Amy Dickinson

In Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things--her follow-up memoir to the NYT bestselling The Mighty Queens of Freeville--America's most popular advice columnist, "Ask Amy," shares her journey of family, second chances, and finding love. By peeling back the curtain of her syndicated advice column, Amy Dickinson reveals much of the inspiration and motivation that has fueled her calling. Through a series of linked essays, this moving narrative picks up where her earlier memoir left off. Exploring central themes of romance, death, parenting, self-care, and spiritual awakening, this touching and heartfelt homage speaks to all who have faced challenges in the wake of life's twists and turns. From finding love in middle-age to her storied experience with stepparenting to overcoming disordered eating to her final moments spent with her late mother, Dickinson's trademark humorous tone delivers punch and wit that will empower, entertain, and heal.

A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home

Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

"The Mighty Queens of Freeville is great American storytelling at its best. A tale of promise postponed and scrappy survival, Amy Dickinson's glorious triumphs are like rabbits pulled out of a hat, one after another after another. Full of hope and humor and big simple truths, it is a story told with grace and without a trace of cynicism. This is a book you will love and one you will be truly sad to finish." --Laura Zigman, author of Animal Husbandry "Reading Amy's book in bed. Wife to me: 'Is it good?' Me to wife: 'Sure, but what do I care, I'm a guy' Wife to me: 'Then why are you crying?'" --Noah Adams, author of Piano Lessons, "In The Mighty Queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson shares her life story about love and loss, parents, daughters, aunts, fathers, pets, and life from the mundane to the ridiculous to the quietly heartbreaking. Or, sometimes loudly heartbreaking, with great big honking sobs. Amy doesn't have all the answers, but she suggests a good place to find them: at home, with the people who love you." --Peter Sagal, host of NPR's "Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!" and author of The Book of Vice: Naughty Things (and How to Do Them) "Common sense, a practical nature, and a searing sense of social justice are the hallmarks of Amy Dickinson's advice column. Now, in a delicious and hilarious memoir, Amy gives us her worldview via Main Street with wit and originality, through her own bejeweled binoculars. The view is never, for a moment, self-indulgent. She's a wise and fair queen for sure. Long Live Amy!" --Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of the Big Stone Gap series, Lucia, Lucia, and Very Valentine Millions of Americans know and love Amy Dickinson from reading her syndicated advice column "Ask Amy" and from hearing her wit and wisdom weekly on National Public Radio. Amy's audience loves her for her honesty, her small-town values, and the fact that her motto is "I make the mistakes so you don't have to." In The Mighty Queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson shares those mistakes and her remarkable story. This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the people who helped raise them after Amy found herself a reluctant single parent. Though divorce runs through her family like an aggressive chromosome, the women in her life taught her what family is about. They helped her to pick up the pieces when her life fell apart and to reassemble them into something new. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates and adult education classes, travels across the country with her daughter and their giant tabby cat, and tries to come to terms with the family's aptitude for "dorkitude." They have lived in London, D.C., and Chicago, but all roads lead them back to Amy's hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), a tiny village where Amy's family has tilled and cultivated the land, tended chickens and Holsteins, and built houses and backyard sheds for more than 200 years. Most important, though, her family members all still live within a ten-house radius of each other. With kindness and razor-sharp wit, they welcome Amy and her daughter back weekend after weekend, summer after summer, offering a moving testament to the many women who have led small lives of great consequence in a tiny place.

A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them

The Mighty Queens of Freeville

In The mighty queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson, syndicated advice columnist and weekly National Public Radio celeb, shares her remarkable story--a tale of Amy and her daughter and the people who helped raise them after Amy found herself a reluctant single parent.

A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town that Raised Them : [a Memoir]

Amy Dickinson's audience loves her for her honesty, her small-town values, and the fact that her motto is "I make the mistakes so you don't have to." In The Mighty Queens of Freeville/i, Amy Dickinson shares those mistakes and her remarkable story. This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the people who helped raise them after Amy found herself a reluctant single parent.They have lived in London, D.C., and Chicago, but all roads lead them back to Amy's hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), where Amy's family has tilled the land, tended chickens and Holsteins, and built houses and backyard sheds for more than 200 years.

A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town that Raised Them

For a decade, Amy Dickinson has been the Chicago Tribune's signature general advice columnist, helping readers with questions both personal and pressing. Ask Amy: Advice for Better Living is a collection of over 200 question-and-answer columns taken from 2011–2013. As the highly popular successor to the legendary Ann Landers, Dickinson answers readers' questions with care and attention, while also providing a plainspoken, straight-shooting dose of reality that often only comes to us from close friends. Dickinson's advice is rooted in honesty and trust, which is why so many readers turn to her for advice on their everyday lives and for maintaining healthy, lasting relationships. Ask Amy: Advice for Better Living is a testament to the empathetic counsel and practical common-sense tips that Dickinson has been distilling for years.

Amy Dickinson

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