All Skate: True Stories from Middle Life

ALL SKATE: True Stories from Middle Life is a series of musings from one mid-life woman, wife, and mother on what it means to grow old in a country obsessed with TikTok, Instagram influencers, and that creepy Elon Musk and his Mars-bound robots. "What will you do / with your one wild and precious life?" the poet Mary Oliver asked, and the answer here is "everything." From grade-school crushes to pandemic roller-skating disasters, from the dread of bathing suit season to the embrace of flawed and beautifully fragile bodies, from the uncomfortable joy of Swedish death-cleaning to the easy joy of holding on to the tiniest moments that matter, All Skate is one woman's testimony to the eternal powers of humor, love, and kindness.

"Tough, searching and funny, these intimate essays find hope even during the worst tribulations of middle age. Lori Jakiela is a fearless writer, trying to make sense of her life and losses while celebrating the world and the people she loves with an indomitable wonder. All Skate is that rare miracle-a book that gives you courage."-Stewart O'Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster and Emily, Alone

"With Lori Jakiela you get a generous wit, a completely unique sensibility, and a playful weaving of disparate subjects that in her hands become inevitably connected. This is a writer who holds a bright (and often funny) lantern up to darkness she feels is on its way, and darkness that has already swept through her life in the form of loss. Who but Jakiela would leave the lights on in their dead mother's house so they could drive by and imagine she was still inside watching Golden Girls? Deep love of brilliantly drawn parents, children, students, friends, and husband permeate this collection, as does Jakiela's sharp eye on gender, and on how class operates in the world of literary culture. Once again, Jakiela resists pretension while holding onto roots, onto home, onto the ties that bind and give our lives meaning."-Jane McCafferty, author of First You Try Everything and The Sea Lion Who Saved the Boy Who Jumped From the Golden Gate

"In All Skate: True Stories from Middle Life, Lori Jakiela delivers another collection of essays brimming with what readers have come to love about her work: a little heartbreak, a lot of humor, and the hard working hands of a writer who always knows exactly where to draw a reader's attention. Jakiela does the brilliant work of connecting everything from Buddhism to roller skating to Jimmy Carter, mastectomies, butterflies, bullies, bikinis, and working class bars. She writes essays like the airplanes she describes from her time as a flight attendant. They're full of heavy baggage and anxious characters, but they glide like weightless miracles, making readers forget how much technical skill it takes to build and fly each of these beautiful machines."-Sarah Shotland, author of Junkette

"Lori Jakiela reminds me of those fearless street performers who toss lighted torches in the air and always, miraculously, catch them on the way down. Jakiela's flaming torches are hard, funny truths about herself, about us, and about the nation as it burns down to ashes. "-Susan Zakin, author of In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster and founding editor, Journal of the Plague Years