Nowhere for Very Long: the unexpected road to an unconventional life by Brianna Madia

In this beautifully written, vividly detailed memoir, a young woman chronicles her adventures in an orange van named Bertha traveling across the deserts of the American West and reflects on an unconventional way of life

A woman defined by motion, Brianna Madia bought a beat-up bright orange van, filled it with her two dogs Bucket and Dagwood, and headed into the canyons of Utah with her husband on a journey of discovery. Nowhere for Very Long is her story of exploration--of the world outside and the spirit within. From the backroads to the breakdowns, married to solo, lost to found, it is the chronicle of a woman in the wild, learning and unlearning.

Brianna knew her road would be the one less traveled from an early age. Rejecting the competitive and capitalistic path set out before her, she chose to seek a truer version of happiness, a road scary, uncertain, and entirely her own. But pursing a life of intention isn't always what it seems. In fact, at times it was downright boring, exhausting, lonely, and even desperate----when the van overheated and she was forced to pull over on a lonely stretch of Wyoming highway; when the weather was bitterly cold and the water jugs froze beneath her we she slept in the parking lot of her office; when she faced tough choices, hard truths, and inevitable regrets; when she worried about money, her marriage, and the looming question mark of her future. But this life was a life of her choosing and that made all the difference.

Nowhere for Very Long isn't about extreme minimalism or tiny house living or #VanLife. It's about cherishing the moment and being a woman living a life true to herself, come what may.

260 pages (April 2022)

 

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12 Best Book Club Discussion Questions for Any Book from Bookclubs

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Title Read-alikes: The Change: My Great American, Postindustrial, Midlife Crisis Tour by Lori Soderlind; Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women by Annabel Abbs; That wild country: An Epic Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands by Mark Kenyon;  Bowing to Elephants: Tales of a Travel Junkie by Mag Dimond; Alone Time by Stephanie Rosenbloom; Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman; I Have Something to Tell You: a Memoir by Natalie Appleton; Bewildered by Laura Waters; Fly Girl: a Memoir by Ann Hood; Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad; Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life: A Memoir by Delia Ephron; Tracks: a Woman's Solo Trek across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robyn Davidson; and Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger.

The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

A powerful, emotional debut novel told in the unforgettable voice of a young Nigerian woman who is trapped in a life of servitude but determined to get an education so that she can escape and choose her own future.

Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a "louding voice"—the ability to speak for herself and decide her own future. But instead, Adunni's father sells her to be the third wife of a local man who is eager for her to bear him a son and heir.

When Adunni runs away to the city, hoping to make a better life, she finds that the only other option before her is servitude to a wealthy family. As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless slave, Adunni is told, by words and deeds, that she is nothing.

But while misfortunes might muffle her voice for a time, they cannot mute it. And when she realizes that she must stand up not only for herself, but for other girls, for the ones who came before her and were lost, and for the next girls, who will inevitably follow; she finds the resolve to speak, however she can—in a whisper, in song, in broken English—until she is heard

371 pages (February 2020)

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Title Read-alikes: The Color Purple by Alice Walker; A Girl Is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi; Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao; Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan; Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo; The Impatient by Djaili Amadou Amal; Vagabonds by Eloghosa Osunde; The Son of the House by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia; A Mercy by Toni Morrison; The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: a memoir by Wayétu Moore; We Kiss Them with Rain by Futhi Ntshigila; Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangaremga; and His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Meadie.

Fast Girls: a novel of the 1936 women's Olympic team by Elise Hooper

“Fast Girls is a compelling, thrilling look at what it takes to be a female Olympian in pre-war America. Rich with historical detail and brilliant story-telling, the book follows three athletes on their path to compete – and win – in a man’s world.  Brava to Elise Hooper for bringing these inspiring heroines to the wide audience they so richly deserve.”—Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics and The House Girl

Acclaimed author Elise Hooper explores the gripping, real life history of female athletes, members of the first integrated women’s Olympic team, and their journeys to the 1936 summer games in Berlin, Nazi Germany.

