The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays
Written by Megan Stielstra
Narrated by Megan Stielstra and Meredith Mitchell
4/5
()
About this audiobook
“Stielstra is a masterful essayist.” —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
From an important new 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.
Megan Stielstra
Megan Stielstra is the author of Once I Was Cool and Everyone Remain Calm. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Guernica, BuzzFeed, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University.
Related to The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
Related audiobooks
Inventing the Abbotts: And Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKeep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Every Kind of Wanting Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No One Tells You This: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Crying Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Reckonings: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All Grown Up Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Deserve the Truth: Change the Stories that Shaped Your World and Build a World-Changing Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the Land of Men: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Misfit's Manifesto Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Feast Your Eyes: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Land of Enchantment Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I Miss You When I Blink: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devotion: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This One Wild and Precious Life: The Path Back to Connection in a Fractured World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sunshine State: Essays Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How Not to Drown Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5All This Could Be Yours Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Getting to Center: Pathways to Finding Yourself Within the Great Unknown Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Look Alive Out There: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Small Backs of Children Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Social Science For You
The Song of Achilles: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Road Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Parable of the Sower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kindred Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Left Hand of Darkness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Behold a Pale Horse Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lonely Dad Conversations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Year of Magical Thinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Razorblade Tears: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
18 ratings0 reviews