, she shares all she learns about bats, bioluminescent mushrooms and more.
Readers who choose to follow Night Magic into the dark may find the courage to turn off that backyard floodlight, allow their eyes to adjust and see something spectacular.
It’s been over a decade since Amy Tan published her last novel, but there’s a good reason for that. In 2016, while hard at work on her next literary endeavor, Tan found her psyche and creative drive overwhelmed by the political turmoil consuming the country. When writing fiction failed to provide refuge, Tan sought it elsewhere: Making good on a long-held promise to learn to draw, she began taking nature journaling classes and found herself captivated by the birds she observed. Soon, the hobby turned into a full-on obsession, leading Tan to transform her backyard into an ideal sanctuary for local birds so she could document and sketch the fauna that visited her yard.
Written in her hallmark heartfelt and lively prose, The Backyard Bird Chronicles curates excerpts from Tan’s personal birding journals from 2017 to 2022, sharing anecdotes about her hunt for the perfect squirrel-proof seeds and feeders, the awe she felt sighting her first great horned owl, and the comedy of baby birds learning to feed. Each entry is complemented with Tan’s own drawings.
Tan’s childlike wonder at the birds she observes is contagious, but the book goes beyond a compendium of avian observations: You’ll also find introspection and rumination on universal questions about mortality, empathy, racism and our connection (and responsibility) to nature. Because her journals were written without any intention of publication, there is something truly exhilarating about the candor of Tan’s thoughts; her unguarded presence on the page sparkles with cleverness and compassion. It is the rare reader who will be immune to her unbridled enthusiasm and her message that sometimes life’s sweetest pleasures are its simplest.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles showcases a master novelist in a new light. These pages will be a buoyant balm to the soul for inquisitive readers.
Atlas Obscura got its start as a community-driven website about the weirdest destinations around the globe, but it has expanded into a podcast and books such as the bestselling Atlas Obscura and Gastro Obscura. The latest book, Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders by Cara Giaimo and Joshua Foer, is a monumental tour through the world’s most interesting organisms, with heaping piles of facts, stories, photographs and illustrations.
Divided into chapters based on habitat, the book begins with a section on humans that emphasizes the positive aspects of our relationship with Earth. “We are of course bound to [plants, animals and organisms] with every breath of air and every bite of food. But we also learn from the species around us, using our observations of them to build new understandings of how life on Earth has been, is, and could be,” the authors write. This sets a curious and optimistic tone for the book, which is true to the overall Atlas Obscura vibe.
Wild Life is for people who say things like “Nature is metal!” when a lion kills a gazelle and are thrilled about the fact that platypuses glow under black light. Did you know that slime molds were able to replicate the Tokyo railway system? Did you know that moss balls travel as a pack in the Eurasian tundra, and no one knows why?
Along with facts about more than 500 organisms, the book also includes Q&As with such people as a grass weaver, a walrus watcher and “a crow-human conflict mediator,” suggesting that our own lives can be almost as wild as those of these incredible creatures.
—Cat Acree
Leaf, Cloud, Crow
In Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows (2023), the third book from the bestselling author, Tennessee naturalist and New York Times contributing writer, readers were invited into a weekly communion in her Nashville backyard, with 52 essays coinciding with brilliantly colorful collages by her brother, Billy Renkl. With her new guided journal, Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal, Renkl extends her invitation further, drawing us into a yearlong commitment to seeing the world more clearly and, in doing so, knitting ourselves closer to it.
In her introduction to Leaf, Cloud, Crow, Renkl explains that her praxis of observation is one that she has cultivated for three decades, but even now, “It isn’t always easy to give myself over to the timeless beauty outside my window.” To help get you into the right mindset, she offers her essay “How to Pay Attention,” a clear and declarative list of things to do and be as a backyard naturalist. “Silence and stillness are your greatest tools,” she writes. “Take care not to frighten anybody. Sit quietly and let the world come to you.”
From there, Renkl puts your powers of observation and evaluation to work. Organized by seasons, the journal begins in winter, during the week of December 21-27, when the user is encouraged to go find something in the natural world—a dead leaf will do—and then make a metaphor from it. From there we learn about birding, the pain and glory of seasonal changes, the willingness to be completely perplexed by something we’ve seen, and so on, each prompt coinciding with an excerpt from The Comfort of Crows.
If you despair at the loss of ecosystems and the damage that we have done to the wild world, Renkl’s words and the lessons she imparts are a balm. For those who wish to do better, see better and (of course) write better, it’s an excellent gift.
—Cat Acree
Looking for a holiday gift for a birder, tree-hugger or civilian scientist? We’ve got just the thing.
