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Sign up todayThis Particular Happiness
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Learn moreAs a farm girl in eastern Oregon, feeding bottles to bummer lambs and babysitting her little sister, Jackie Shannon Hollis expected to become a mother someday. After a series of failed relationships, she met Bill, the man she wanted to spend her life with. But he was a man who never wanted children. Saying I do meant saying I don’t to a rite of passage her body had prepared her for since puberty.
Told in short nonlinear chapters, This Particular Happiness explores the fracturing of female identity as Shannon Hollis questions her childless decision, navigates her roles as daughter and wife and sister and friend, and ultimately learns to listen to her own heart. This debut memoir is about what we keep and what we abandon to make space in our lives for love.
In addition to thinking she would be a mother, Jackie Shannon Hollis once dreamed of being a June Taylor dancer or a race car driver. A lifelong Oregonian, she resides in a home her friends call the tree house. Through her local library, she facilitates writing classes for people experiencing houselessness. Jackie and her husband lead workshops on communication, conflict management, and creating successful and satisfying relationships.
In addition to thinking she would be a mother, Jackie Shannon Hollis once dreamed of being a June Taylor dancer or a race car driver. A lifelong Oregonian, she resides in a home her friends call the tree house. Through her local library, she facilitates writing classes for people experiencing houselessness. Jackie and her husband lead workshops on communication, conflict management, and creating successful and satisfying relationships.
Reviews
“This Particular Happiness, is a deeply moving story about Jackie Shannon Hollis’s decades-long yearning to have a child―and her complicated decision not to. But it’s also about so much more than that. With honesty, generosity, precision, and insight, Hollis writes the story of her life―from her girlhood in rural Oregon, where she both broke and followed the rules, to her hard-earned self-acceptance at middle age. This Particular Happiness is a gloriously wise memoir about one woman’s unexpected path to becoming.”
“We all know that having a child changes everything, but so, too, does not having one, and in Hollis’s brave, moving memoir, she explores the bliss, the yearning, the making peace with a life she and her partner chose (and didn’t choose), and how happiness takes on shapes we can never imagine. The perfect book for anyone contemplating motherhood―or not!”
“An ideal memoirist. Her prose is honest and open; she presents herself, with all her shortcomings, in the same direct light as her other characters.”
“This Particular Happiness examines the particularly female journey―how and where do we make room for love? And whether lover, wife, mother, or daughter, how can we be our most authentic selves? Jackie Shannon Hollis explores this rich terrain with clarity and courage, in spare and lovely prose evocative of the high plains landscape and fertile farmland she hails from.”
“This deeply engaging memoir wrestles with one of the most important questions of all: Why do we want what we want? Jackie Shannon Hollis explores how her own desires have been shaped by a culture that celebrates ‘mother’ more than any other role for women, and the possibilities that open up when she chooses not to play the role. A vibrant, absorbing, intimate book.”
“A celebration of living life using your own damn map.”
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