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Never Simple
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
"the audiobook is compelling and, on occasion, jaw-dropping."-- Vulture
Liz Scheier’s darkly funny and touching memoir—with shades of Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle and Mira Bartók’s The Memory Palace—of growing up in ’90s Manhattan with a brilliant, mendacious single mother
Scheier’s mother Judith was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, a fast-talking charmer you couldn’t look away from, a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and—when in the grips of the mental illness that plagued every day of her life—a violent and abusive liar whose hold on reality was shaky at best. On an uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room to tell her two important things: one, she had been married for most of Scheier’s life to a man she’d never heard of, and two, the man she’d told Scheier was her father was entirely fictional. She’d made him up. Those two big lies were the start, but not the end; it took dozens of smaller lies to support them, and by the time she was done she had built a farcical, half-true life for the two of them, from fake social security number to fabricated husband.
One hot July day twenty years later, Scheier receives a voicemail from Adult Protective Services, reporting that Judith has stopped paying rent and is refusing all offers of assistance. That call is the start of a shocking journey that takes the Scheiers, mother and daughter, deep into the cascading effects of decades of lies and deception.
Never Simple is the story of learning to survive—and, finally, trying to save—a complicated parent, as feared as she is loved, and as self-destructive as she is adoring.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.
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- Narrated by: Nicole Hardy
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When Nicole Hardy’s eye-opening "Modern Love" column appeared in the New York Times, the response from readers was overwhelming. Hardy’s essay, which exposed the conflict between being true to herself as a woman and remaining true to her Mormon faith, struck a chord with women coast-to-coast. Now in her funny, intimate, and thoughtful memoir, Nicole Hardy explores how she came, at the age of 35, to a crossroads regarding her faith and her identity.
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This Book Spoke to Me
- By Allison on 04-08-14
By: Nicole Hardy
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After Perfect
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Christina McDowell
- Narrated by: Christina McDowell
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of New York Times best sellers What Remains by Carole Radziwill and Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey, Christina McDowell's unflinching memoir is a brutally honest, cautionary tale about one family's destruction in the wake of the Wall Street implosion.
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Mixed reaction
- By Margaret on 07-09-15
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True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness
- A Feminist Coming of Age
- By: Christine Lahti
- Narrated by: Christine Lahti
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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For decades, actress and director Christine Lahti has captivated the hearts and minds of her audience through iconic roles in Chicago Hope, Running on Empty, Housekeeping, And Justice for All, Swing Shift, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, God of Carnage, and The Blacklist. Now, in True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness, this acclaimed performer channels her creativity inward to share her own story for the first time.
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Christine Lahti, Actress, Activist and A+ Author!
- By L. Cat Schultz on 10-26-18
By: Christine Lahti
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The Finishing School
- A Novel
- By: Joanna Goodman
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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One spring night in 1998, the beautiful Cressida Strauss plunges from a fourth-floor balcony at the Lycée Internationale Suisse with catastrophic consequences. Loath to draw negative publicity to the school, a bastion of European wealth and glamour, officials quickly dismiss the incident as an accident, but questions remain. Was it a suicide attempt? Or was Cressida pushed? It was no secret that she had a selfish streak and had earned as many enemies as allies in her tenure at the school.
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this book was just ok
- By Josh Fields on 02-26-20
By: Joanna Goodman
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Until I Say Good-Bye
- My Year of Living with Joy
- By: Susan Spencer-Wendel, Bret Witter
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Susan Spencer-Wendel's Until I Say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy is a moving and inspirational memoir by a woman who makes the most of her final days after discovering she has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). After Spencer-Wendel, a celebrated journalist at the Palm Beach Post, learns of her diagnosis of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, she embarks on several adventures, traveling to several countries and sharing special experiences with loved ones.
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Until I Say Good-Bye is a paradox for me.
- By Bonny on 03-19-13
By: Susan Spencer-Wendel, and others
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Hope and Other Luxuries
- A Mother’s Journey Through a Daughter’s Anorexia
- By: Clare B. Dunkle
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Clare Dunkle seemed to have an ideal life - two beautiful, high-achieving teenage daughters, a loving husband, and a satisfying and successful career as a children's book novelist. But it's when you let down your guard that the ax falls. Just after one daughter successfully conquered her depression, another daughter developed a life-threatening eating disorder.
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Potent and Real
- By Susie on 09-17-15
By: Clare B. Dunkle
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The Daisy Children
- A Novel
- By: Sofia Grant
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When Katie Garrett gets the news that she’s received an inheritance from the grandmother she hardly knew, it couldn’t have come at a better time. She flees Boston and travels to rural Texas. There, she’s greeted by her distant cousin Scarlett. Friendly and flamboyant, Scarlett couldn’t be more different from sensible Katie. And as they begin the task of sorting through their grandmother’s possessions, they discover letters and photographs that uncover the hidden truths about their shared history, and the long-forgotten tragedy of the New London school explosion of 1937 that binds them.
