The Wrong Way to Save Your Life - by Megan Stielstra (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Stielstra is a masterful essayist." --Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

From an important new writer comes this powerful collection of personal essays on fear, creativity, art, faith, academia, the Internet, and justice.

In this poignant and inciting collection of literary essays, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. In her titular piece "The Wrong Way To Save Your Life," she answers the question of what has value in our lives--a question no longer rhetorical when the apartment above her family's goes up in flames. "Here is My Heart" sheds light on Megan's close relationship with her father, whose continued insistence on climbing mountains despite a series of heart attacks leads the author to dissect deer hearts in a poetic attempt to interrogate her own feelings about mortality.

Whether she's imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra's work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful--this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.

Intellectually fierce and viscerally intimate, Megan Stielstra's voice is witty, wise, warm, and above all, achingly human.

From the Back Cover

In this intellectually daring, viscerally intimate collection, Megan Stielstra interrogates her own fear in stories both personal and universal as she searches for a better way to live. The titular piece answers the question of what has value in our lives--which is no longer rhetorical when the Chicago apartment above her family's bursts into flames. The essay "Here Is My Heart" details her close relationship with her father, a big-game hunter in Alaska who continues to climb mountains despite his heart problems, leading the author to dissect deer hearts in a poetic examination of mortality.

Whether imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of losing her first home during the recession, or shining a light on the complexities of postpartum depression tangled with the fierce joys of motherhood, Stielstra's work informs, impels, and embraces us all.

Review Quotes

Praise for Megan Stielstra: "Stielstra's Once I Was Cool isn't just edgy, funny, surprising, a ricochet of wow. It's practically actionable. The words reach out from the page. They direct us to look, to think, to ask." - The Chicago Tribune
"America's next great essayist is Megan Stielstra." - Joyland
"She has a profound understanding of where we all go in our minds, and the unique ability to turn it into a story that sounds like your new best friend is telling it to you." - Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much
"That is Stielstra's talent: her ability to create experiences. Every narrative seemed to pick itself up off the page and turn itself into a performance before my eyes. The numerous asides, amendments, and annotations, force the reader to see and hear her work, not just read it. Ekphrasis (visual description) at its best, there is no contemporary author more vivid in description that Megan Stielstra." - The Chicagoist
"Stielstra's voice is so palpable, so immediate and vibrantly alive, it feels as though she's standing right in front of you." - Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men
"A star of the Chicago story-telling scene, Stielstra internalizes her engagement with the live audience and translates it to the page with a voice that is personal and candid, yet neither nostalgic nor self-referential. In the four parts of this collection, each devoted to a decade of her life, Stielstra segues between quotidian concerns and harrowing ones, like what objects to grab as she and her son narrowly escape their burning apartment building." - National Book Review
"The author of the beloved Once I Was Cool returns this summer with a fresh book of essays on fear, and it couldn't be more timely. Stielstra's essays read like the conversations you want to be having with friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, and strangers, but maybe--like me--you've been a little afraid to initiate. Like a good friend, Stielstra doesn't hold back on her love, wit, wisdom, and truth. . . . What I loved most about this book was how deeply I felt Stielstra's own heart thumping on every page. She taught me that the opposite of fear isn't courage. It's kindness." - Ploughshares
"The essay collection that I still think about the most, for its wit and its wisdom, is Megan Stielstra's masterpiece." - Maris Kreizman
"I'm fascinated with the way kindness cancels out fear (and fear cancels out kindness), and Stielstra's essays wrestle with both." - Chicago Tribune
"It's opened up my thinking about the personal essay. She has a knack for taking her personal, intimate stories and broadening them outward to consider how she fits in this larger project of humanity we're all engaged in. The book is genius." - Amanda Fortini, Nevada Public Radio
"These essays--all centered on the subject of fear--are powerful, beautiful, relevant, raw, and important. In deeply intimate and personal stories, she invites readers on a journey through multiple neighborhoods, homes, writing programs, jobs, and beaches; through concert venues and dog parks; through offices and classrooms. Chicago is alive on the page--not just as a backdrop, but as an active agent on the choices and events in Stielstra's life. Her life has clearly been marked by the city, and she grapples every day with how to mark Chicago in turn--to make it better. This isn't her first collection, and how lucky we will be if it isn't her last." - Chicago Review of Books
"Reading this book is like listening to stories from a wise, compassionate, and irrepressibly funny friend--one who allows her empathy to fill every unflinching tale about how fear both plagues and saves us. Whether she's writing about gun laws, a bear attack, or post-partum depression, Stielstra's clear voice calls for us to stay awake, and to pay attention." - Esmé Weijun Wang
"For its wisdom and compassion, honesty and courage, Stielstra's stellar essay collection is a lifeline and a microscope, a means of examining the dread of whatever one finds daunting and a manner of exorcising demons through the sheer power of commitment and desire."
- Booklist (starred review)
"It's Stielstra at her best: wryly funny and brutally honest." - Chicago Magazine
"A life-enriching collection of essays by a conscientious writer and teacher who knows that asking the right questions is more important than having all the answers. . . . The author sounds like a marvelous teacher, and her collection offers plenty of teaching moments. In a style that is literary but never pedantic, Stielstra has crafted a collection that has such a sense of continuity that it could pass as a memoir." - Kirkus (starred review)
"She has a flair for nostalgia and for cultural criticism that is never pretentious. Moreover, her take on going from her hapless 20s to her more sophisticated 40s is funny and smart. It is easy to connect with her experiences as she unabashedly relates embarrassing or discomfiting moments, whether it is digging through the trash for her retainer at Wendy's as a teenager or sleeping with a guy during her 30s 'who made me keep my socks on. He was afraid of feet.'" - Publishers Weekly
"Warm, funny and occasionally furious. . . Megan Stielstra maps essential questions about art and the self: questions about memory, assumption, love and fear. . . .Stielstra is an evangelist for story's power to transform lives. . . . Her sentences hum with the humor and asides of oral storytelling." - Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Stielstra's wonderful writing and her storytelling bravery is truly a gift for everyone who reads her." - Kevin Sampsell, author of This Is Between Us
"Stielstra's prose reads like something your friend needs to tell you RIGHT NOW, before she even takes her coat off." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"A noted fiction writer whose unique, dynamic readings often include elements of live music, distancing her from the pack of her hushed, floor-gazing peers on the lit-reading circuit... Her specific brand of performance-pairing quirky Sedaris-style musings with unexpected theatrical trimmings like on-site musicians (she once used an entire New Orleans brass band)-is a text-based variation on the 'story theater' style used by many Chicago theater artists." - Time Out Chicago
"In Once I Was Cool, Megan Stielstra is warm and open and wise. Whether she's writing about the complex loneliness of early motherhood or failing to rise to the occasion or find the right language while living abroad, Stielstra is a masterful essayist. From the first page to the last, she demonstrates a graceful understanding of the power of storytelling. What she's truly offering with her words, is the grandest of gifts." - Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
"In The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, Megan Stielstra takes a core sample of her life, like a core sample of a glacier, and subjects it to her great punk-rock sensibility. What happens? It melts beautifully! There are fires and guns and knives in these terrific essays, and heavy metal and bloody hearts on cutting boards, and Stielstra handles it all with humor and expert humanity." - Eula Biss, author of On Immunity
"When Megan Stielstra writes you can actually feel her beautiful heart pumping blood through every sentence." - Samantha Irby, author of Meaty and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.