Things I Should Have Told My Daughter

In this inspiring memoir—that Jane Fonda raves “will make you braver...want to live your life better and make a difference”—the award-winning playwright and bestselling author of What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day reminisces on the art of juggling marriage, motherhood, and politics while working to hone her craft as a writer.

Before she become one of America’s most popular playwrights and a bestselling author with a novel endorsed by Oprah’s Book Club, Pearl Cleage was a struggling writer going through personal and professional turmoil.

In Things I Should Have Told My Daughter, Cleage takes us back to the 1970s and 80s, when she was a young wife and mother trying to find her voice as a writer. Living in Atlanta, she worked alongside Maynard Jackson, the city’s first black mayor and it was here among fraught politics that she began to feel the pull of her own dreams—a pull that led her away from her husband as she grappled with ideas of feminism and self-fulfillment.

In the tradition of literary giants such as Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, and Maya Angelou, Cleage crafts an illuminating and moving self-portrait in which her “extraordinary experiences, deep social concerns, passionate self-analysis, and personal and artistic liberation, all so openly confided, make for a highly charged, redefining read” (Booklist).