The Way We Weren't

Praise

“Simple and highly addictive . . . the reader might feel herself gripping the book not only to see where Talbot and her daughter Indie end up . . . . but also to eat up her delectable prose.”—Brevity

“A magnetic pull sets in while reading The Way We Weren’t, a sinking into the author’s state of heart and mind, a compulsion to keep turning the pages. The memoir’s allure is a testament to Jill Talbot’s formidable talent.”—The Boston Globe

“To say that Jill Talbot steps into the controversial borderlands between fiction and non fiction with The Way We Weren’t is a vast understatement. It is more like she plunges into them off the fifty-meter springboard, doing three somersaults and a half gainer on the way down. This gut wrenching tale of abandonment (though it is never perfect clear who was the abandoner, who the abandonee) makes us ask giant, soul-bending questions, like ‘Does anyone ever know anyone?’ and ‘Are we always the creators of our own misery?’ A brave story of one woman’s fight to survive, most of all, her own proclivities.” —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted

“White-knuckled on the steering wheel, Talbot drives her readers headlong into the fray of her own past. Powerful, effective, and relentless, Talbot reminds us that life is always half-highway and half-dirt road, that our experiences—no matter how universal—demand we pave the way ourselves.” —B.J. Hollars, author of Dispatches from the Drownings