Description:
From the author who redefined motherhood for the modern age comes an unflinchingly honest account of midlife, identity, and recovery
By her mid-forties Angela Garbes had built a good life. She was a successful author with a loving husband, two kids, and a thriving community. Her writing on motherhood was hailed as urgent and groundbreaking by peers and critics. Internally, though, she was consumed by feelings of unworthiness, professional pressure, fragmented memories she'd rather not confront, and a substance use habit that was no longer tenable. As the first generation daughter of Filipino immigrants, Garbes had learned how to be the type of daughter her family needed, translating American customs to her hardworking parents and assimilating herself into her rural surroundings. As a latchkey kid of the 1980s, she learned that big feelings were an inconvenience and external achievement offered a clear path to approval. She found solace in tv, books, pop culture, and carefree visits to the Philippines, all the while burying truths that threatened family happiness. Thus a child who knew how to be everything to everyone without knowing herself became an adult who found relief and belonging in alcohol and cocaine, coping mechanisms that morphed into an addiction that poisoned the joys and responsibilities of mothering and daily life. Never Too Much is the story of Garbes's recovery, and an honest examination of the forces that landed her there. It is also the story of an artist becoming herself and a fierce excavation of youth from the vantage of midlife. Readers are invited on her journey to see the way motherhood, relationships, and aging collide with generational trauma, abuse, and the search to reclaim identity. Garbes does the exhilarating, terrifying, and liberating work of confronting her past to know herself, this time on her own terms. For readers of Leslie Jamison, Claire Dederer, Meaghan O'Connell, and Cathy Park Hong, In Translation is Garbes's most personal work yet, and her most unforgettable.Brief description: Angela Garbes is the author of the national bestseller Essential Labor, called "a landmark and a lightning storm" by the New Yorker. Her TED Talk "What Working Parents Really Need From Workplaces," which insists that we treat caregiving as the work that makes all work possible, has been viewed over two million times. Her first book, Like a Mother, was an NPR Best Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, New York, Bon Appétit, and featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and NPR's Fresh Air. She lives in Seattle.
Review Quotes:
"Across her body of work, Angela Garbes has pledged her commitment to the raw and ungovernable, the everyday maelstrom, the beauty in all these things. Never Too Much feels like an unexpected bloom that sprang from this soil. It is a history of self-alienation and a recounting of Garbes' long, impure, beautiful quest to finally find in herself a home. It's uniquely candid, and tremendously, intimately moving, from a writer of remarkable power and strength."--Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
"Angela Garbes has written a memoir of striking clarity and courage that is intimate, searching, and unsparing about addiction, family, and the ways we hide from ourselves. With vivid detail, Garbes captures a life in all its contradictions, creating a story that feels both deeply personal and universally true. I couldn't look away."--Kate Baer, #1 NYT bestselling author of How About Now "A searing portrait of the artist as woman in mid-life, the artist as an addict, the artist as a mother, daughter, wife, and flawed human being working through pain. Never Too Much is a deeply humane, courageous, beautiful book that left me changed, and that will change others too. It is one of the most moving renderings of the struggle for self-knowledge and self-expression that I have ever read."--Lydia Kiesling, bestselling author of The Golden State and Mobility "I inhaled this book like it was an endless cup of noodles. Moving through recovery, motherhood, daughterhood, aging, and art making, Angela Garbes digs into the depths of what we're afraid to tell ourselves and implores us to see what can grow in that trembling yet fertile compost of midlife. A profound reckoning of what it means to undo shame and 'badness' even when we want to waltz right into it." --Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City "When I say that I felt this book physically, I mean that Angela Garbes has written an arrow straight through the chest. Never Too Much is a revelation: as scorching as it is tender, as precise as it is lyrical. Garbes pulls at the fraying seams of her life and makes art from it." --Molly Wizenberg, author of The Fixed Stars "A lush, generous, fecund, sweaty, animal masterwork of human vulnerability. Exquisite as an orchid, primal as a feeding frenzy, Angela Garbes' writing contains more life than seems possible. Somehow in its tender specificity this book manages to capture the whole world." --Lindy West, author of Adult Braces and Shrill "Never Too Much is tender, courageous, and packed with so much pain, tension, self-doubt, and ambition, I felt like I was right there, listening to the author's heartbeat. And isn't that the whole point of all of this? To show ourselves so that others can feel seen?" --Jennifer Romolini, author of Ambition Monster