The New York Times Book Review: A review of the new memoir by Rob Delaney, which explores the actor’s shattering experience of losing his two-year-old son, Henry, to brain cancer. “A Heart That Works may be a tribute to a lost son and the family who survives him; it may be a hand outstretched to bereaved parents who feel alone on their planet of grief; but most of all, it is a hopeful plea to people everywhere to make choices, large and small, guided by love. What a world it would be if we did.”
– Book Review: A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney
The Washington Post: An excerpt from Bomb Shelter, depicting the before-and-after moment when a mother finds her son unconscious and calls for help. After a close call comes within a breath of taking what we love the most, can we ever be the same — or is everything changed?
– The Night Time Stopped
The Atlantic: An adapted excerpt from Bomb Shelter, telling a surprising story and contemplating the fact that while we can’t protect our loved ones forever, love is never futile. “The extraordinary doesn’t wipe out the ordinary. People get married in wartime. Babies are born during pandemics. My mom drew water for my bath and flung wet clothes into the dryer and taught me to tie my shoes while my father did test runs for the end of the world.” – The Most Haunting Truth of Parenthood
PARADE Profile: Dolly Parton & James Patterson A conversation with a pair of legends, both at the top of their game. “What’s clear from their camaraderie is that something even bigger than a book with its own soundtrack has emerged from their collaboration: a genuine friendship. While they may be mismatched in height and glamour (no offense at all to Patterson, but who could possibly sparkle at comparable wattage to Dolly Parton?), these two highly uncommon figures have found they have a great deal in common.”
The Washington Post: On graduations, vaccinations, publications… and the exhilarating, heartbreaking forward march of time. “So much of life — creating, parenting, aging — is getting used to one phase just in time for it to end, then stumbling forward to the next one. A new stage may feel exciting at the same time it feels unsteady. Like flying, but also like falling. Like exposure. But when it’s time, it’s time. You can’t go back.”
— As the World Opens Up, It’s Tough to Let Go
Recent Book Reviews
New York Times Book Review: The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser
Washington Post Book World: Left on Tenth by Delia Ephron
The Week: Six All-Time Unforgettable Books
Washington Post Book World: A Conversation with Nobel Prize Winner Kazuo Ishiguro
Essays & More
The New York Times
For Those We Can’t Always Protect
This Togetherness Is Temporary
I’m So Excited for 40th Grade
The Great Fortune of Ordinary Sadness
To the Type-A Person Having a Meltdown
Hard Knock Life: What Are The Turtles Telling Me?
Shopping for a Car — And a Teenager’s Future
My Adventures in Accountability
Sing, O Muse, of the Mall of America
Wishing Away the Wish List
The Power of Place
How to See More Of Your Best Friends? Move Away
When the Honeymoon Is Over: Settling Into Real Life
In Praise of Name Tags
“Hookup Line”
And Then the Dog Died
Finding Friends in a New Town
Telling the Kids: We’re Moving
Rekindling a Love for Dinner
The Washington Post
In Search of Lost Time
This Novel Has a Cat Narrator — And It Had Me at Meow
Look to the Lessons of Theater Kids
Learning From Our Mistakes
Teaching Girls to Save Their Own Lives
This Shop’s Walls Can Talk (In 140 Characters)
The Atlantic
Face Hunger: What We Miss When We’re Masked
Real Simple
Writer Mary Laura Philpott Knows When To Quit
White Lies
The Paris Review
The Case for Seasonal Sentimentality
Lit Hub
Why, Exactly, Do We Have Subtitles on Books?
Surviving the Ordinary: Why We Need Memoirs of Regular Lives
Stealing Stories, Book Tours, and Staying Off Twitter
Girl Scout Heart, Henry Miller Mind
Garden & Gun Magazine
Soda Shop Time Machine
Southern Women: Lee Smith, Storyteller
Expand Your Southern Canon
The Los Angeles Times
It’s Not the Celebrities You Mourn For
Parade
Interview: Dolly Parton and James Patterson
Why Writer Mary Laura Philpott Is Ditching Her Stilettos (And Why She Ever Wore Them in the First Place)
Salon
Wearing Someone Else’s Scrubs: The Comfortable Cotton of the Road Not Taken
Philpott often interviews fellow writers — from the latest up-and-coming novelists and memoirists to celebrity authors such as Sally Field — both live onstage and in a variety of publications. She also profiled authors regularly for several years as founding editor of Musing, the digital magazine of Nashville’s legendary independent bookstore, Parnassus Books. And for six seasons, she was a host of the Emmy-winning literary interview program on Nashville Public Television, A Word on Words.
Mary Laura Philpott 