Disaster Preparedness

I love Heather Havrilesky's work, and have been reading her for years. She's smart, hilarious, unique-just terrific. --Anne Lamott Heather Havrilesky's memoir nails the sheer life-or-deathness of the Very Important Things in a suburban kid's world with a shticky self-awareness of how very unimportant they turn out to be. -- Elle A thoroughly enjoyable exploration of one woman's experience dodging disasters real and imaginary... Havrilesky is unafraid to guide us through her most intimate memories of childhood, motherhood, and everything in between. -- San Francisco Chronicle Havrilesky takes her own life as the subject... with brutal honesty, a sense of humor, and a willingness to forgive. -- The Paris Review Daily Finely observed... her tales of feeling like an outsider... have the warmth and familiarity of an old friend. -- Salon Heather Havrilesky's memoir Disaster Preparedness is about board games, inappropriate boyfriends, Star Wars, kickball, Amy Carter and chain stores - but it's also about life and death, and love and loss. I thought it was great. --AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically and The Guinea Pig Diaries Heather Havrilesky captures the weird, chaotic, innocent-but-also-jaded, sweet- but-also-kind-of-rancid essence of childhood in the 1970s. And if that's not enough, she takes us-hilariously, painfully, utterly relatably-through the entropy of being a teenager in the 1980s. At once sharp and tender, Disaster Preparedness both laments and salutes what it means to belong to a family- and indeed an entire culture-that seems inherently unmoored. --Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House