“Thank You for Staying with Me isn’t just a great book; it is a necessary one. Bailey Gaylin Moore’s writing is as powerful as writing the hard truth gets. She grew up in the Ozarks, a conservative part of this country, but what happened to her there could have happened anywhere—and does. I was bowled over by the immediacy of her prose and moved by the magical grace of her blessings. This is astonishing writing.”—Abigail Thomas, New York Times best-selling author of What Comes Next and How to Like It
“A breathlessly beautiful, exhilarating collection throbbing with power and life. Bailey Gaylin Moore writes with impressive wit, shattering tenderness, and aching vulnerability. Mother-daughter relationships, selfhood, systemic injustice, and reckoning with the past are all delivered with stunning insight and love. This is a gorgeous, highly recommended collection.”—Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of When Trying to Return Home
“In Thank You for Staying with Me, Bailey Gaylin Moore offers exegeses of music (‘the importance of dissonance’), of history and lore (‘the myth of vagina dentata’), and of modern philosophy (‘Heidegger’s non-choices’), and the hilariously titled section ‘Hegel Exercises’ through a telling of her personal history in Missouri, in relationships with men, and in academia, using a dizzying blend of comic moments, sober revelations, and urgent lyrical explorations. Thank You for Staying with Me is meta, metal, and metaphysical. With a lens that encompasses the astronomical and the microscopic—as well as the human-scaled phenomena of Spencer’s Gifts and baseball dads—this book takes the reader on a thrilling journey of the detours and digressions of a mind coming to terms with a world in flux. Treat yourself and read this book.”—Phong Nguyen, author of Bronze Drum and Roundabout
“This is a full-throttle, working-class, single-mother, progressive, hard-drinking, feminist series of essays/meditations/rants on where America and the author’s life are headed as the midwestern homemade Trump signs blur past. Go along for the ride—if you dare. You won’t regret it.”—Sue William Silverman, author of Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul
“In Thank You for Staying with Me Bailey Gaylin Moore restlessly and ingeniously proves that a dedicated engagement of home becomes—as we age and evolve—in turns an act of redefinition and refusal, of dismantling and reconsecration. Such acts, in this brilliant essay collection, carry with them a narrative vulnerability that is as electric as it is raw, as it is exhilaratingly curious, filtering intense formative experience through inquiries into psycholinguistics, the behavior of the cosmos, legislative policymaking, philosophy, symbology, entropy, and more. Such ruminations gather an uncommon gravity as they twine to become one of the more earth-shattering comments on family that I’ve ever read. These essays—and their urgent drive to make sense of the human experience in both macro and micro ways—stand not only as testaments to but also as demonstrations of love.”—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers
“We read to understand the world and ourselves a little better. To enter the mind and heart of another through the power of words. To feel seen. In Thank You for Staying with Me Bailey Gaylin Moore gives us just that. A writer of tremendous candor, tenderness, and empathy, Moore provides an intelligent, deeply moving account of loss, trauma, depression, and teen motherhood. . . . Formally inventive and brilliantly written, these essays are both enlightening and emotionally evocative. Her impressive knowledge and background in philosophy, ontology, culture, and politics provide thoughtful context and complexity to these works as well. In the end, though, this is a book about healing and grace, hope and transcendence. The complicated love for an imperfect place and its people. And the debt of gratitude we owe the ones who stay with us.”—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works, 2003–2018
