Megan Stielstra

From an important new American writer comes this powerful collection of personal essays on fear, creativity, art, faith, academia, the Internet, and justice. In this poignant and inciting collection of literary essays, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. In her titular piece “The Wrong Way To Save Your Life,” she answers the question of what has value in our lives—a question no longer rhetorical when the apartment above her family’s goes up in flames. “Here is My Heart” sheds light on Megan’s close relationship with her father, whose continued insistence on climbing mountains despite a series of heart attacks leads the author to dissect deer hearts in a poetic attempt to interrogate her own feelings about mortality. Whether she's imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra's work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own. Intellectually fierce and viscerally intimate, Megan Stielstra's voice is witty, wise, warm, and above all, achingly human. “Stielstra is a masterful essayist.”—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

Essays

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

Connie Meade

But clearly bars were just where I did have to do research, not just for Let’s Go, but so I would understand the human condition. The longer I lived, the more evident it became that going out and getting drunk were the things people cared the most about. They thought you were putting on an act if you said you were more interested in anything else. Even Let's Go, which was written by people who supposedly cared about human achievement, was always implying that museums were somewhere you went to seem high-minded, and that the thing that was actually important and desirable was knowing which were the right bars and clubs.

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life quotes

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