Moxie: Friends

Highly Recommended

Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke
Reading this book explained a whole lot of things about why so many families I know are struggling financially, even though we don't spend extravagantly. Simultaneously enlightening and nauseating.
Elizabeth Warren: All Your Worth : The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan
If other personal finance books have frustrated you because they assume you have money to invest and you don't even have enough money to buy a large coffee, this is the personal finance book for you. Reading this book showed me that it's not that I waste money on stupid things--it's that our basic expenses are too high to begin with. Reading this book is the end of financial guilt and the beginning of getting out of the hole.
Adele Faber: Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too
Lots of great ideas to think about and put into practice about not assigning your kids roles and how to approach fights. Also goes over some of the stuff from the How to Talk So Kids Will Listen book about making kids feel understood. Because, really, that's all anyone wants--to be understood. And kids are people, too.
Anne Lamott: Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
Just perfect. A beautiful, funny, sad, accurate account of what the first days, weeks, and months with a baby are like. This is exactly what your journal would be, if you could write as well as she does.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc: Random Family : Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
LeBlanc's writing and pacing makes you want to keep reading despite the tragic story. Think you have an informed opinion about welfare reform and how to strengthen families in this country? Not until you've read this book.
John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
This is the red pill. Don't read it if you want to stay comfortable with the American school system. Gatto goes into why government-owned schools were created and the things they actually teach us.
Ellis Avery: The Smoke Week: September 11-21, 2001
If you have any curiosity about what it was like for New Yorkers during the World Trade Center attacks, this is the book to read. A brilliant, crystalline, spot-on memoir of the week or so after the attacks, this book is an ode to New Yorkers. Realistic, clean, and completely un-maudlin, it's just the story of what it was like for us. This is what should go into a time capsule to represent September 2001.

(My seriously talented friend Shannon just got a reading of her new, full-length play! The play is called Jacques the Fairy, and it plays with epic types and quests all wrapped up in humor and bibliophilia. If you're in NYC, please come see it at Dixon Place (Bowery just below Houston) on Wednesday, September 10. When tickets go on sale I'll post this again with a link to buy them, in case any of you want to come.)

I just realized that I've made more new, good friends in the last two years than I had in the previous ten. I know sometimes we start thinking that we're too old and don't need any new friends, but as I've opened up and started liking myself again, I've gained some new friends that I've really let into my inner circle.

I think it's a matter of priorities. Finding someone who thinks the way I do is such a precious thing to me, that I can't afford to let that go just because I'm busy. All this other stuff--the schedule, the job, the apartment--all the stuff that sucks my time--is just logistics. The essence of my life is the relationships. That's the only answer I have when people ask how I find the time to write Ask Moxie (I can't not write it--it's what I'm supposed to do), and who am I to turn down someone I click with? The chance for a relationship that enriches both our lives is just too exciting to walk away from.