Adair Lara

A personable and funny book on how to write about your life in essay and memoir, by Adair Lara, whom Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird) calls "San Francisco's legendary writer and teacher"

Naked, Drunk and Writing

Normal Is Just a Setting on the Dryer

A collection of reflections on the nature of what it means to be a writer. How do you find out what being a writer means to those who really are writers? You ask them. In this book, Adair Lara shares what the ink-stained, carpal-tunneled, slightly dazed, word struck people she knows had to say. You know you’re a writer when . . . . . . You’ll never forgive your parents for your happy childhood. . . . The doctor tells you that you have terminal cancer, and you think, “I can use this.” . . . You accidentally sign a check with your pen name. . . . You know more than ten synonyms for “blue.” . . . You write your Christmas letter as if it were War and Peace. Many readers will recognize themselves in this collection of observations about the eccentric, quirky, word-obsessed condition that is being a writer.

You Know You're a Writer When . . .

We all live in a speeded up world--we buy instant meals, work overtime, are wired in to our homes and offices, and precariously balance family and jobs. But it seems the more we get done the more there is to do, and while our modern lifestyles have given us faster ways of doing things, they have also quickly taken away the rhythm and serenity of daily life. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Adair Lara wrote a column describing her mother's way of slowing down--hanging up clothes on a clothesline. More than 1,000 readers responded to her column with their own suggestions--writing letters in longhand though they have computers, washing dishes by hand though they have dishwashers, reading their favorite novels again and again. The best of these stories, as well as others, have been combined to create this inspirational collection.

And Other Ways to Find More in Less

Hanging Out the Wash

What does a mother do when her teenaged daughter is spinning out of control and nothing is bringing her back? Here is a searingly honest memoir of motherhood and a testament to the power of love and family. When Adair Lara’s daughter Morgan turned thirteen, she was transformed, seemingly overnight, from a sweet, loving child into an angry, secretive teenager who would neither listen nor be disciplined. The author, her youngest son, Patrick, her ex-husband, Jim, and her new husband, Bill, all stepped on a five-year roller-coaster ride in which Morgan incarnated the chaos principle in torn jeans and dyed hair. Drinking, drugging, disappearing, suspicious companions, failing and cheating at school, joy riding in a stolen car–there was no variety of adolescent acting out that she didn’t indulge in. For Adair Lara it became an endless sojourn at the end of her rope, a trial immensely complicated by the reappearance in her life of her aging father, a man who had abandoned his wife and seven children decades earlier. Inevitably, Morgan’s misbehavior revives memories of her own headstrong adolescence, while her father’s presence makes agonizingly real for her the consequences of giving up. Paradoxically, he also becomes the source of her best advice. Hold Me Close, Let Me Go is an emotionally charged, often brutally honest memoir that all parents (and anyone who was ever a teenager) will experience shocks of recognition from while reading. It imparts invaluable lessons about holding loved ones close through the roughest passages and about the power of family to overcome the most grievous obstacles. Adair Lara is a clear-eyed and eloquent witness to the complex costs and rewards of motherhood, and her book will redefine for readers their idea of what being “a good enough mother” really means.

A Mother, a Daughter and an Adolescence Survived

Hold Me Close, Let Me Go

An award-winning newspaper columnist provides a candid memoir of dealing with a teenage daughter whose rebellion is spinning out of control as she describes her daughter's transformation from loving child to angry, secretive adolescent involved in drinking, drugs, running away, failing school, and more, in a portrait of motherhood and the healing power of love and family. Reprint.

When the self-help books just aren’t helping, it’s time to call in the experts: real people . . . San Francisco Chronicle columnist Adair Lara polled her readers for life lessons learned through experience, receiving thousands of heartfelt and irreverent responses. The best are compiled here in more than two hundred bits of priceless counsel, accompanied by witty, whimsical illustrations by award-winning artist Roxanna Bikadoroff. This handy little volume is filled with humor, unconventional insights, and the kind of common wisdom that will always bear repeating.

Adair Lara

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