Diaries

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Robert Olmstead

Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the laconic, rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me he draws directly from his own experience as he journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's dairy farm in New Hampshire to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him. Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about coming of age and leaving home, about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the shattering decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he traces the flowering of his love for a woman who "walks like light would walk if it could." And throughout, there is the land where his family has worked and lived and died for six generations, land at once richly abundant and cruelly demanding.

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Rosanne Cash

For thirty years as a musician, Rosanne Cash has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, releasing a series of albums that are as notable for their lyrical intelligence as for their musical excellence. In this memoir, Cash writes compellingly about her upbringing in Southern California as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother, June Carter Cash. In her account of her development as an artist she shares memories of recording her own first album on a German label; working her way to success; her Nashville marriage to Rodney Crowell; her relationship with the country music establishment; taking a new direction in her music and moving to New York; motherhood; dealing with the deaths of her parents, in part through music; the process of songwriting; and her fulfillment with her current husband and musical collaborator, John Leventhal.--From publisher description.

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Marsha Mason

"In Journey, Marsha Mason retraces the path she followed out of her difficult childhood. She moved to New York City, where she worked as a waitress and go-go dancer before landing a role in the then popular daytime TV soap opera Love of Life. After that, her world started to change, as one success led to another.". "Marsha Mason's Journey is revealing of the demands and sacrifices of the life of a successful actress, and at the same time inspiring, as she traces a lifetime spent in search of an elusive happiness. As an adult child of alcoholics, she has come to understand the forces that shaped her life and propelled her along a path that was as inevitable as it was debilitating. And now, from her present vantage point, she is able to look back with a new understanding, one that enables her to take comfort in the success she has found and find joy in learning to celebrate life."--BOOK JACKET.

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David Beers

Through his father's history in the aerospace industry, the author tells of "'the blue sky tribe' of ever-optimistic middle-class Americans who believed in something called the American Dream, then woke up one day to discover it was gone."--Jacket.