Stories I Might Regret Telling You

A memoir from internationally renowned singer Martha Wainwright.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was born in 1976 in New York. My parents, Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, loved me, or at least they grew to love me. My father told me when I was a teenager that he didn’t want me at first, but my mother insisted on having me. #2 My mother and her sisters were performers, and I was brought up in the music business. I was never baptized, but I went to a French school and was taught by nuns who told me that I was going to burn in hell with all the other sinners. #3 I loved the stories my grandmother, Gaby, would tell me about 1920s and 1930s Montreal. She had a hunched back, but she was still handsome and strong. She never got married, and she had no children. #4 I had many female caregivers as a child, including my mother, who was a great and eccentric dresser. The air between my mom and her boyfriend, Pat Donaldson, was often strained because she was also his employer.

The singer-songwriter's heartfelt memoir about growing up in a bohemian musical family and her experiences with love, loss, motherhood, divorce, the music industry, and more. Born into music royalty, the daughter of folk legends Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and sister to the highly-acclaimed and genre-defying singer Rufus Wainwright, Martha grew up in a world filled with such incomparable folk legends as Leonard Cohen; Suzy Roche, Anna McGarrigle, Richard and Linda Thompson, Pete Townsend, Donald Fagan and Emmylou Harris. It was within this loud, boisterous, carny, musical milieu that Martha came of age, struggling to find her voice until she exploded on the scene with her 2005 debut critically acclaimed album, Martha Wainwright, containing the blistering hit, "Bloody Mother F*cking Asshole," which the Sunday Times called one of the best songs of that year. Her successful debut album and the ones that followed such as Come Home to Mama, I Know You're Married but I've Got Feelings Too, and Goodnight City came to define Martha's searing songwriting style and established her as a powerful voice to be reckoned with. In Martha's memoir, Stories I Might Regret Telling You, Martha digs into the deep recesses of herself with the same emotional honesty that has come to define her music. She describes her tumultuous public-facing journey from awkward, earnest, and ultimately rebellious daughter, through her intense competition and ultimate alliance with her brother, Rufus, to the indescribable loss of their mother, Kate, and then, finally, discovering her voice as an artist. With candor and grace, Martha writes of becoming a mother herself and making peace with her past struggles with Kate and her former self, finally understanding and facing the challenge of being a female artist and a mother. Ultimately, Stories I Might Regret Telling You will offer readers a thoughtful and deeply personal look into the extraordinary life of one of the most talented singer-songwriters in music today.

‘Liner Notes is, unsurprisingly, as good as its author’s songs, with moments of sharp humor alternating with real-life pain, and vivid reflections on love, death, and the whole damn thing. Loudon Wainwright is a true original: not like anyone else, just as he set out to be.’ Salman Rushdie In the late 1960s, Loudon Wainwright III established himself as a loner, deliberately standing outside the conventional. He recorded his first album in 1969, full of raw, angry poetry, but it was the 1972 novelty song ‘Dead Skunk’ that brought him popular recognition. Wainwright’s songs are as hilarious as they can be painful. In Liner Notes, he details the family history and fractured relationships that have informed him: the alcoholism, infidelities and competitiveness; the successes, joys and love. Wainwright writes poignantly about being a son, a parent, a brother and a grandfather while re-printing selections from his father’s columns and meditating upon family, inspiration and art. As plain-speaking on the page as in his songs, Wainwright lays everything bare in this heartfelt memoir of music and family. His lyrics adorn and inform the text, amplifying his prose and connecting his songs to the life he led. ‘He is unafraid and clear-eyed about the events of his life – and utterly engaging.’ Rosanne Cash ’Fans of the self-lacerating, painfully funny Wainwright III will find the memoir they want here’ Kirkus Reviews

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the co-creator and co-star of the hit series Broad City, a hilarious and poignant collection about love, loss, work, comedy and figuring out who you really are when you thought you already knew. When Abbi Jacobson announced to friends and acquaintances that she planned to drive across the country alone, she was met with lots of questions and opinions: Why wasn't she going with friends? Wouldn't it be incredibly lonely? The North route is better! Was it safe for a woman? The Southern route is the way to go! You should bring mace! And a common one . . . why? But Abbi had always found comfort in solitude, and needed space to step back and hit the reset button. As she spent time in each city and town on her way to Los Angeles, she mulled over the big questions - What do I really want? What is the worst possible scenario in which I could run into my ex? How has the decision to wear my shirts tucked in been pivotal in my adulthood? In this collection of anecdotes, observations and reflections - all told in the sharp, wildly funny and relatable voice that has endeared Abbi to critics and fans alike - readers will feel like they're in the passenger seat on a fun and, ultimately, inspiring journey. With some original illustrations by the author.

