21 Best nonfiction books like I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood by Jessi Klein

If you liked the nonfiction plot in I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood by Jessi Klein , here is a list of 21 books like this:

Similar categories in Ann Patchett's Tom Lake book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• adult
• audiobook

"You can’t pretend this [Covid] isn’t happening,"

-Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

"In the summer the pear trees were fine. In the summer, all that is hideous about a pear tree is hidden by leaves and pears. But once those disguises were removed they were nothing but acres of murder…"

-Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

"Hazel, listen to me. I'm going to tell you something important, you need to be brave.' I then explained to the dog how I have told myself for so many years that my career fell apart because I wasn't …"

-Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

"It's as if someone bought all the diamonds at Tiffany's, and crushed them into dust, then spread that dust across the water so that it sifts down evenly, filtering through the shards of light that cu…"

-Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Similar categories in Sloane Crosley's Grief Is for People book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• essays
• audiobook

"Grief is for people, not things."

-Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

"Suicide is a tax on human consciousness."

-Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

"How will he know you loved him," she asks, "unless you try to destroy yourself?"

-Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

"Pictures should be of what you see, not of what the world sees when it sees you."

-Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

Similar categories in Miranda July's All Fours book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• humor
• adult
• audiobook

"But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"Maybe we shouldn't do that," Jordi said. "Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn't have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn't we be normalizing change?"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"I guess any calling, no mater what it is, is a kind of unresolved ache," I said, giving in to knowing more than him. "It's a problem that you can't fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will c…"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to co…"

-Miranda July, All Fours

Similar categories in Mary Louise Kelly's It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• parenting
• biography
• memoir
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• adult
• audiobook

"In his book "Being Mortal", the surgeon Atul Gawande accurately describes the joy that flows from being good at your work. 'You become a doctor for what you imagine to be the satisfaction of the work…"

-Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs

Similar categories in Becky Kennedy's Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• nonfiction
• adult
• parenting
• audiobook

Similar categories in Ann Napolitano's Hello Beautiful book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• adult
• audiobook

"The child inside Julia lay wide-eyed in the dark, knowing that she was Jo, but only because Sylvie was Beth."

-Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

"You and your sisters have so many reference points, such a dense history," William said. "I never get used to it."

-Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

"She was Julia's wild hair, she was the lake her husband had once been carried out of, and no matter what happened next, she was love."

-Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

"You’re depressed, not crazy. It’s not insane to be depressed in this world. It’s more sane than being happy. I never trust those upbeat individuals who grin no matter what’s going on. Those are the o…"

-Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

Similar categories in Jenny Jackson's Pineapple Street book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• adult
• audiobook

"But you know foundations shouldn't have to be the answer. The real problems are tax laws, anti-labor policies, and the slow expansion of the welfare state," Chip said. Everyone turned and looked at h…"

-Jenny Jackson, Pineapple Street

Similar categories in Curtis Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• humor
• adult
• audiobook

"Just to be clear,"

-Curtis Sittenfeld, Romantic Comedy

"Aren't we all performing the role of ourselves?"

-Curtis Sittenfeld, Romantic Comedy

"I don't write from a point of clarity. I write out of confusion."

-Curtis Sittenfeld, Romantic Comedy

"Isn't the goal to live with out demons, not to expect them to go away?"

-Curtis Sittenfeld, Romantic Comedy

Similar categories in Maria Bamford's Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• audiobook

Similar categories in David Sedaris's Happy-Go-Lucky book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• short stories
• nonfiction
• essays
• audiobook

Similar categories in Nora McInerny's Bad Vibes Only (and Other Things I Bring to the Table) book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• essays
• adult
• audiobook

"He can say he forgives me, sure, but I know better. In therapy, I work on forgiving myself."

-Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only (and Other Things I Bring to the Table)

"How frightening to know that your brain can betray you this way, that the vessel for our sense of self is often faulty and prone to error. How awful to know that death may come for us over and over, …"

-Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only (and Other Things I Bring to the Table)

"To admit this—a hopelessly unfashionable addiction to the appearance of my body—is a crime in some circles. It's much more becoming to "embrace your flaws" or—even better—to not see your body's flaws…"

-Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only (and Other Things I Bring to the Table)

Similar categories in Rob Delaney's A Heart That Works book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• parenting
• biography
• memoir
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• audiobook

"I felt like I was being asked to find an individual lentil in a warehouse that a tornado had just torn through"

-Rob Delaney, A Heart That Works

"Why don't you just leave open the possibility that others love you, whether you like it or not, and that the people who'd like you to stick around aren't, to a man, wrong."

-Rob Delaney, A Heart That Works

Similar categories in Molly Shannon's Hello, Molly!: A Memoir book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• adult
• audiobook

"But I thought, I can do whatever I want. I can be friends with whoever I want. I'm going to be friends with the freaks and the geeks and I don't have to fit into any clique. And I'm Free! And I like …"

-Molly Shannon, Hello, Molly!: A Memoir

Similar categories in Nathan Hill's Wellness book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• audiobook

"It's an altogether manic and ceaseless conversation, a conversation that feels sometimes like falling down stairs, barely keeping upright, taken by gravity, skipping, grasping, and then somehow landi…"

-Nathan Hill, Wellness

"Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them. So he says, ‘Yes I beli…"

-Nathan Hill, Wellness

Similar categories in Casey Wilson's The Wreckage of My Presence book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• short stories
• nonfiction
• essays
• audiobook

Similar categories in Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• parenting
• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• short stories
• nonfiction
• essays
• adult
• audiobook

"A mother's heroic journey is not about how she leaves, but how she stays."

-Jessi Klein, I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

"But becoming a mother alters every ince of your body, your routine, your soul, your heart."

