Everything You Ever Wanted: A Florence Welch Between Two Books Pick

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She blogs at Today Moms on MSNBC, The Huffington Post and JillianLauren.com, which was named a top 100 mom blog of 2012 by Babble Magazine.

pg. 188 "You have to keep in mind that my kid didn't have parents for a while at a crucial time in his development and this has repercussions. We're working it out. We're healing. We're doing great, actually. And our version of doing great looks different from how it does for kids who have had a typical attachment cycle in the first three years of life. So he's going to need a little extra attention." Reality show on another planet’ is such an irresistible hook that, if someone had told me more than half the book would be about Iris’s pre-Nyx life in London, I might have been put off. Yet that’s what I ended up liking most about it. Sauma brings Iris to life so brilliantly that I felt like I knew her and I was her, simultaneously. This is likely by design – Iris’s whole existence is a melange of elements that will be familiar to most urban twenty/thirtysomethings – but it’s executed very well. In particular, her mental health difficulties are skilfully handled. Iris woke up feeling like there was a great weight bearing down on her body … The Smog’s long, smoky tendrils were reaching around her in an unwelcome, suffocating hug.”So I started reading this this morning and finished it this afternoon. I was obsessed and couldn't stop reading to see what was going to happen!

I am on Matt's couch again. Half the time I think I am irretrievably lost and half the time I know that I will not be here forever. This disgusting place with this love of my life. Not Matt, of course. Gross. Not even hero in. Okay, heroin, yes, heroism. But really it's the relief. The floating glaze of today and today and today. Is it so much to ask for, some relief? Says everyone who has ever made a deal with the devil. Is it so much to ask for? We take the planet as a given, and we want to see it more than we want to understand it. I cannot thank Sauma enough for this. For disregarding the pseudo-science that bogs down and overcomplicates so much modern sci-fi with needless tedium. Here’s a planet, here’s how we get there, now let’s see it. Wow, but Jillian Lauren has had a crazy life. And man, does she know how to write about it. This, her second memoir, focuses on her marriage and struggle with infertility and her ultimate decision to adopt a boy from Ethiopia. When he has attachment issues, her ability to throw herself into trying to figure out how best to help him is remarkable. I already knew that parenting was hard, but I can't even imagine dealing with a toddler who has had emotional trauma.

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Sauma knows that we all want life to be more than it is; that we long for the connections it offers to be fuller and richer. But she is especially astute about the risks involved in human love, and how rare it is that we take them. All those conversations that should happen, but don’t; the things we are too frightened to say, the decisions we leave until it is too late. Iris’s last Earth weeks are replete with such occasions: her attempts to say goodbye to her mother and her flatmate Kiran, the time she spends with her teenage sister. Mona was born when Iris was 15 – “too old to be her friend, too young to appreciate babies, too busy counting the years till university when she could finally leave home”. The gap between them, for so long too large, now becomes the most important to bridge. pg. 135 "People are constantly saying: Oh, it's a boy thing. Oh, it's a stage. Oh, everyone goes through that. They mean to be helpful, but I am left feeling lonely and inadequate. If everyone goes through this, why does it feel so insurmountable?"