<p>In her plucky new memoir, award-winning journalist Susan Orlins embraces her hang ups and faces life's imperfections with wit and grit. While her friends smoke marijuana or drink to get high, Orlins becomes intoxicated by therapy visits. Eavesdrop on her confessions as she goes through psychiatrists the same way she goes through boyfriends. Orlins takes readers on a rocky but riotous journey from her starter marriage during college to her second marriage in 1979, after which she moves to Beijing. Her years in Beijing and her effort to adopt a baby there provide a fascinating portrait of an era in which "eating bitterness" was a way of life for Chinese people. She worries: Will I locate a child? Will I convince the Communist government to go along with a foreign adoption? In the chapter "'I May Have Ruined the Marriage, But You're Ruining the Divorce," Orlins explores her separation with wry, wrenching self-awareness. She rebounds with a divorce party and then vibrantly portrays a cast of Mr. Wrongs, like one who--whenever he feels blue--swallows a pinch of his father's ashes. During a solo bicycle trip in Paris, Orlins tracks down a boyfriend from 42 years earlier. No one could have anticipated the crisis that occurs an hour into their reunion. With her knack for stumbling into drama, it's no wonder she worries. As Orlins ages, she misses her younger self and pictures paying her a visit. This imaginary encounter changes Orlins forever. Readers of all ages will relate to this deeply personal story, told with comical sensibility by a quirky, startlingly honest mother, daughter, ex-wife, and dog lover, who--à la Nora Ephron--will feel like a dear friend. Confessions of a Worrywart: Husbands, Lovers, Mothers, and Others will stay with you long after you finish reading it.Reviews“A first-rate personal essayist, Susan Orlins delivers the goods time and again. Underneath her self-mocking voice, her abundant humor, her brio, there is the serious candor of a moralist who worries the problems that won’t go away.”—PHILLIP LOPATE, author and editor of The Art of the Personal Essay “Susan Orlins is America’s funniest neurotic since Woody Allen. Just be careful you don’t crack a rib reading Confessions of a Worrywart.”—PATRICIA VOLK, author of Stuffed “Susan Orlins combines the practical with the comical. A multi-tasking mom, she knows how to show and hide her feelings simultaneously. When you have the time (the kids are out of the house and your mom is in a home), read this book! You will identify and laugh.”—SYBIL SAGE, writer for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Growing Pains, Magnum P.I., Northern Exposure "Toxic chemicals. Tomatoes. Getting the bed by the window in her future nursing home. What's NOT to worry about? Just ask Susan Orlins, America's funniest worrywart—not because you want to wring your hands, but because you want to laugh out loud. Her offbeat take on all challenges, great and small, is a delight."— DIANE MACEACHERN, Author of Big Green Purse</p>

Confessions of a Worrywart: Husbands, Mothers, Lovers and Others

Biographies & Memoirs

Orlins, Susan

Community & Culture

Seneca Books

<p>For Gerald Anderson, a brewing storm meant an opportunity to break into cars, stores, and homes. He would then buy drugs and inevitably land in jail. From age 15 to 37, this cycle was all he knew. But when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the levees broke, Anderson's focus shifted, and he called upon skills he had learned in prison to tend to those who were trapped. Using a boat they found at an evacuated house in the Garden District, Anderson and his homeboys battled chin-high floodwaters to rescue victims, in some cases their bodies: a woman in labor, an old man without legs, an addict with a bullet in his chest. He and his friends looked after families and elderly in the projects “just like if we was protecting the President’s house.”Still Standing: How an Ex-Con Found Salvation in the Floodwaters of Katrina is more than a tale of struggles when the levees broke. A gifted storyteller, Anderson weaves reflections on life before Katrina into the narrative. “Whenever I disobeyed my brother, he’d hold me up to the ceiling and drop me. One hour later I go right back and disobey him. After a while it like a bee sting, it hurt for a minute and go away. . . . The neighborhood I came up in, you sit on the porch, and it like watchin’ a wrasslin’ match. You see the ladies, the hustlers, the dogfights. If there ain’t men doin' violence, women be fightin’ about men.”Anderson also reflects on using his wits in prison, where he grilled cheese sandwiches by ironing them inside brown paper bags. In Louisiana State Penitentiary, Anderson lived with his father for the first time and realized, “My daddy got a little care about me.”Seeing dead bodies had been commonplace for Anderson. But when his beloved Miss Mary and her grandchildren are stabbed to death during Katrina, Anderson says, "It put chills in my body . . . . I ain’t never seen anyone murdered that open her heart to you like Miss Mary."Anderson's memoir illuminates a man’s life that is tested by floodwaters and then given new meaning by his rescue efforts. His voice and cadence lend immediacy to his riveting story.When author and award-winning journalist Susan Orlins met Anderson he was selling Street Sense, Washington, DC’s newspaper that is written and sold by homeless vendors. For 18 months they met weekly. He talked, she typed. She asked questions, he answered. Anderson’s memoir is the result.</p>

Still Standing: how an ex-con found salvation in the floodwaters of Katrina

Anderson, Gerald

Memoirs

Jambalaya Press

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