This Is the Author

"What inspired me to write this memoir was I had a daughter four years ago, and my mother, who had been dead for a long time, was an alcoholic. And as I began to write about motherhood I realized that one thing that was very important to me, in my life with my daughter, was to sort of break a cycle of silence and secrecy that exists within most alcoholic families." Learn more: http://www.penguinra...

"I was inspired to write the book when my old editor-in-chief from SAVEUR Magazine reached out to me while I was in France because he'd read some online post that I'd written and said, 'You should think about writing a book.' And I remember telling him, 'No, I don’t want to write a book.'" Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/531102/killing-it/

"My novel is titled IMMIGRANT, MONTANA. A young man comes to America from India, and hears Dr. Ruth on the radio. He also wants to fall in love, have sex." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/565697/immigrant-montana/

"I was inspired by Isabel Allende’s memoir PAULA, which she wrote when her daughter was in a coma, which she ultimately did not recover from. I remember I found that book when I was in my MFA program, already pretty close to done with my book. I read that and I saw how she was addressing her daughter directly, and giving the family history to her daughter in an effort to revive her daughter and br...

"I was inspired to write my book HAPPIER AT HOME because I realized that for me, one of the most important elements for my happiness was feeling happy at home. And I wanted to really dig deep. I wanted to think about how I could be more "at home" at home." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/209400/happier-at-home/

"I wrote my book because I had to. I didn’t plan on it to be a book. I kept notebooks for several years after my wife died and at a certain point I started transcribing them and I realized that in doing that it was not just helping me understand certain things but it was giving me a certain kind of distance I needed to move forward." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/563747/t...

"Here I was really kind of cruising into the very heart of middle age and suddenly there was this compound called Omega-3’s and also this Omega-3 compound was implicitly and explicitly connected to the entire food system of the ocean, at least in how it’s discussed in most magazines and newspapers. I thought this was a good way in to look at a lot of different things going on in the ocean but yet...

"The inspiration for this book came from a few places; It was really a knitting together of a number of stories and themes that I had been working on for years, having to do with problems with the welfare system, and the kind of grand promise of just giving people cash coming from developing countries, like Brazil. " Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/551618/give-people-money/

"What inspired us to write this book was that we saw so many families and parents struggling with the dilemma of conflicting sleep advice that they were getting. A lot of parents telling us that they really had a feeling that their child was capable of better sleep but that they wanted to be good, responsive, warm parents, and that they’d been reading about attachment parenting and the importance...

"I wrote my book because I didn’t want to have any secrets and I thought that it would be important to talk about the abuses that women face in jail. I also thought it would be important to talk about books, because even though we live in the digital age, there’s nothing better than holding a book in your hand." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/566410/the-lost-chapters/

"I was inspired to write this book because I actually wrote a book called GIRL CODE a couple of years ago, which was all about women coming together and supporting one another. But I noticed there was an issue. Women were totally excited and on board to support one another, and they knew that they’d be happier if they did that, but they couldn’t get there if they didn’t have confidence in themselv...

"My book is about my five years that I spent in the white house in the Obama administration and the two months I spent in the Trump administration as a stenographer. I actually got the job on Craigslist so I was a bit of a fish out of water. The story is really about a young woman, me, finding her way along the corridors of power and making a lot of bad decisions and poor life choices, and having...

"ASTROBALL is really the result of several twists of fate. In 2014, in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, I wrote a cover story about what was then the worst team in baseball, one of the worst teams in baseball history, and we predicted on the cover that they would win the 2017 World Series. And then they actually did. I just had to write a book about the new techniques they used to get from the bottom to the to...

"Hope Nation is a collection of stories and essays about hope written by some of my personal favorite YA writers writing for readers today." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/561595/hope-nation/

"I wrote this book with Rodney Anderson at Stanford because I suffered from chronic pelvic pain for over 20 years and gratefully I found a way to stop it. The recovery from pelvic pain was one of the major miracles of my life. We wrote this book to bring this amazing method to the many who suffer from chronic pelvic pain syndrome who have not found an answer to their condition." Learn more: http:/...

"A lot of the inspiration for this book came from experiences doing fieldwork. I’ve been fortunate in being able to do a lot of different kinds of scientific fieldwork, whether it's digging up fossils, tagging the backs of living whales, or dissecting their carcasses. " Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/556686/spying-on-whales/

"I wrote my book because I’ve been thinking about what has gone wrong in our relations between men and women for as long as I’ve been an adult. As I say in the book, my life tracks almost perfectly with the modern second-wave feminist movement, and I think I have a perspective that lifespan gives me about what has gone right and wrong with the movement." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseau...

"I had always wanted to write a memoir one day, and I had always wanted to write a book, and I thought that it'd be a unique opportunity to speak to a number of issues I care deeply about—issues of free speech, issues of race, class, inequality—and ultimately, to speak to the ways in which I hope to make a positive difference in the lives of others." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio....

"I decided to write this for three reasons. I wanted a vehicle to keep the spotlight bright on the Flint water crisis because I knew that the nation's attention would fade while many of the needs and problems resulting from the crisis would remain. Second, I also wanted a vessel to share the Flint story not only for our terrible lessons, but to also share that there are Flints everywhere, communit...

"REGULATORY HACKING: A PLAYBOOK FOR STARTUPS is really the culmination of this incredibly cool journey I’ve had the privilege to go on over the last five years. Through co-founding 1776 with Donna Harris, I’ve gotten to meet these incredible startup founders all over the world: from Silicon Valley, from Washington D.C., but also Nairobi, Singapore, London, Brussels. And this is really more a story...

"I wrote my book, SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW, because I wanted to show the audience that the diagnosis of dementia doesn’t have to mean the end. When people hear the word “dementia” they often think of the end stages. I wanted to show how each person has a beginning, and a middle, and many adventures and laughter in between." Learn more; http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/563464/somebody-i-u...

"What planted the seed for this book was a couple of things. I allude to this story of my dad being an engineer, working in nuclear energy. I grew up with this storyline about how all of these amazing scientists collaborated together to create this groundbreaking thing that was going to change the world. Then when I was an adult, I learned how that same technology was probably going to be what wip...

"What brought me to write about the Wyndham sisters was the painting, really, the painting that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s a tremendous painting, it’s enormous, and it takes up almost one big wall of the gallery. And if you go and see that painting you’ll see that it kind of socks you in the face. And it was that question of what lay behind that image of perfection o...

"I wrote my book because I saw so many creatives, especially marketers, who I work with everyday that would stop before they start." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/558024/the-creative-curve/

"I wrote this book as a consequence of being obsessed, I would say, with the insanity of the Cold War. It struck me in the '80s, and I suppose in the late '70s, that the fact that two armed camps had appeared in the world, each of which was poised to destroy the other utterly, and themselves at the same time, was a problem of such paramount importance that nothing else was worth thinking about." L...