Nemonte Nenquimo and her family lived within nature, with food from the river, the rainforest and their gardens. A monkey was her childhood pet. According to family lore, she knew she would become a spirit jaguar when she died. But things were changing fast: A huge metal tube had descended from the sky not too many years before she was born. The missionaries who emerged from it didn’t speak her language, but they persuaded her community’s leaders to put a mark on a paper in return for clothing and other gifts.
Within a couple of decades later, her river was black with pollution, much of her forest was cut down, her community’s men had been coerced into laboring for oil companies in exchange for pieces of paper their way of life had no use for. White people said Nenquimo and her community must worship their god. She and other children were herded into schools that forced them to put aside their traditions.
A Waorani woman from Ecuador’s Amazon region, Nenquimo co-founded the Indigenous-led Ceibo Alliance that scored a major legal victory in 2019, protecting half a million acres of rainforest from oil drilling. Nenquimo has been lauded internationally for her activism; now, with husband Mitch Anderson, an American environmentalist, she is telling her story in the inspired and rare We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People.
In this lyrically written memoir, Nenquimo takes us inside her world, with its tensions between her family’s shamanistic traditions and the initial allure of the Christian missionaries, who taught her to read and write in Spanish, allowing her to communicate more widely. But this education came at a cost that traumatized Nenquimo for years. She describes her emotional journey through a deeply spiritual perspective, including one remarkable scene in which drinking ayahuasca brings her a revelatory vision.
Nenquimo sharply conveys the sheer confusion and terror of colonialism for the Waorani and other Indigenous peoples. Missionaries, oil executives and government officials used underhanded methods to wrest control of the region from families like Nenquimo’s. Ironically, the missionary education gave Nenquimo and others the tools they needed to fight back. Her story is one of fierce determination to claim a heritage that was nearly stolen from her.
Climate activist Nemonte Nenquimo tells the story of her Waorani people in the inspired, beautifully written We Will Be Jaguars.
Emily Witt sets her arresting memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, in New York City from 2016 to 2021, charting her entry into the city’s techno scene with its mind-altering drugs, ecstatic music and community of people sometimes embracing, sometimes resisting a changing new world. In her book’s first section, she describes learning the “geography of nightlife,” writing gauzily about raves and parties she attends, the drugs she takes and the general euphoria that blankets her life for several months as she falls in love with a fellow raver, Andrew.
When the Trump presidency begins, we are thrust back into the waking world with her, and the story takes on much darker hues. Still, she continues to party until she can’t: COVID-19 hits the city with ferocity. Gone are the raves and the DJs and the scene itself, “and with it the illusion of health and safety.” Witt invites us to relive a tumultuous era in the country’s history through the eyes of a keen observer.
Witt, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the acclaimed exploration of nontraditional sex, Future Sex, relays her experiences covering watershed moments and national tragedies: the aftermath of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, protests after the death of Breonna Taylor, and the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. She reflects on the country’s collective heartbreak and rage alongside her own personal losses, like her tumultuous romantic entanglement and breakup with Andrew, which throws her world into chaos. And she deftly analyzes her role as a journalist in a mad world where her work feels, at times, ineffectual.
Witt looks back at this time of experimentation with wisdom, writing that she used hallucinogens to “psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted . . . that I sought a chemical window to see outside.” In the end, readers who prefer a tidy memoir that culminates in a single awakening may find Health and Safety wanting; it’s more like a spider web glistening with many realizations that branch out in connecting threads. This sharp, deeply personal work is all the better for it.
Emily Witt’s sharp, deeply personal memoir, Health and Safety, invites us to relive a tumultuous era in American history through the eyes of a keen observer.
The publishing industry tends to shine a spotlight on memoirs by transgender people who are already famous: actors, models, Jeopardy! champions. Their transition stories hit similar beats as those of other trans people, but the circumstances of their lives do not. This makes Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe stand out—the author was a typical suburban stay-at-home parent when he transitioned. Any parent can understand how researching “phantom penises’’ ended up low on Radclyffe’s to-do list when raising four young children.
Growing up upper-class in Britain, Radclyffe lived a privileged but sheltered life: boarding school, conservative parents and little exposure to queer culture. Although he was curious about sex and gender, his fear, shame and denial kept him in a gilded cage well into adulthood. We meet him in his 40s, as a female-presenting parent of four, married to a conventional cis man who works in finance. From the outside, Radclyffe’s Connecticut family looks perfect, but he’s in therapy trying to figure out why he is losing hair, has no appetite and is prone to extreme mood swings.