This inspiring story is based on the real lives of three little-known trailblazing women Olympians.  Perfect for readers who love untold stories of amazing women, such as The Only Woman in the Room, Hidden Figures, and The Lost Girls of Paris.

In the 1928 Olympics, Chicago’s Betty Robinson competes as a member of the first-ever women’s delegation in track and field. Destined for further glory, she returns home feted as America’s Golden Girl until a nearly-fatal airplane crash threatens to end everything.

Outside of Boston, Louise Stokes, one of the few black girls in her town, sees competing as an opportunity to overcome the limitations placed on her. Eager to prove that she has what it takes to be a champion, she risks everything to join the Olympic team.

From Missouri, Helen Stephens, awkward, tomboyish, and poor, is considered an outcast by her schoolmates, but she dreams of escaping the hardships of her farm life through athletic success. Her aspirations appear impossible until a chance encounter changes her life.

These three athletes will join with others to defy society’s expectations of what women can achieve. As tensions bring the United States and Europe closer and closer to the brink of war, Betty, Louise, and Helen must fight for the chance to compete as the fastest women in the world amidst the pomp and pageantry of the Nazi-sponsored 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

486 pages (July 2020)

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13 Book Club Questions to Energize Any Meetup from Bustle

 

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Title Read-alikes: The Divine Miss Marble: a life of tennis, fame, and mystery by Robert Weintrab; The Peerless Four by Victoria Patterson; Speed Kings: the 1932 Winter Olympics and the fastest men in the world by Andy Bull; Tigerbelle: the Wyomia Tyus story by Wyomia Tyus; Three Seconds in Munich: the controversial 1972 Olympic Basketball Final by David Sweet; Little Wonder : the fabulous story of Lottie Dod, the worlds first female sports superstar by Sasha Abramsky; Something in the Air: the story of American passion and defiance in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics by Richard Hoffer; Running Sideways: the Olympic champion who made track and field history by Pauline Davis; Beautiful Exiles by Meg Waite Clayton; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows; The Poppy Girls by Margaret Dickinson; and Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly.

Yale needs women: how the first group of girls rewrote the rules of an Ivy League giant by Anne Gardiner Perkins

"If Yale was going to keep its standing as one of the top two or three colleges in the nation, the availability of women was an amenity it could no longer do without."

In the summer of 1969, from big cities to small towns, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "one thousand male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women's equality in education.

Or was it?

The experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale's imposing campus was not the same one their male peers enjoyed. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer, many of the first girls found themselves immersed in an overwhelmingly male culture they were unprepared to face. Yale Needs Women is the story of how these young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future. Anne Gardiner Perkins's unflinching account of a group of young women striving for change is an inspiring story of strength, resilience, and courage that continues to resonate today.

373 pages (September 2019)

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Yale Needs Women | Intro For Book Clubs (SourcebooksInc):

Anne Gardiner Perkins of Yale Needs Women reflects 50 years after the university went coed (WTNH News8):

Title Read-alikes: The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever by Kent Garrett; Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania by Frank Bruni; Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey J. Selingo; Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus by Jennifer S. Hirsch & Shamus Khan; Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves A Second Chance at Education by Mike (Michael Anthony) Rose; Game On: Why College Admission Is Rigged and How You Can Beat the System by Susan F. Paterno; The College Dropout Scandal by David L. Kirp; Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities by Alexandra Robbins; Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System by Andrew Gumbel; Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine by Olivia Campbell; The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs; The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy; and The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore.

This Is Chance!: The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered City She Held Together by John Mooallem

The thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster—and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together.

In the spring of 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was a modern-day frontier town yearning to be a metropolis—the largest, proudest city in a state that was still brand-new. But just before sundown on Good Friday, the community was jolted by the most powerful earthquake in American history, a catastrophic 9.2 on the Richter Scale. For four and a half minutes, the ground lurched and rolled. Streets cracked open and swallowed buildings whole. And once the shaking stopped, night fell and Anchorage went dark. The city was in disarray and sealed off from the outside world.

