TOTALLY BIASED REVIEWS

In this episode, our host, Asha Dore, chats with author Stephanie Weaver about her estrangement memoir, Bitter, Sweet. Find the book here: https://stephanieweaver.com/bitter-sweet More about Bitter, Sweet: In Bitter, Sweet, Stephanie Weaver blends her personal journey of healing from childhood sexual abuse, family estrangement, and narcissistic dynamics with research and actionable strategies. At 30, memories of her abuse surfaced, forcing her to confront betrayal, gaslighting, and emotional wounds. Weaver turned her pain into empowerment and now offers readers tools to reclaim their identity, set boundaries, and heal. A lifeline for survivors of trauma and estrangement, Bitter, Sweet is poignant, unflinching, and hopeful, reminding readers that healing is not just possible—it's transformative. For anyone seeking resilience, this book is a powerful guide forward. About Stephanie Weaver: I'm a writer, TED talk coach, and speaker.  My drive is to find the meaning behind things and then explain it clearly. If it's an experience, I'll try to improve it as well. The old-world tailors and engineers in my family tree played a hand in my path, whether or not I realized it. Measuring. Styling. Recreating. I was destined to redefine myself and my career from health educator to exhibition developer to experience consultant and wellness advocate. I don't choose the stories I write. They choose me, born out of deeply personal experiences. I believe we all have stories to tell. Know yourself and you'll understand yours.https://stephanieweaver.com/about/  Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. www.AshaDore.net www.parleyproductions.com  Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com  

In this episode, Asha Dore chats with Jenny Bartoy about the new anthology that Bartoy edited, No Contact: Writers on Estrangement. Tune in for a lively conversation about estrangement, trends, and how to parent kids differently when you have separated from a family member. Find the book here: https://books.catapult.co/books/no-contact/ About No Contact: Estrangement presents an essential existential question: who are we without our family? What kind of person cuts the proverbial umbilical cord and why? And who do we become, once untethered from our kin? Families fall apart and individuals cut ties for myriad reasons—abuse, politics, mental illness, and addiction, among others—and reunification often is not in the cards. Estrangement can be a positive change, as Emi Nietfeld explains in her essay about finding relief and logic after cutting off her mother. It can be a journey: noam keim rebuilds their sense of self by learning Arabic in their ancestral homeland of Morocco, while Nicole Graev Lipson searches for answers in literature and motherhood after her brother ghosts her. Other writers explore how estrangement complicates life's big shifts—Domenica Ruta traces the repercussions of severing ties while battling cancer; Hannah Bae reels from the prospect of cultural alienation when she cuts off her Korean parents; and after twenty years of separation, Soni Brown reluctantly becomes her mother's caretaker as dementia erases her memory. Through thirty-two intimate, first-person accounts, No Contact counters the prevalent trope of reconciliation as a happy ending, focusing instead on the complex grief, healing, and authenticity found in the rupture from family. Featuring work by Hannah Bae, Eben E. B. Bein, Soni Brown, Lorne Daniel, Lindsey Danis, Michelle Dowd, Nick Flynn, Stephanie Foo, Gabriela Denise Frank, Susan Ito, Danielle Jernigan, noam keim, Erika Krouse, Monique Laban, Cassandra Lewis, Kate Lewis, Nicole Graev Lipson, Tiffany Aldrich MacBain, Jamal Mahjoub, Onita Morgan-Edwards, Emi Nietfeld, Geneva Phillips, Deesha Philyaw, Anna Qu, Domenica Ruta, Oslyn Serratos, Alyson Shelton, Cheryl Strayed, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Raksha Vasudevan, Jane Wong, and Kristen Millares Young. About the Author: https://jennybartoy.com/ JENNY BARTOY is a French American editor and critic. Her writing appears in several anthologies and in such publications as The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, Under the Gum Tree, Room, Chicago Review of Books, CrimeReads, and The Rumpus, among others. She holds a master's degree from Columbia University and lives in Tacoma, Washington.  Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions.  Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. www.AshaDore.net www.parleyproductions.com  Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com  