Once Radclyffe realizes he is trans, and begins to transition, his physical presentation is not the only thing that changes. His experiences with sex, relationships and friendships are all impacted, and Frighten the Horses weaves together many narratives. It’s the story of a marriage falling apart when one spouse refuses to see the other clearly, of a parent who desperately fears that each new change might affect his children’s happiness, and of finding both acceptance and rejection in some surprising places.
Accompanying Radclyffe’s journey is his self-education about queer history and gender politics. (Bluestockings, a Lower East Side bookstore located a train ride away from his Connecticut home, is integral to this.) He learns about the marginalization of trans people, which helps him understand why he lacked a compass for much of his youth. Frighten the Horses is warm, moving and most importantly, inspiring for anyone who needs a reminder that it’s never too late to be one’s authentic self.
Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a powerful standout among the burgeoning subgenre of gender transition memoirs.
Connie Chung broke the glass and bamboo ceiling when she became the first Asian American woman to co-anchor a national news broadcast program, joining Dan Rather at the desk of the CBS Evening News. Her visibility and success led generations of Chinese parents to name their daughters Connie. In her briskly paced memoir, Connie, Chung recounts her personal and professional life with candor, humor and heart.
Growing up as the youngest of 10 daughters and the only child in the family born in the U.S., Chung spent more time watching television than doing chores, and her family stopped everything to listen to Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. The legendary newsman’s coverage of politics and government lit a spark in Chung. In 1971, she landed a job as a Washington correspondent on his program. (Cronkite, she writes, “radiated gravitas and humility, never behaving like the superstar he was.”) Over the next 40 years, Chung embraced the excitement of “getting the get”—landing an exclusive story or interview—and faced the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated profession. Connie carries readers through the ups and downs of Chung’s career as the major networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) piped her image and voice into millions of American living rooms during prime time. Readers will glimpse the relationships that have sustained Chung; she gushes about her husband, talk show host Maury Povich: “Were it not for Maury, I could never have had the career I had. . . . He helped me navigate my treacherous path up the ladder.”
Chung pulls no punches as she describes the harassment she faced from anchors who felt threatened by her work, among them Dan Rather, who sabotaged her career after the network sent her to cover the Oklahoma City bombing (Rather was on vacation and unreachable when it occurred). And she movingly recounts going public during the #MeToo movement with the story of her own sexual assault by a gynecologist when she was in college. Connie offers words of advice for future women reporters: “Remember to have a sense of humor, take your work seriously, don’t forget to have a life and—most importantly—stretch your hand to others who are trying to climb on board.” Chung’s humanity and journalistic passion reverberate through this invigorating memoir.
With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.
“I don’t think people realize how many librarians are being attacked,” Amanda Jones says from her home in Watson, Louisiana. “I used to think it was just a Southern thing. But I have friends in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Maine, California and New York who have experienced this.”
Jones, the author of That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America, seems an unlikely candidate to be caught in the crosshairs of a culture war. She grew up in a conservative Christian household in the deep red state of Louisiana. She lives in the same two-stoplight town where she grew up, right next door to her parents and her childhood home, and she works as a school librarian just a few miles down the road, in the middle school she once attended.
Her life changed on July 19, 2022, when she attended a board meeting at Livingston parish’s public library. Book content was on the agenda, which sent alarm bells ringing for Jones, who had been following censorship news across the country and in her parish. These conversations, she knew, “almost always targeted LGBTQIA+ stories.” Jones has taught queer kids who later took their own lives. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand in silence while we lose another kid because of something our community has done to make them feel less,” she writes. At the meeting, one library board member, Erin Sandefur, made objections to some young adult and children’s content, although, as Jones writes, “She never really articulated what her concern was, just that there was a concern to be had.”
“If people are going to label me an activist, I might as well act like one and show them what I’m made of.”
Jones, who was a 2021 School Library Journal National Librarian of the Year, was the first of about 30 to counter those concerns and speak up against censorship of queer stories, reciting a speech she wrote beforehand that included the words,“All members of our community deserve to be seen, have access to information, and see themselves, in our PUBLIC library collection.” Her speech was so on point, in fact, that she later received an email singing its praises from none other than Terry Szuplat, one of former President Barack Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters.
But her high didn’t last. Four days after the board meeting, Jones opened an email that said, “Amanda, you are indoctrinating our children with perversion + pedophilia grooming. Your evil agenda is getting print + national coverage. . . . We know where you work + live. . . . you have a LARGE target on your back. Click, click . . . see you soon. . .” Jones’ heart began pounding; she was completely in shock.