Slowly, people switched on their transistor radios and heard a familiar woman’s voice explaining what had just happened and what to do next. Genie Chance was a part-time radio reporter and working mother who would play an unlikely role in the wake of the disaster, helping to put her fractured community back together. Her tireless broadcasts over the next three days would transform her into a legendary figure in Alaska and bring her fame worldwide—but only briefly. That Easter weekend in Anchorage, Genie and a cast of endearingly eccentric characters—from a mountaineering psychologist to the local community theater group staging Our Town—were thrown into a jumbled world they could not recognize. Together, they would make a home in it again.

Drawing on thousands of pages of unpublished documents, interviews with survivors, and original broadcast recordings, This Is Chance! is the hopeful, gorgeously told story of a single catastrophic weekend and proof of our collective strength in a turbulent world.

There are moments when reality instantly changes—when the life we assume is stable gets upended by pure chance. This Is Chance! is an electrifying and lavishly empathetic portrayal of one community rising above the randomness, a real-life fable of human connection withstanding chaos.

336 pages (March 2020)

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1964 Quake| The Great Alaska Earthquake (USGS):

 

Jon Mooallem on This is Chance! (with Jazmine Hughes from GreenlightBookstore):

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Title Read-alikes: The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet by Henry Fountain; Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters by Cary J. Griffith; Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson; Strong in the rain: surviving Japan's earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster by Lucy Birmingham; On the Burning Edge: A Fateful Fire and the Men Who Fought It by Kyle Dickman; Ruthless Tide: The Heroes and Villains of the Johnstown Flood, America’s Astonishing Gilded Age Disaster by Al Rocker; Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame by Michael Kodas; Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894 by Daniel James Brown; The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do about Them by Lucile M. Jones; One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene Weingarten; Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad; Quakeland: On the Road to America's Next Devastating Earthquake by Kathryn Miles; and Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States.

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America - the first African-American to serve in that role - she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations - and whose story inspires us to do the same.

400 pages (November 2018)

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Title Read-alikes: A Promised Land by Barack Obama; More Than Enough: claiming space for who you are (no matter what they say) by Elaine Welteroth; The Obamas by Jodi Kantor; Educated by Tara Westover; Born a Crime: stories from a South African childhood by Trevor Noah; Life Undercover: coming of age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox; Mighty Justice: my life in civil rights by Dovey Johnson; The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the making of an American dynasty by Susan Page; and Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I Found My Tribe: a memoir by Ruth Fitzmaurice

A transformative, euphoric memoir about finding solace in the unexpected for readers of H is for Hawk, It's Not Yet Dark, and When Breath Becomes Air.

Ruth's tribe are her lively children and her filmmaker and author husband Simon Fitzmaurice who has ALS and can only communicate with his eyes. Ruth's other "tribe" are the friends who gather at the cove in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, and regularly throw themselves into the freezing cold water, just for kicks.

The Tragic Wives' Swimming Club, as they jokingly call themselves, meet to cope with the extreme challenges life puts in their way, not to mention the monster waves rolling over the horizon. Swimming is just one of the daily coping strategies as Ruth fights to preserve the strong but now silent connection with her husband. As she tells the story of their marriage, from diagnosis to their long-standing precarious situation, Ruth also charts her passion for swimming in the wild Irish Sea--culminating in a midnight swim under the full moon on her wedding anniversary.

An invocation to all of us to love as hard as we can, and live even harder, I Found My Tribe is an urgent and uplifting letter to a husband, family, friends, the natural world, and the brightness of life.