-Jessi Klein, I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

"Motherhood leaves you inevitably and profoundly changed; you can be similar to who you were - maybe? - but you'll never be the same."

-Jessi Klein, I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

"Because now I know that everything bad can happen, and I am responsible for it not. Because sometimes I feel like keeping us from dying will kill me. Because I am on board, and I'm exhausted. Because…"

-Jessi Klein, I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

Similar categories in Elizabeth Passarella's It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• essays
• adult
• audiobook

"The whole crux of the Christian faith is that we cannot save ourselves... I know that I can't fix the brokenness inside me or overcome my own sin. For people who don't share my faith, this sounds tot…"

-Elizabeth Passarella, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

"Epilogue: "I don't need these. Not any of this." "I want this camel. This is all I'm taking just to remember him by." "Sometimes you hold on to a big thing, an overwhelming thing because you believe …"

-Elizabeth Passarella, It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

Similar categories in Kate Kennedy's One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• essays
• adult
• audiobook

"Why would I ever let someone who drafts make-believe football teams make me believe I should be embarrassed by my interests?"

-Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

"Pregnancy loss...is an open wound with the most vulnerable scab, forced to constantly replenish its surface-level protection as it's picked at daily, not by you, but inadvertently by other people's j…"

-Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

"I'm a weird contradiction of someone who pursues and values traditions but tries to reject the parts that are oppressive, unfair or unnecessary, because we can adapt things to who we are, not to who …"

-Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

"That's the thing about girlhood. You and your friends have to take yourselves seriously, because no one else will. We had to keep our emotional behavior to diary pages and fangirl in private, perform…"

-Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

Similar categories in Jessica Grose's Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• parenting
• memoir
• nonfiction
• adult
• audiobook

Similar categories in Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautiful book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• essays
• adult
• audiobook

"At our wedding, our college creative writing professor read a poem—John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage."

-Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

"How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go. Inside forty-somethin…"

-Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Similar categories in Rebecca Makkai's I Have Some Questions for You book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• adult
• audiobook

Similar categories in Catherine Newman's Sandwich book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• adult
• audiobook

"What does loss look like, in your body? Where is it? It feels like an air bubble stuck in your psyche. It feels like peering down into a deep hole. The vertigo of that. The potential for obliteration…"

-Catherine Newman, Sandwich

"We're just ruined by sex, women---our bodies, our psyches. We're sexually assaulted every five minutes. We're infected with everything. Traumatized by conceiving, by not conceiving. But let's keep at…"

-Catherine Newman, Sandwich

Similar categories in Angela Garbes's Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• parenting
• memoir
• nonfiction
• essays
• audiobook

"We are caught between how we were raised and how we really want to live."

-Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

"More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible,"

-Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

"Doing this requires knowledge of the history of mothering and care work—how they came to be seen as naturally female, which is to say invisible and undervalued."

-Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

"When you become a mother, you engender life, endless possibilities. Mothering is creative in a very literal sense—it is cultivating all that potential, bringing a small person into consciousness."

-Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Similar categories in Kate Baer's And Yet: Poems book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• parenting
• memoir
• short stories
• nonfiction
• adult
• audiobook

"Let your life rest on what is already good."

-Kate Baer, And Yet: Poems

"It's just another day in the good-bad, bad-good earth machine."

-Kate Baer, And Yet: Poems

"We expect so much of children, hovering above them like giant, invincible gods. What a racket to discover as an adult, how little we have to pass down."

-Kate Baer, And Yet: Poems

Similar categories in Samantha Irby's Quietly Hostile: Essays book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• memoir
• humor
• short stories
• nonfiction
• essays
• adult
• audiobook

"[...] and my face is sore from smiling so hard in an effort to appear friendly and nonthreatening."

-Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays

"I'm so embarrassed by everything all the time, humiliated even by the need to breathe air where other people can see me"

-Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays

"I want to push back against this idea that it's not real love if you're not passionately chattering at each other all the time, that it's just as valid (and romantic!) to know instinctively when to s…"

-Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays

"I lived in blissful solitude for a long time...and you learn a lot about yourself and what you require for life when it's just you that you have to think about...You can buy frozen fish sticks and ea…"

-Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays

Similar categories in Chelsea Devantez's I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This [But I'm Going to Anyway] book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• short stories
• nonfiction
• essays
• audiobook

Similar categories in R. Eric Thomas's Congratulations, the Best is Over! book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• short stories
• nonfiction
• essays
• audiobook

"If I'm not heading toward a place where I can feel joy, then hope in the present has nothing to hold on to."

-R. Eric Thomas, Congratulations, the Best is Over!

Similar categories in Emma Straub's This Time Tomorrow book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• adult
• audiobook

"This time tomorrow, where will we be?"

-Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

"Forward, that was the idea. Until the future, whatever it was going to be."

-Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

"It's not about the time. It's about how you spend it. Where you put your energy."

-Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

"Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope - hope was honest. Hope was good."

-Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

Similar categories in Paul Scheer's Joyful Recollections of Trauma book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• nonfiction
• essays
• audiobook

"I didn’t need a girlfriend when I had Blockbuster."

-Paul Scheer, Joyful Recollections of Trauma

"But not acknowledging my trauma took away my triumph. I survived, and I wanted to make surviving the abuse part of my story. I want to wear my former shame with pride."

-Paul Scheer, Joyful Recollections of Trauma

Similar categories in Mary Laura Philpott's Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• parenting
• biography
• memoir
• humor
• biography memoir
• short stories
• nonfiction
• essays
• audiobook

Similar categories in Catherine Newman's We All Want Impossible Things book and Jessi Klein's I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

• adult
• audiobook

"In the end there’s more beauty in the imperfection."

-Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things