The coauthors of the bestselling Peak Performance dive into the fascinating science behind passion, showing how it can lead to a rich and meaningful life while also illuminating the ways in which it is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to cultivate a passion that will take you to great heights—while minimizing the risk of an equally great fall. Common advice is to find and follow your passion. A life of passion is a good life, or so we are told. But it's not that simple. Rarely is passion something that you just stumble upon, and the same drive that fuels breakthroughs—whether they're athletic, scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic—can be every bit as destructive as it is productive. Yes, passion can be a wonderful gift, but only if you know how to channel it. If you're not careful, passion can become an awful curse, leading to endless seeking, suffering, and burnout. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness once again team up, this time to demystify passion, showing readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers. They ultimately argue that passion and balance--that other virtue touted by our culture--are incompatible, and that to find your passion, you must lose balance. And that's not always a bad thing. They show readers how to develop the right kind of passion, the kind that lets you achieve great things without ruining your life. Swift, compact, and powerful, this thought-provoking book combines captivating stories of extraordinarily passionate individuals with the latest science on the biological and psychological factors that give rise to—and every bit as important, sustain—passion.

"Parker hasn't spoken since he watched his father die five years ago. He communicates through writing on slips of paper and keeps track of his thoughts by journaling. A loner, Parker has little interest in school, his classmates, or his future. But everything changes when he meets Zelda, a mysterious young woman with an unusual request: 'treat me like a teenager'"--

Julie Powell thought cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the craziest thing she'd ever do -- until she embarked on the voyage recounted in her memoir, Cleaving. Her marriage challenged by an insane, irresistible love affair, Julie decides to leave town and immerse herself in a new obsession: butchery. She finds her way to Fleischer's, a butcher shop where she buries herself in the details of food. She learns how to break down a side of beef and French a rack of ribs -- tough physical work that only sometimes distracts her from thoughts of afternoon trysts. The camaraderie at Fleischer's leads Julie to search out fellow butchers around the world -- from South America to Europe to Africa. At the end of her odyssey, she has learned a new art and perhaps even mastered her unruly heart.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER New York Times bestselling author Jen Lancaster has lived a life based on re-invention and self-improvement. From Bitter Is the New Black to The Tao of Martha, she’s managed to document her (and her generation’s) attempts to shape up, grow up, and have it all—sometimes with disastrous results… Sure Jen has made mistakes. She spent all her money from a high-paying job on shoes, clothes, and spa treatments. She then carried a Prada bag to the unemployment office. She wrote a whole memoir about dieting…but didn’t lose weight. She embarked on a quest for cultural enlightenment that only cemented her love for John Hughes movies and Kraft American Singles. She tried to embrace everything Martha Stewart, while living with a menagerie of rescue cats and dogs. (Glitter…everywhere.) Mistakes are one thing; regrets are another. After a girls’ weekend in Savannah makes her realize that she is—yikes!—middle-aged (binge watching is so the new binge drinking), Jen decides to make a bucket list and seize the day, even if that means having her tattoo removed at one hundred times the cost of putting it on. From attempting a juice cleanse to studying Italian, from learning to ride a bike to starting a new business, and from sampling pasta in Rome to training for a 5K, Jen is turning a mid-life crisis into a mid-life opportunity, sharing her sometimes bumpy—but always hilarious—attempts to better her life…again.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time, in his own words—featuring never-before-seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death NAMED ONE OF THE BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE GUARDIAN • NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD Prince was a musical genius, one of the most beloved, accomplished, and acclaimed musicians of our time. He was a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of “Uptown” to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of “Paisley Park.” But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, one of the greatest pop stars of any era. The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince—a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The first is the memoir Prince was writing before his tragic death, pages that bring us into his childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us through Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album was released, via an evocative scrapbook of writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution through candid images that go up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book’s fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain—the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, where he retells the autobiography of the first three parts as a heroic journey. The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his profound collaboration with Prince in his final months—a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated—and annotations that provide context to the book’s images. This work is not just a tribute to an icon, but an original and energizing literary work in its own right, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image—his undying gift to the world.