Listening for #1000WordsOfSummer!

This month, I decided to participate in Jami Attenberg’s #1000WordsOfSummer initiative, which encourages participants to write 1000 words a day over the course of two weeks. She sends out one email a day to encourage writers and often brings on guests to add their two cents about writing. I’ve enjoyed Attenberg’s writing for several years, so I thought now would be the perfect time to pick up her memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You.

Attenberg loosely follows her writing career in the memoir, jumping back and forth in time to add context and to flesh out the people in her life. In her writing, she describes life while trying to find her way as a writer, the many jobs she’s worked, and the places she’s traveled to visit. Throughout the memoir, you can feel a sense of unsettledness, that all this time, Attenberg was just looking for a place to feel the most herself.

Attenberg describes her struggle with who she feels she’s supposed to be as a writer vs who she wants to be. She’s supposed to want to live in New York, working night and day if that’s what it takes to live there. She’s supposed to find a long term partner, to want to travel the world. But she finally realizes she feels the most at home in her little house in New Orleans, just her and her dog.

Xe Sands performs the audiobook with an incredible sense of intimacy. I think memoirs can be some of the most difficult audiobooks to narrate because they are so deeply personal for their authors. But Sands rises to the challenge, beautifully capturing Attenberg’s narrative voice.

Iris and a group of other women create a Facebook group as a place to air out all of their bridesmaid grievances. But as the group grows, Iris finds it harder and harder to keep the group under control. With her sister’s wedding coming up, Iris worries that her online life will spill over to her offline one. Full of the very specific brand of family and wedding chaos, The Bridesmaid Union is sure to delight anyone who loves stories full of drama.

In the summer of 1999, Fe Fe and her friends Precious and Stacia form a trio, friends forever. But when a new girl arrives in the neighborhood, the three friends find their dynamic suddenly changed. As their Chicago neighborhood changes around them, the girls find their friendship changing as well. Years later, Fe Fe returns to the neighborhood and is flooded with memories from that one fateful summer.

Bonnie just wants to live her life alone, sitting in front of her TV watching her favorite show, Three’s Company. But Bonnie’s life is irrevocably changed when she wins the lottery. She decides to move to a house in the mountains where she can recreate the set of Three Company and live out her own dreams by imagining herself in the TV show.

Ibram X. Kendi gives parents and guardians the tools they need to have important conversations with the kids in their lives. Using both research and personal stories from his life, Kendi shares a guide on how to teach kids to be antiracist at different stages of their lives.