In this episode, Asha Dore chats with Mary. Alice Stewart, a writer, electrician (!!), and book agent at ENLIVEN ENDEAVORS. More about Enliven here: ENLIVEN is a future-thinking agency which provides a dynamic, interdisciplinary home to writers and creators of all stripes. Our goal is to expand the definition of what a literary agency does to support its clients. We strive to be a true creative partner, helping writers to grow and develop across all mediums. We are proud to say that many of our clients are multi-hyphenates– writers, actors, dancers, musicians, visual artists, poets, translators, and performers. We believe that by truly understanding and tapping into their unique gifts and aspirations, we can break boundaries and help them thrive. https://www.enlivenendeavors.com/ About Mary Alice: Mary Alice Stewart is a writer, editor, and a literary agent at Enliven. She holds an MFA and a BA from Bennington College and is currently a student at Central Maine Community College in their Electromechanical Technology program where she also teaches writing to students heading into the trades. Mary Alice has lectured/consulted for Tin House, The Shipman Agency's Work Room, North Carolina Writers' Network, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Caricon: A Celebration of Caribbean Literature, Chelsea Hodson's Morning Writers' Club, and more. She has attended The John Ashbery Home School and the Disquiet workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, and received a residency with Virginia Center for Creative Arts. As a private editor, her clients have gone on to publish with premier publishing houses. Her writing has appeared in Forever Mag, Rose Books' inaugural anthology Primal Scream, Joyland, No Tokens, and elsewhere. An essay of hers has been translated into Italian for Edizioni Black Coffee's website. Mary Alice is from, and lives in, Maine. Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. www.AshaDore.net  www.parleyproductions.com  Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com  

Our host, Asha Dore, talks with Amanda McCracken about her 2026 book, When Longing Becomes Your Lover published by Worthy Books  Find it here: https://www.amazon.com/When-Longing-Becomes-Your-Lover/dp/1546008535/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0 About the book: Journalist and late-in-life virgin Amanda McCracken dated over 100 men by the time she was in her late thirties. She was so certain she was doing everything she could to find the loving, lasting relationship she wanted. So why wasn't it working? After another breakdown in her therapist's office, she came to a startling realization: she was addicted to longing. This realization was part of a 10-year journey to understand the cultural, neurological, and psychological factors that shaped her beliefs about love, sex, and commitment. She began to understand that longing for someone feels good. It can even feel better than being in a secure relationship. Longing can provide a sense of control when life is uncertain and offers a safe place to hide from emotional vulnerability, especially in today's online dating and hookup world. But longing can trigger an addictive neurochemical boost that can derail us from forming healthy, intimate relationships. In this searingly honest book, Amanda shares the crushes, relationships, situationships, travel, friendships, hookups, bad dates, wins, losses, and brushes with fate that came with her journey.  Starting with her early childhood hero fantasies and how they evolved in her tween and teen years into a commitment to the purity movement espoused at her church, she chronicles her profound longing for love that led her to her lowest point. She provides a deep, exploratory look into the state of mind known as limerence: an obsessive rumination on an idealized version of someone. Amanda weaves together her personal journey with research, storytelling, soul-searching questions, and quotes from experts and nonexperts alike to reveal the addictive nature of longing while providing hope through her journey of breaking her patterns and ultimately choosing the path towards healthy, authentic intimacy. About the author: Amanda McCracken is a journalist and the host of the podcast The Longing Lab. Her TEDx talk, "How longing keeps us from healthy relationships," was a TED editor's pick. She's been interviewed about her essays on relationships, sex, and longing by Kate Couric, USA Today, Bloomberg News, and the BBC. She's also the author of the forthcoming book "When Longing Becomes Your Lover." Follow her on Instagram or LinkedIn. Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com  

