NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Among Esquire’s Best Nonfiction Books of the entire year

Among NPR’s Preferred Books of the entire year

One of the Year’s Most Anticipated Books: BuzzFeed, Bustle, HelloGiggles, Literary Hub, She Reads

“I’ve spent my adult existence prowling bookshelves for the modern-day reincarnation of my favorite authors—Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin—all rolled into one…Very good news: I’ve finally found their successor.” —Elisabeth Egan, The Washington Post

Acclaimed about I Miss You AFTER I Blink: Essays essayist and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott presents a charmingly relatable and smart memoir-in-essays about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on her behalf successful lifestyle’s to-do list and realized she may need to reinvent the list—and herself.

Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be correct, and you’ll always be happy.

But once she’d completed her existence’s to-do list (work, spouse, house, infants—check!), she found that rather than feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck inside a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling little talk, and sprawling visitors. She’d performed everything “right,” but she sensed all incorrect. What’s the even worse failure, she considered: smiling and staying the program, or blowing everything up and running away? And are those the only options?

Within this memoir-in-essays full of spot-on observations about home, work, and innovative life, Philpott assumes the conflicting stresses of contemporary adulthood with wit and heart. She gives up her own stories showing that identification crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife; reassures us that little, repeating personal re-inventions are both regular and required; and advises that if you’re likely to faint, you should obtain low to the ground first. Primarily, Philpott shows that when you quit feeling content with your daily life, you don’t need to burn it all down and set off on a transcontinental hike (if you don’t want to, of course). You are able to contact upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not really, and where you belong. Who in our midst isn’t trying to achieve that?

Just like a pep talk from a sister, I Miss You ONCE I Blink may be the funny, poignant, and deeply affecting book you’ll want to share with all of your close friends, as you find out what Philpott provides figured out on the way: that multiple stuff can be accurate folks at once—and that sometimes doing factors wrong may be the way to do life right.