Disaster Preparedness

“I love Heather Havrilesky’s work, and have been reading her for years. She’s smart, hilarious, unique-just terrific.” –Anne Lamott 

“Heather Havrilesky’s memoir nails the sheer life-or-deathness of the Very Important Things in a suburban kid’s world with a shticky self-awareness of how very unimportant they turn out to be.” —Elle

“A thoroughly enjoyable exploration of one woman’s experience dodging disasters real and imaginary… Havrilesky is unafraid to guide us through her most intimate memories of childhood, motherhood, and everything in between.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Havrilesky takes her own life as the subject… with brutal honesty, a sense of humor, and a willingness to forgive.” —The Paris Review Daily

“Finely observed… her tales of feeling like an outsider… have the warmth and familiarity of an old friend.” —Salon

“Heather Havrilesky’s memoir Disaster Preparedness is about board games, inappropriate boyfriends, Star Wars, kickball, Amy Carter and chain stores – but it’s also about life and death, and love and loss. I thought it was great.” –AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically and The Guinea Pig Diaries

“Heather Havrilesky captures the weird, chaotic, innocent-but-also-jaded, sweet- but-also-kind-of-rancid essence of childhood in the 1970s. And if that’s not enough, she takes us-hilariously, painfully, utterly relatably-through the entropy of being a teenager in the 1980s. At once sharp and tender, Disaster Preparedness both laments and salutes what it means to belong to a family- and indeed an entire culture-that seems inherently unmoored.”–Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House