10 Best Books for Breaking Free from People-Pleasing and Setting Boundaries That Actually Stick

The email came at 11 PM, which should have been my first red flag. My friend Rachel was asking if I could watch her kids the following weekend — again —.

The email came at 11 PM, which should have been my first red flag. My friend Rachel was asking if I could watch her kids the following weekend — again —.

I found my first Pippi Longstocking book at a library book sale when I was nine. It was a 1960s edition with that particular smell — the smell of paper that.

Here's what nobody explains about starting over: it doesn't feel like a fresh start. That's the myth. That's the version in the memoir where the author has.

Okay so this is for people like me who have spent way too much time on BookTok, who have added approximately forty-seven books to their TBR after watching one.

I was twenty-four and living alone for the first time when I walked into a bookstore in Silver Lake and saw a flyer taped to the register. "Book Club — Third.

There is a particular silence that happens in a good book club meeting — the kind that comes after someone has said something true and everyone is sitting with.

Here's what I used to think about optimism: it was for people who hadn't paid.

There is a specific feeling I associate with the summer of 2005, when I was seventeen and working the closing shift at a bookstore that has since been replaced.

This isn't as dramatic as it sounds. I was a literature graduate student — I read constantly. But somewhere between the required syllabi and the critical.

I need to start by admitting something: when my son Eli was first evaluated for autism at age five, my first instinct was to ask what we could do to make him.