This Is The Author

"I wrote this book, AN AMERICAN FAMILY, to tell the story of my family’s immigration to the United States. But behind all this, the American values that inspired me to decide to come to the United States and then make it a home."

"I had been working in the single-mom space through my blog and podcast, and speaking and media engagements, for more than five years. I was raised by a single mom, I became a single mom, and I had a lot of initial shame around being a single mom. And, you know what? It happens to suit me really well. And I found myself relaxing into this time that I’m in and finding all these women—there’s ten million single moms in our country, millions worldwide, and these women have nothing to be ashamed about. I’m meeting incredible women every day that are doing incredible things—in business, in their communities, with their families—and I wanted to reach out to them. And I wanted to inspire the women that aren’t quite there yet."

"My book is about how I learned to be a leader and how I built my company. I wrote it because when I started I would spend every Friday night in the bookstore, reading about CEOs and successful organizations, so that I could learn from them. And I found wonderful stories and amazing stories of success, but I always left wondering how they did it."

"My book is about life in the Texas border country. It follows my family’s migration into Texas from Missouri in the 1850s. But in a larger sense, it’s about the migration of different peoples, through a distinctly unwelcoming landscape over the last 14,000 years."

"My book, SO MUCH I WANT TO TELL YOU: Letters to My Little Sister, is a collection of essays and lessons that I’ve learned over the past decade since her suicide in 2007."

"People always ask me why I wrote the book, where did I get the idea to write the book. As with most of my books, the idea did not come from me, it came from others, specifically two friends to whom I dedicate the book. One is Markus Spieker, who lives in Germany, and the other is my dear friend here in New York, Greg Thornbury, who is the president of the Kings College. I had never thought about writing a biography of Luther, but these two very dear friends kept pushing me to think about it saying that the 500th anniversary of the reformation, October 31st, 1517 presented a perfect occasion for people to rethink his legacy, and in many cases, learn about this seminal figure, whom perhaps, they had never encountered. The more I looked into it, I was myself embarrassed at how little I knew and at how shockingly seminal Luther was."

"I think that I realized there were a lot of stories and ideas that didn’t really make sense to talk about on stage in a stand-up context because they were just too embarrassing, or not funny enough, or just too personal, and I couldn’t figure out a way to perform them live. And so I started writing them down and they just sat in this document, and I just hoped one day I’d get brave enough to do it or smart enough to figure out how to do them on stage, and I just couldn’t. People kept suggesting I write a book and I always just felt like, 'Oh God, that’s something you do when you have a long life.' I just didn’t feel like I had enough to offer, and then I thought, “Oh, maybe I should do all those stories that I've never figured out how to tell on stage. Maybe they’re a book.' And I started looking at them and I was like, “Wow this stuff’s embarrassing, I’m never gonna be able to say this in front of people.' So I just gave up on that ever happening and I started turning it into a book. And then to get throug

"FASTER THAN NORMAL is about understanding that a trait that many of us are born with, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, is not the curse or the disability that we’ve been told it is all of our lives, that if managed properly, allows us to be faster than normal, to have quicker a brain, to come up with answers faster than other people, to create, to explore, to learn faster and differently, to get more hours in our day back, to get more of our life back. It is a gift, not a curse."

"My book is about adolescents—how they age, how they grow, and how they make decisions. Why do they do what seem like the most insane things at times? I wrote my book because I’ve always been really interested in the teenage years, and not only teens, but adolescence, that period of time from about 10,11,12 until about 25, 26,27, when we actually start to not only become, but act, like adults. Those years so many things change and we all remember those years in in our own lives so acutely, so intensely, just like it was yesterday. Well, it turns out there are a bunch of reasons why that is the case and we set a path for ourselves during those years that really forecasts our future…so much inevitably changes and predicts who we will become and how we will get there. And that is something that has fascinated me my entire life."

"As a magazine writer, I’m always looking for other people’s stories and trying to talk to people about what their lives are like. I always knew that that came from a place from having some pretty crazy experiences as somebody who’s bipolar and that I had all these stories that seemed outlandish and bananas, and that maybe I had to start with my own story. It all definitely started when lithium, the medication that I was taking for bipolar disorder, stopped working for me. All of a sudden, bipolar disorder and lithium became so much more prominent and important in my life. And it became much more clear to me that it was a bigger part of my identity than I ever imagined."

