Seeing children as a gift, not a carefully managed asset. REVIEW OF: Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies by Steve and Candice Watters (Moody 176 pp., $13.99) Eight years ago, I was chatting with a friend, also named Jenny, at a quaint café in Westchester, New York. The memory takes on a dreamlike quality, [...]

I picked up Real Sex just after moving into my new condo. I read it incessantly on the porch swing. I live on the first floor of a six-flat, so my brand new neighbors kept walking by on their way to the dumpster, eyeing me with curiosity as I slipped the book under my leg. [...]

REVIEW OF: Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self by Joseph E. Davis (University of Chicago Press, 312 pages, $27.50) “I was not sexually abused. Yet I was sexually abused,” Ellen Bass wrote in an anthology of survivor accounts called I Never Told Anyone. “We were all sexually abused. The images and attitudes, [...]

A compelling memoir from the son of a priest and a former nun. REVIEW OF: Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son by Peter Manseau (Free Press, 400 pp.; $25) One summer my husband, John, an Eastern Orthodox priest, worked as a chaplain at a Catholic hospital. The nuns invited him [...]

A new book by Elizabeth Marquardt offers a child’s-eye-view of divorce. REVIEW OF: Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce by Elizabeth Marquardt (Crown 288 pp.; $24.9) A generation of children of divorce has grown up. They have a story to tell. It’s not the story you might find in books like [...]