213 pages (March 2018)

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Ruth Fitzmaurice discusses the first time she showed the manuscript to her husband:

Title Read-alikes: The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch; The Vow by Kim Carpenter; Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki; Until I Say Good-Bye by Susan Spencer-Wendel; Wondering Who You Are by Sonya Lea; Jan's Story by Barry Petersen; Everybody's Got Something by Robin Roberts; The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs; The Cookie Cure by Susan Stachler; The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager; Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley; After the Silence by Louise O'Neill; and Elsewhere by Rosita Boland.

We Are All Made of Stars by Rowan Coleman

A dedicated nurse, Stella finds comfort at the hospice where she works the late shift, especially since her husband returned from Afghanistan—cold, distant, and shattered by painful memories he refuses to share. The hospice at night is another world, where the dying receive closure by creating the letters that Stella helps them write. The pages are filled with love and humor, sometimes regret, and, occasionally, even instructions for a perplexed husband on how to run appliances. There’s one rule: The letters are mailed only after the patient has passed.

Suddenly Stella is faced with a dilemma: A woman under her care, Grace, has written a confession to the son she abandoned many years before. The letter clearly needs to be read before Grace dies. But if Stella mails it now, she breaks the rule—and risks tampering not only with Grace’s wishes but also with fate.

Navigating passion and grief, loyalty and loss, and a marriage threatened by silence and secrets, Stella discovers that letters hold a special power: granting solace, saving memories, nurturing relationships. As the words endure, love redeems.

342 pages. (July 2016)

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40 Great Book Club Questions for Any Book from Book Riot

 

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Title Read-alikes: And Again by Jessica Chiarella; Me Before You by Jojo Moyes; The Glittering Hour by Iona Grey; Bearing the Body by Ehud Havazelet; The Mother's Promise by Sally Hepworth; Nora Webster by Colm Toibin; Tempting Fate by Jane Green; On Second Thought by Kristan Higgins; A Walk Along the Beach by Debbie Macomber; Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt; and Ned's Circus of Marvels by Justin Fisher.

Mercies in Disguise : a story of hope, a family's genetic destiny, and the science that rescued them by Gina Bari Kolata

The phone rings. The doctor from California is on the line. "Are you ready Amanda?" The two people Amanda Baxley loves the most had begged her not to be tested--at least, not now. But she had to find out.

If your family carried a mutated gene that foretold a brutal illness and you were offered the chance to find out if you'd inherited it, would you do it? Would you walk toward the problem, bravely accepting whatever answer came your way? Or would you avoid the potential bad news as long as possible?

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times science reporter and bestselling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an almost archetypal family in a small town in South Carolina. A proud and determined clan, many of them doctors, they are struck one by one with an inscrutable illness. They finally discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of events that many saw as providential. Meanwhile, science, progressing for a half a century along a parallel track, had handed the Baxleys a resolution--not a cure, but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease and who did not. And science would offer another dilemma--fertility specialists had created a way to spare the children through an expensive process.

A work of narrative nonfiction in the tradition of the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Mercies in Disguise is the story of a family that took matters into its own hands when the medical world abandoned them. It's a story of a family that had to deal with unspeakable tragedy and yet did not allow it to tear them apart. And it is the story of a young woman--Amanda Baxley--who faced the future head on, determined to find a way to disrupt her family's destiny.

262 pages (March 2017)

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Mercies in Disguise Research Grant from the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation.

Gina Kolata discusses Mercies in Disguise:

Amanda's presentation at the  2016 Crutzfeldt-Jakob Disease 2016 Family Workshop:

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Title Read-alikes: The Family Gene by Joselin Linder; Against Medical Advice by James Patterson; Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich; The Angel and the Assassin by Donna Jackson Nakazawa; The Breakthrough by Charles Graeber; Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius; The Philadelphia Chromosome by Jessica Wapner; The Lost Family by Libby Copeland; Happiness by Heather Harpham; Chasing My Cure by David Fajgenbaum; My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me by Jason B. Rosenthal; A Mind Unraveled by Kurt Eichenwald; and Sophie and the Rising Sun by Augusta Trobaugh.