Heather Lanier

How Not to Die There is no way for me to write this list without including this book! It’s focused on nutrition and is structured by first going through many chronic diseases and causes of deaths and then focuses on the foods to consume in the second half.

My 13-year-old daughter needs a lot of help in school. Due to developmental disabilities, she can’t quite return a volleyball like her peers in gym class. She can’t open a snack bag on her own at lunchtime. While she’s learning to identify words found in Dr. Seuss, her eighth-grade peers are reading novels like The Giver. None of this is a tragedy. She has an aide to help her with snacks. She has an occupational therapist who visits gym class and modifies activities for her.

Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals: Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Roads She’s Traveled,” by .