"My book THE FOUR TENDENCIES is about a personality framework that I’ve identified called the Four Tendencies that divides all of humanity into four types: Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel. I got my first insight into this framework when I had lunch with a friend and she said something that got me obsessed with this question of personality types. She said, 'I know I would be happier if I would go running, and when I was in high school I was on the track team and I never missed track practice, so why can’t I go running now?' And I thought, 'Well, why? It’s the same person, the same behavior, at that time it was effortless but now she can’t do it. What’s going on?' My determination to figure out the answer to that question, in the end, led me to write a whole book, called THE FOUR TENDENCIES."

"I was inspired to write this book, UNLEASHING THE INNOVATORS, because I love big companies, I worked in one for 25 years, and in my consulting practice, company after company I meet is struggling with culture change, and revitalization, and growth, and energy, and risk and dealing with fear of failure. And many of them were using startups to try to kind of put new energy into the company. And yet, I didn’t think there was a playbook for that."

"Hi, my name is Erwin Raphael McManus. I live here in Los Angeles, California and I’m the lead pastor of a community of faith called Mosaic. I just wrote a book called THE LAST ARROW. And THE LAST ARROW is really about living a life without regret. I began to ask the question, “what is it about people that often times confuses quitting with failing?” Since so many times in life we lower our expectations, and so in some ways the subtext title for me is that we should never settle."

"What inspired me to write MEDITATE WITH ME: A Step-by-Step Mindfulness Journey was I wanted kids to have a way to slow down. I wanted to give kids a beloved book that they could connect to, that they could interact with, practices that were easy for them, a way to feel their breath in their body, a way to slow down when they need it, and a way to really calm themselves…a way to sort of start practicing self-soothing techniques that they’ll really need throughout their entire lives."

"My book, READING WITH PATRICK, is about a student of mine named Patrick, and this remarkable literary and intellectual awakening we experienced together in a county jail in Arkansas. He was a student in my class who was incredibly bright, really quiet, and just had trouble coming to school. I really encouraged him to come to school to write and to read and we had this incredible year together where he improved incredibly. Three years after this, I’ve left Arkansas—it’s a place where a lot of people leave—I agonize about it, I decide to go to law school. My parents are like, “what the heck are you doing in Arkansas?” Three years later, I’m in law school and I find out from a friend that Patrick had gotten into a fight and killed someone. I was totally devastated. I was shocked. I went back to Arkansas to visit him in county jail and I discovered that his reading skills had regressed. They were worse when I first met him in the eighth grade, and it’s because he had dropped out of school the year after I left t

"It is about basically finding an email when my daughter was three weeks old that led me to the discovery that my husband was not who I thought he was. And showing the really perfect fairy tale 'before' aspects of our relationship and then the 'after' parts, where I’m just uncovering lie after lie and kind of unraveling this double life he had been living. I wrote my book because I actually didn’t feel like I had a choice not to. It kind of wrote itself in four months and it felt like I was writing to survive."

"It took me 10 years to write DRAW YOUR WEAPONS. I wrote it after seeing two photographs. The first photograph I saw was a picture of a man and he was holding a violin, and I read the newspaper story about him. It turned out he was a conscientious objector during World War II who’d protested the internment of Japanese Americans, and was put in prison. While he was there, he built a violin. And the newspaper story I read about him was about his grandson completing that violin and giving it to him on his birthday. And everything in my body said, 'you have to write about this person.'"

"I found myself writing about a lot of these women in my day job, which is a culture writer at BuzzFeed. And it seemed clear to me that there was something that was changing. I used to be a professor, and I focused on media studies but also gender studies. And so I was very familiar with the ways that attitude towards women, an embrace of feminism, and unruliness generally, kind of ebb and flow over decades."

"The story behind my book THE CHANGELING is that I became a new father and started taking endless numbers of photos of my son, and posting them to Facebook almost immediately. And then I had to ask myself why in the world was I sharing something so private."

"Somebody asked me ‘Do you want to do an autobiography?’ I wasn’t going to do it now—I say this in my introduction. I thought it’s what you do at the end...I did not know the rules. But they said, 'Do it!' I thought, okay, I’ll do one. It’s a halfway point. This is my first half of life."