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You've Been So Lucky Already by Alethea Black
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You've Been So Lucky Already

A Memoir

$24.99

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Narrator Alethea Black

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Length 6 hours 23 minutes
Language English
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From the award-winning author of I Knew You’d Be Lovely comes an empowering and disarmingly funny memoir about grief and illness—and the wit and wisdom it takes to survive it.

As a child, Alethea Black drifts between her father, a brilliant mathematician who is also her best friend, and her mother, a frank and outspoken woman on fire. After her father’s death, Alethea is left unmoored, a young woman more connected to life’s ethereal mysteries than to practical things such as doing laundry or paying taxes.

And then, just when life seems to be getting back on track, she’s suddenly racked by crushing fatigue, inexplicable pain, and memory loss. With her grasp on reality fading, and specialist after specialist declaring nothing is wrong, Alethea turns to her own research and desperate home remedies. But even as her frantic quest for wellness seems to lead to confusion and despair, she discovers more about her own strength than she ever could have imagined—and becomes a woman on fire herself.

Alethea Black was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College in 1991. Her work has been featured in the Kenyon Review, the American Literary Review, and Narrative Magazine, among others. The author of the short-story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, she’s the recipient of the Arts & Letters Prize and is a three-time winner of the MOTH StorySLAM. Black lives in Los Angeles County, California, with her dachshund, Josie. For more on her work, visit www.aletheablack.com.

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Reviews

“The book…succeeds in offering a candid depiction of a woman’s struggle with her own vulnerabilities as she seeks to understand the ‘pile of terrifyingly beautiful rubble’ left in the wake of all her struggles. Flawed but no less poignant for its imperfections.” Kirkus Reviews

“Wonderfully poetic with wry observations, Black’s writing both amazes and charms.” Publishers Weekly

“The surface of that story plays as a plucky attempt to lighten a heavy load: Black is a child of divorce who is thrown for a loop by her father’s early death from cancer, endures a series of mysterious illnesses in adulthood, and eventually loses her house, all of her possessions and her live-in boyfriend. By recounting her travails in a conversational tone…she borrows from popular single-lady conventions to turn the frown of bad fortune upside down.” The New York Times Book Review

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