About this item
A perceptive, witty memoir about the transformative humiliations of childhood-and adulthood-from a unique, already-beloved voice. . When Heather Havrilesky was a kid during the 70s, harrowing disaster films dominated every movie screen with earthquakes that destroyed huge cities, airplanes that plummeted towards the ground and giant sharks that ripped teenagers to shreds. Between her parents dramatic clashes and her older siblings hazing, Heathers home life sometimes mirrored the chaos onscreen. . A thoughtful, funny memoir about surviving the real and imagined perils of childhood and early adulthood, Disaster Preparedness charts how the most humiliating and painful moments in Havrileskys past forced her to develop a wide range of defense mechanisms, some adaptive, some piteously ill-suited to modern life. From premature boxing lessons to the competitive grooming of cheerleading camp, from her parents divorce to her fathers sudden death, Havrilesky explores a path from innocence and optimism to self-protection and caution, bravely reexamining the injuries that shaped her, the lessons that sunk in along the way, and the insights that carried her through. . By laying bare her bumps and bruises, Havrilesky offers hope that we can find a frazzled and unruly, desperate and wistful, restless and funny and frayed-at-the-edges way of staring disaster in the face, and even rising to meet it head on. By turns offbeat, sophisticated, uproarious and wise, Disaster Preparedness is a road map to the personal disasters we all face from an irresistible voice that gets straight to the unexpected grace at the heart of every calamity.
About the Author
Heather Havrilesky is an essayist and critic who writes New York Magazine's popular Ask Polly advice column. She is the author of What If This Were Enough? (Doubleday, 2018) , How to Be a Person in the World (Doubleday, 2016) and Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead, 2011) . Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, NPR's All Things Considered, and several anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles with a loud assortment of dependents, most of them non-deductible.
