Showing results by author "Alena Dillon" in All Categories

For Sera Wheeler, the Olympics is the reason for everything. It’s why she trains 30 hours a week, starves herself to under 100 pounds, and pops Advil like Tic Tacs. For her mother, Charlene, hungry for glory she never had, it’s why she rises before dawn to drive Sera to practice in a different state, and why the family scrimps, saves, and fractures. It’s why, when Sera’s best friend reports the gymnastics doctor to the authority who selects the Olympic Team, Sera denies what she knows about his treatments, thus preserving favor.

Inside a century-old row house in Brooklyn, renegade Sister Evelyn and her fellow nuns preside over a safe haven for the abused and abandoned. Gruff and indomitable on the surface, warm and wry underneath, little daunts Evelyn, until she receives word that Mercy House will be investigated by Bishop Hawkins, a man with whom she shares a dark history. In order to protect everything they’ve built, the nuns must conceal many of their methods, which are forbidden by the Catholic Church.

Kathy Begley is an empty nester, the primary caretaker of her ailing mother, and the emotional support for her laid-off husband. She’s also returning to the office after two decades to work under a borderline inappropriate boss. Then a Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony invitation arrives, and she uncovers an unfathomable family secret: her mother, Peggy Mayfield, wasn’t just a tempestuous wife and mother. She was a Women Airforce Service Pilot.

My Body Is a Big Fat Temple, a memoir of pregnancy and early motherhood, follows a writer as she debates having children, miscarries, faces morning sickness, uncertainty, physical impairments, labor, breastfeeding, the "baby blues," the heartache of not loving her son as she thinks she should, parenting through a plague, until finally (basically, mostly) blossoming into her new identity.