Uplifting titles from Tara Westover’s memoir Educated to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City offer escape and inspiration
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert has long been the hoary cliche of new starts, the story of a woman who apparently can’t find any decent Italian food in New York, but for my money it is not a patch on the best of that genre, Julia Child’s My Life in France, the memoir of how she wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It is great on food, but even better on life, and accepting it just as it is. She finds joy everywhere, and it’s extremely hard not to fall in love with her.
If the weather is not behaving itself and you want to heat up a little, How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan is the sexy, sun-drenched story of a woman finding herself in the Caribbean with a handsome younger man, full of laughs and heart. You will also unfailingly be cheered by Elizabeth von Arnim’s absolutely gorgeous 1922 novel The Enchanted April, about a mismatched set of women spending a month together in Tuscany; it’s pure escapist heaven.
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