A Wall Street Journal bestseller.
New York Times bestselling author Jen Lancaster is here to help you chill the hell out.
When did USA become shorthand for the United States of Anxiety? From the moment Americans wake up, we’re bombarded with all-new terrifying news about crime, the environment, politics, and stroke-inducing foods we’ve been enjoying for years. We’re judged by social media’s faceless masses, pressured into maintaining a Pinterest-perfect home, and expected to base our self-worth on retweets, faves, likes, and followers. Our collective FOMO, and the disparity between the ideal and reality, is leading us to spend more and feel worse. No wonder we’re getting twitchy. Save for an Independence Day–style alien invasion, how do we begin to escape from the stressors that make up our days?
Jen Lancaster is here to take a hard look at our elevating anxieties, and with self-deprecating wit and levelheaded wisdom, she charts a path out of the quagmire that keeps us frightened of the future and ashamed of our imperfectly perfect human lives. Take a deep breath, and her advice, and you just might get through a holiday dinner without wanting to disown your uncle.
New York Times bestselling author Jen Lancaster is "as adept at fiction as she is at telling her own stories" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). And now in her new novel, reality gets an unreal makeover...
Reagan Bishop is a pusher. A licensed psychologist who stars on the Wendy Winsberg cable breakout show I Need a Push, Reagan helps participants become their best selves by urging them to overcome obstacles and change behaviors. An overachiever, Reagan is used to delivering results.
Despite her overwhelming professional success, Reagan never seems to earn her family's respect. Her younger sister, Geri, is and always will be the Bishop family favorite. When a national network buys Reagan's show, the pressures for unreasonably quick results and higher ratings mount. But Reagan's a clinician, not a magician, and fears witnessing her own personal failings in prime time. (And seriously? Her family will never let her hear the end of it.) Desperate to make the show work and keep her family at bay, Reagan actually listens when the show's New Age healer offers an unconventional solution...
Record Nielsen ratings follow. But when Reagan decides to use her newfound power to teach everyone a lesson about sibling rivalry, she's the one who will be schooled...
One would think that with Jen Lancaster's impressive list of bestselling self-improvement memoirs-Bitter Is the New Black; Bright Lights, Big Ass; Such a Pretty Fat; Pretty in Plaid; My Fair Lazy; and Jeneration X-that she would have it all together by now.
One would be wrong.
Jen's still a little rough around the edges. Suffice it to say, she's no Martha Stewart. And that is exactly why Jen is going to Martha up and live her life according to the advice of America's overachieving older sister-the woman who turns lemons into lavender-infused lemonade.
By immersing herself in Martha's media empire, Jen will embark on a yearlong quest to take herself, her house, her husband (and maybe even her pets) to the next level-from closet organization to craft making, from party planning to kitchen prep.
Maybe Jen can go four days without giving herself food poisoning if she follows Martha's dictates on proper storage....Maybe she can grow closer to her girlfriends by taking up their boring-ass hobbies like knitting and sewing....Maybe she can finally rid her workout clothes of meatball stains by using Martha's laundry tips.... Maybe she can create a more meaningful anniversary celebration than just getting drunk in the pool with her husband....again. And maybe, just maybe, she'll discover that the key to happiness does, in fact, lie in Martha's perfectly arranged cupboards and artfully displayed charcuterie platters.
Or maybe not.
To smooth her admittedly rough edges, Jen Lancaster is going to 'Martha up' and live her life according to the advice of America's overachieving older sister. By immersing herself in Martha's media empire, Jen will embark on a yearlong quest to take herself, her house, her husband to the next level. Maybe Jen can go four days without giving herself food poisoning, if she follows Martha's dictates on proper storage. Maybe she can create a more meaningful anniversary celebration than just getting drunk in the pool with her husband...again. And maybe, just maybe, she'll discover that the key to happiness does, in fact, lie in Martha's perfectly arranged cupboards and artfully displayed charcuterie platters. Or maybe not...
How could we know that forever could end at seventeen?'
Anyone passing through North Shore, Illinois, would think it was the most picture-perfect place ever, with all the lakefront mansions and manicured hedges and iron gates. No one talks about the fact that the brilliant, talented kids in town have a terrible history of throwing themselves in front of commuter trains.
Meet Simone, the bohemian transfer student from London, who is thrust into the strange new reality of an American high school; Mallory, the hypercompetitive queen bee; and Stephen, the first-generation genius who struggles with crippling self-doubt. Each one is shocked when a popular classmate takes his own life except not too shocked. It's happened before. With so many students facing their own demons, can they find a way to save each other as well as themselves?
Bridesmaids meets The In-Laws in a novel told from the alternating perspectives of two women who define the term frenemies-from New York Times bestselling author Jen Lancaster.
Jacqueline Jordan knows conflict. A fearless journalist, she's spent the past decade embedded in the world's hot spots, writing about the fall of nations and the rise of despots. But if you were to inquire about who topped Jack's enemy list, she'd not hesitate to answer: Kitty Carricoe.
Kitty reigns supreme over the world of carpools and minivans. A SAHM, she spends her days caring for her dentist husband and three towheaded children, running the PTA, and hiding vegetables in deceptively delicious packed lunches.