Then, her phone blew up with texts from friends and family sharing two Facebook posts: The group Citizens for a New Louisiana posted a photo of her making her speech at the board meeting, the caption accusing her of fighting to include “sexually erotic and pornographic materials” in libraries. Another post by local man Ryan Thames shared a photo from her professional website and accused her of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.”
The posts caught on like wildfire as people from her own community shared them on multiple platforms. Then they went national. Users “embraced comments laced with hate, and grew wild with speculation”: they called her a groomer and a pedophile and threatened violence. “I had worked so hard to build up a good reputation for myself,” she recalls. “It was so surreal, to go from such a community high, where you’re kind of beloved, and then in an instant, they’re like, ‘Oh, she’s that awful person.’” The posts, comments and threats kept coming.
Jones lived in a constant state of terror; she got a taser, pepper spray and security cameras. She slept with a gun under her bed. Word of the controversy began to spread, and before long, journalists took notice. One day Jones saw her face in the NBC news app. “This is really happening,” she writes of her thinking. “I’m an actual national news headline.”
She began thinking of her tormentors in Harry Potter terms, as her dementors. Channeling her inner Nancy Drew, Jones discovered that she was far from their only target. Her investigations revealed correlations between their outlandish online posts about libraries and librarians and various far-right campaign contributions. One of the ringleaders, she explains, is a leader of a dark money nonprofit. “I think he’s paid to do that. That’s his job: to stir up nonsense for politicians.”
The slanderous accusations are ongoing, at both a local and national level, many trumpeted by the group Moms for Liberty. Jones has suffered mental and physical repercussions, including panic attacks and hair loss, and ultimately took a semester’s leave of absence from her job to recover. “Even to this day,” she says, “if I get an email and I don’t know who is sending it, my heart starts racing, and that causes my adrenaline to spike.”
She eventually channeled her favorite childhood author, asking herself, “What would Judy Blume do?” The answer, she realized, was to fight back. She took her dementors to court. The judge ultimately ruled that they could get away with their disinformation attack because she was a “public figure.” Nonetheless, as Jones writes, “These people set out to destroy me, but they woke something up inside me that I hope never dies. The court labeled me a public figure and their lawyers called me an activist when I was just a school librarian. I figure, if people are going to label me an activist, I might as well act like one and show them what I’m made of—grit and perseverance.”
Jones has long known that perseverance pays off: She had originally planned to become an elementary school teacher, like her mother, but during her third year of college, reading the first three Harry Potter books steered her in a different direction, reminding her how much she loved reading. She began taking library science graduate courses, graduating in 2001 as a certified teacher and school librarian. Coincidentally, the librarian at her hometown middle school was taking a year’s sabbatical, so Jones filled in. When the librarian returned, Jones took a job as an English language arts teacher, knowing she wanted to stay at her beloved school. Eventually (14 years later!), when the librarian retired, Jones claimed her dream position.
As traumatizing as the online attacks have been, Jones has also received a tremendous amount of support, often from former students. She’s received well wishes from legions of people she doesn’t know, including numerous authors. She had the word “moxie” tattooed on her left wrist after Newbery Award winner Erin Entrada Kelly applauded her efforts, tweeting, “This is moxie. Sending my love and support to you, Amanda. I’m so proud you’re from my home state.” A few people, however, disappointed Jones, including some colleagues and several people she thought were her friends. But her family has provided constant support, and her conservative mother has accompanied her to library board meetings. After one meeting, during which a trans woman spoke about how books had saved her life, Jones’ mother commented, “You know, I think books can save lives.” “I’m like, ‘Mom,’” Jones recalls, “‘I’ve been telling you this for years.’”
“I hope I’m always evolving and learning,” Jones says. “The biggest struggle is wanting to defend myself publicly. Like when a lady told me a couple of weeks ago at a library board meeting that I needed to read Romans, I just said, ‘Ma’am, I’ve read the Bible twice. Thank you.’ You can’t argue with them. It’s pointless.”
There have been some glimmers of joy. She gets giddy about technical stuff, like seeing the copyright in her book. Jones says, “Not even in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would have my own ISBN in my own book, you know?”
“It’s odd to me,” she muses, “how big of a voice I had. It shows me that anybody can make a wave. I heard author Kekla Magoon say at a conference last year in New Hampshire that we’re like raindrops. If it’s just one, you might not notice it. But when we all collectively start falling, people start to listen. I’m hoping that by speaking out and writing this book that other people will speak up, and then more people will start to listen, and people will wake up to what’s happening to our libraries before it’s too late, before they’re all destroyed.”
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