Recipes and cookbooks, meals and mouthfuls have framed the way Candace Walsh sees the world for as long as she can remember, from her frosting-spackled childhood to her meat-eschewing college years to her post-college phase as a devoted Martha Stewart's Entertaining disciple.
In Licking the Spoon, Walsh tells how, lacking role models in her early life, she turned to cookbook authors real and fictitious (Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart, Mollie Katzen, Daniel Boulud, and more) to learn, unlearn, and redefine her own womanhood. Through the lens of food, Walsh recounts her life's journey--from unhappy adolescent to straight-identified wife and mother to divorcee in a same-sex relationship--and she throws in some dishy revelations, a-ha moments, take-home tidbits, and mouth-watering recipes for good measure. A surprising and rambunctiously liberating tale of cooking and eating, loving and being loved, Licking the Spoon is the story of how--accompanied by pivotal recipes, cookbooks, culinary movements, and guides--one woman learned that you can not only recover but blossom after a comically horrible childhood if you just have the right recipes, a little luck, and an appetite for life's next meal.

The new buzzword in female sexuality is "sexual fluidity"--the idea that for many women, sexual identity can shift over time, often in the direction of same-sex relationships. Examples abound in popular culture, from actress Cynthia Nixon, who left her male partner of 15 years to be with a woman, to writer and comedienne Carol Leifer, who divorced her husband for the same reason.
In a culture increasingly open to accepting this fluidity, "Dear John, I Love Jane" is a timely, fiercely candid exploration of female sexuality and personal choice. The book is comprised of essays written by a broad spectrum of women, including a number of well-known writers and personalities. Their stories are sometimes funny, sometimes painful--but always achingly honest--accounts of leaving a man for a woman, and the consequences of making such a choice.
Arousing, inspiring, bawdy, bold, and heartfelt, "Dear John, I Love Jane" is an engrossing reflection of a new era of female sexuality.

It's time to get past the idea that divorce equals failure. Sure, it may not be what you had in mind when you walked down the aisle, but if it's the escape hatch into a better life, it should be filled with more promise. It can be celebrated.
"Ask Me About My Divorce" is a spicy, fun, riveting collection of essays by women from all walks of life. With the unifying thread "I got divorced, and the world came into view," the words within will make readers laugh, cry, nod their heads, and feel inspired to do what they need to for themselves. These aren't stories from women tiptoeing around a difficult subject -- they're about the ways divorce can be, in fact, a new lease on life.