Kitty and Jack haven't a single thing in common-except for Sarabeth Chandler, their mutual bestie. Sarabeth and Jack can be tomboys with the best of them, while Sarabeth can get her girly-girl on with Kitty. In fact, the three of them were college friends until the notorious frat party incident, when Jack accidentally hooked up with Kitty's boyfriend...
Yet both women drop everything and rush to Sarabeth's side when they get the call that her fabulously wealthy husband has perished in a suspicious plane crash. To solve the mystery surrounding his death, Jack and Kitty must bury the hatchet and hit the road for a trip that just may bring them together-if it doesn't kill them first.
A NOTE FROM JEN LANCASTER:
"To whom the fat rolls...I'm tired of books where a self-loathing heroine is teased to the point where she starves herself skinny in hopes of a fabulous new life. And I hate the message that women can't possibly be happy until we all fit into our skinny jeans. I don't find these stories uplifting; they make me want to hug these women and take them out for fizzy champagne drinks and cheesecake and explain to them that until they figure out their insides, their outsides don't matter. Unfortunately, being overweight isn't simply a societal issue that can be fixed with a dose healthy of positive self-esteem. It's a health matter, and here on the eve of my fortieth year, I've learned I have to make changes so I don't, you know, die. Because what good is finally being able to afford a pedicure if I lose a foot to adult onset diabetes?"
Unfiltered. Unapologetic. Older, but not wiser, Lancaster goes back to basics in this hilarious essay collection about everything from taking community policing classes to accidentally getting high with her waiter after a fancy dinner. These are the tales she'd tell if she met you in a bar... if she weren't too lazy to put on pants and go to a bar. Offering advice ranging from how to remain happily married to a man who refuses to blow his damn nose already to not creating An Incident at the cheese counter during an attempt at Whole30, she's you, only louder. As she details the chaos that will surely ensue if she has to learn to operate one more television remote control, you'll want to settle in and pour yourself a tall one. Because what's more fun than hearing a friend share her favorite stories?
In Pretty in Plaid, Jen Lancaster reveals how she developed the hubris that perpetually gets her into trouble. Using fashion icons of her youth to tell her hilarious and insightful stories, listeners will meet the girl she used to be.
Think Jen Lancaster was always "like David Sedaris with pearls and a super-cute handbag" (Jennifer Coburn)? Think again. She was a badge-hungry Junior Girl Scout with a knack for extortion, an aspiring sorority girl who didn't know her Coach from her Louis Vuitton, and a budding executive who found herself bewildered by her first encounter with a fax machine. In this humorous and touching memoir, Jen Lancaster looks back on her life - and wardrobe - before bitter was the new black and shows us a young woman not so very different than the rest of us.
The author who showed us what it was like to wait in line at the unemployment office with a Prada bag, how living in the city can actually suck, and that losing weight can be fun with a trainer named Barbie and enough Ambien is ready to take you on a hilarious and heartwarming trip down memory lane in her shoes (and very pretty ones at that).
It's a JENaissance! The New York Times bestselling author of Pretty in Plaid gets her culture on.
Readers have followed Jen Lancaster through job loss, sucky city living, weight loss attempts, and 1980s nostalgia. Now Jen chronicles her efforts to achieve cultural enlightenment, with some hilarious missteps and genuine moments of inspiration along the way. And she does so by any means necessary: reading canonical literature, viewing classic films, attending the opera, researching artisan cheeses, and even enrolling in etiquette classes to improve her social graces.
In Jen's corner is a crack team of experts, including Page Six socialites, gourmet chefs, an opera aficionado, and a master sommelier. She may discover that well-regarded, high-priced stinky cheese tastes exactly as bad as it smells, and that her love for Kraft American Singles is forever. But one thing's for certain: Eliza Doolittle's got nothing on Jen Lancaster-and failure is an option.
In Such a Pretty Fat, Jen Lancaster learned how to come to terms with her body. In My Fair Lazy, she expanded her mind. Now the New York Times bestselling author gives herself-and her generation-a kick in the X, by facing her greatest challenge to date: acting her age.
Jen is finally ready to put away childish things (except her Barbie Styling Head, of course) and embrace the investment-making, mortgage-carrying, life-insurance-having adult she's become. From getting a mammogram to volunteering at a halfway house, she tackles the grown-up activities she's resisted for years, and with each rite of passage she completes, she'll uncover a valuable-and probably humiliating-life lesson that will ease her path to full-fledged, if reluctant, adulthood.
The fiction debut of the New York Times bestselling author of My Fair Lazy.
Told in the uproariously entertaining voice readers have come to expect from Jen Lancaster, If You Were Here follows Amish-zombie-teen- romance author Mia and her husband Mac (and their pets) through the alternately frustrating, exciting, terrifying-but always funny-process of buying and renovating their first home in the Chicago suburbs that John hughes's movies made famous. Along their harrowing renovation journey, Mia and Mac get caught up in various wars with the homeowners' association, meet some less-than-friendly neighbors, and are joined by a hilarious cast of supporting characters, including a celebutard ex- landlady. As they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings- with Mac taking on the renovations himself- Mia and Mac will discover if their marriage is strong enough to survive months of DIY renovations.