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Multigenerational storyline lacked dignity
- By John F. Oldani, Jr. on 06-07-24
By: Sofia Grant
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Before We Visit the Goddess
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Priya Ayyar, Vikas Adam
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, India, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but her family's situation means college is an impossible dream. Then an influential woman from Kolkata takes Sabitri under her wing, but her generosity soon proves dangerous after the girl makes a single unforgivable misstep. Years later, Sabitri's own daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother's choices, flees abroad with her political refugee lover - but the America she finds is vastly different from the country she'd imagined.
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Absolutely Worth a Credit
- By Texastanya on 08-27-16
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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Fairyland
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Alysia Abbott
- Narrated by: Alysia Abbott
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and 80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation - few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene.
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Great representation of the time
- By AvidReader22 on 06-07-19
By: Alysia Abbott
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All of This
- A Memoir of Death and Desire
- By: Rebecca Woolf
- Narrated by: Rebecca Woolf
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, writer Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of forty-four, he died. In All of This, Woolf chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own.
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excellentt!
- By S. DAWN HANSCOM on 11-26-22
By: Rebecca Woolf
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I Can Barely Take Care of Myself
- Tales from a Happy Life Without Kids
- By: Jen Kirkman
- Narrated by: Jen Kirkman
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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"You'll change your mind." That's what everyone says to Jen Kirkman - and countless women like her - when she confesses she doesn't plan to have children. But you know what? It's hard enough to be an adult. You have to dress yourself and pay bills and remember to buy birthday gifts. You have to drive and get annual physicals and tip for good service. Some adults take on the added burden of caring for a tiny human being with no language skills or bladder control.
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Funny. Not fall down laughing funny, but funny
- By david on 05-22-13
By: Jen Kirkman
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What listeners say about Never Simple
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- NMwritergal
- 03-20-22
Another great memoir written by a Jewish woman...
...from NY. While I am so done with 20something fiction that takes place in NY, I love all the memoirs written by Jewish women in their 40s or 50s about their crazy mothers. Other commonalities: well written, complex, the lasting impact of the Holocaust, and most of all the authors' ability to write their stories so well that you have empathy and an understanding of both the daughter and the mother.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Rae Rae’s Travels
- 03-21-22
Fine
I think the story was interesting. I trial, to be sure, to be the only child of a mentally unstable and violent single mother. Also, the idea of truth and lies, and how could you really know anything when practically everything you’ve been told is a lie. I wish the author would’ve focused a little more on her development of self as opposed to the straight-up linear play-by-play. How do you develop a self?” Has she developed a true “self-image?” I don’t know, because it’s never really delved into. My biggest critique is to the reader. If anyone has listened to the robotic TikTok female voice in videos, that’s what a BOOK felt like when listened to. Like fake AI reading a memoir. Maybe it’s the voice that is clouding my feelings of the story, I don’t know. I’m sure the reader is a lovely person, but it just wasn’t my cup of tea. If you want a book with less abuse than the The Glass Castle and set in NYC, this is for you.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Alison Cooper
- 08-09-22
Narrator Detracts from Provocative Memoir
Story and writing very compelling. Narrator not so. Odd pacing, mispronounced words and verbal inflections that don’t align to the content. Glad I listened through to the end, but wished I had read it instead.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Paul Donnelly
- 06-09-22
Well Worth the Read
Excellent book to help understand the painful/sad life of a person with borderline personality disorder. I am a retired mental health professional and I found it fascinating!
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- mai loashi
- 03-26-22
I was expecting a different ride
i feel I boarded the wrong train. the insane story didn't match the level headed narration. was expecting a different tale.
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- Alexandra
- 10-12-24
Disjointed and confusing at times
This was okay. It was interesting enough that I didn’t give up on it, but I was looking forward to it being over. The middle of the story got very disjointed. I feel like the author’s sexual exploration was kind of irrelevant to the rest of the story, and a little cringe. Also, the whining about how she was treated after having babies made my eyes roll. I also found her attendance to her late father’s class reunion so odd. I didn’t care for the over use of the F word. It seemed unnecessary. The end was long and drawn out. Overall, just meh.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-01-22
A great read esp for those who deal with difficult parents or codependency
Such an honest, raw and amazing story. I cried a lot throughout the book because I lived through those same situations with my family and share all the same feelings the author described. Anyone who has a very difficult parent or experiencing codependency with their parent will really love and relate to this story. Love love love.
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- Kristin
- 04-30-22
Unbelievably compelling. Couldn’t stop listening.
WOW. What a story! This is a compelling personal narrative that will have you hooked from the beginning. Liz is an incredible storyteller. I listened to this in a couple of days. I was completely enthralled. I highly recommend this narrative for anyone navigating difficult times, looking for insight on how others managed and feeling the pains of living in the imperfection of humanity. So much amazing wisdom from Liz as she navigated a very difficult upbringing. I can’t believe this was a true story!
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- Sarah B
- 09-21-22
Beautiful and entertaining
This was well written and read! Loved the love. We all love with our best intentions ❤️
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- Tina Naumann
- 12-12-23
Very relatable story
The story is very relatable and I enjoyed it. But the parts where narrator talks in the deeper voice of the men made me cringe. I literally couldn’t stand it and fast forwarded.
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