Jennifer Senior Book order

A Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of one family's search for meaning in the face of unspeakable loss. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine's 165-year archive. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Jennifer Senior explores the contours of grief through one family's twenty-year reckoning with the loss of their son, Bobby McIlvaine Jr., on September 11, 2001. Devastating and expansive, Senior's portrait examines her own relationship with the McIlvaine family alongside intimate scenes of both mourning and recovery experienced by Bobby's mother, father, younger brother, and soon-to-be fiancée. On Grief generously asks us what it means to consider grief, both personal and national, as an ongoing project.

Offering parents a vital framework for understanding their experiences, this book provides a shared language that fosters connection and support. Drawing parallels to the impact of The Feminine Mystique, it addresses the challenges faced by modern families, emphasizing the importance of community and shared narratives. The book resonates with readers seeking reassurance and insight into their parenting journeys, making it a significant contribution to contemporary discussions on family dynamics.

Thousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior now asks: what are the effects of children on their parents? In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior tries to tackle this question, isolating and analyzing the many ways in which children reshape their parents' lives, whether it's their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today's mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear. Recruiting from a wide variety of sources--in history, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology--she dissects both the timeless strains of parenting and the ones that are brand new, and then brings her research to life in the homes of ordinary parents around the country. The result is an unforgettable series of family portraits, starting with parents of young children and progressing to parents of teens. Through lively and accessible storytelling, Senior follows these mothers and fathers as they wrestle with some of parenthood's deepest vexations--and luxuriate in some of its finest rewards. Meticulously researched yet imbued with emotional intelligence, All Joy and No Fun makes us reconsider some of our culture's most basic beliefs about parenthood, all while illuminating the profound ways children deepen and add purpose to our lives. By focusing on parenthood, rather than parenting, the book is original and essential reading for mothers and fathers of today--and tomorrow.