Our host, Asha Dore, talks with Kristine Langley Mahler about her 2026 book, Teen Queen Training published by Autofocus Find it here: https://nyupress.org/9781957392431/teen-queen-training/ About the book: It takes a lot of work to erase the rules of being a teenage girl. Desperate to know what behaviors would produce the "right" adolescence, during the late 1990s Kristine Langley Mahler sought instruction from outdated etiquette guides and Seventeen magazine to subdue her central fear: how to convince someone to choose her. Twenty years later, married and mothering three adolescent daughters of her own, Mahler stumbles upon a 1963 edition of The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining—elegant, archaic directives that push her right back into her old frustrations and propel the creation of Teen Queen Training: a series of 26 erasure essays created from its 26 chapters, illuminating the differences between what she was told and what she really learned. About the author: https://kristinelangleymahler.com/ Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of three nonfiction books: A Calendar Is a Snakeskin (Autofocus Books, 2023), Curing Season: Artifacts (West Virginia University Press, 2022), and the erasure essay collection Teen Queen Training (Autofocus Books, 2026). Kristine's work has been supported by an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council and a residency from Art at Cedar Point Biological Station, thrice named Notable in Best American Essays, received the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review, won the Sundog Lit Collaboration Contest, and has appeared in print and online at Salon, DIAGRAM, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and Brevity, among others. Kristine is the director and publisher of Split/Lip Press. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie, Kristine makes her home outside Omaha, Nebraska. Cancer sun, Aquarius moon. Ask her where she's "from" and she will spread out the maps. email Kristine: kristine at kristinelangleymahler dot com Bluesky: @suburbanprairie / Instagram: @kristinelangleymahler newsletter: Creepsakes Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com

Find Chasing Bandits by Michael E. Neagle here: https://uncpress.org/9781469691046/chasing-bandits/ About the book: Exploring the war on terror before 9/11 While the war on terror has been America's largest and most publicized attempt to root out foreign enemies this century, the quest to identify and destroy real or imagined threats to national security has long been a part of US history. Indeed, since the onset of the United States' overseas empire at the dawn of the twentieth century, it has pursued enemies in places of strategic interest around the globe: the remote islands of the Philippines, the US southern border, hemispheric hot spots in Central and South America, and the greater Middle East. The common depiction of these kinds of foes—private actors who did not formally represent the countries they fought for—has maintained a remarkable consistency over time. The only difference is that enemies who used to be called "bandits" then are now more often referred to as "terrorists." The widespread use of such terms, which connote an illegitimacy of both cause and means, also has served to blunt deeper considerations of US foreign engagements. Drawing on six case studies, Michael E. Neagle spotlights the commonalities of how the United States has leveraged popular understandings of "bandits" to justify incursions abroad as well as rally popular and political support at home. Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore www.AshaDore.net and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth www.parleyproductiobs.com Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com

More than cookies and badges When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girls. Shy by nature, she dreaded her long, unhappy days at school. But a few years later, Farrell found an escape from bullying, the promise of sisterhood, a rising sense of confidence, adventure, and—best of all—lifelong friendship when she joined a Girl Scout troop. Decades later, award-winning author Farrell returns to those formative experiences to explore the complicated and surprising history of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Drawing from extensive archival research, visits to iconic Girl Scout sites around the world, and vivid personal reflections, Farrell uncovers the Girl Scouts intricate history, revealing how the organization has shaped the lives of more than 50 million girls and women since its founding in 1912. With Farrell as our own intrepid guide, we travel to American Indian boarding schools, Japanese American incarceration centers, segregated African American communities, middle-class white neighborhoods, and outposts throughout the globe. Intrepid Girls unpacks how the Girl Scouts navigated tensions over feminism, race, class, and political differences, carving out extraordinary opportunities for girls and women—even as it participated in the very discrimination it promised to transcend. For anyone who has ever worn a uniform or wondered about the hidden history behind this iconic American institution, Intrepid Girls will surprise, inspire, and challenge what we think we know about the Girl Scouts.

Find Famished here: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802884510/famished/ About this book: A groundbreaking debut memoir that examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites Raised Baptist in an insular Appalachian community, Anna Rollins learned early that among the world's many dangers, her own body loomed large. So, she dedicated herself to keeping it small—strictly controlling her calories and exercising to the point of exhaustion while murmuring some version of the prayer: "We must decrease so that He can increase." She was picking up a similar mantra online: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." To be a Christian woman was to be thin and chaste, sidestepping any pleasures of the flesh that would cause you—or a brother in Christ—to stumble into sin. But thinness was also a sign of virtue to the outside world. By day, Rollins attended schools and churches where male pastors and older women policed female bodies. By night, she scrolled websites and chat rooms where dieting itself inspired a kind of religious devotion. Despite Rollins's piety, anger grew in her chest. "I was all hunger, all need. I was ashamed. But I was also proud. I knew that I was also physical, embodied, a person with desires, despite how frequently I was told that I was not." Still, it wasn't until she found herself obsessing over how she would burn off the pasta she ate for dinner while watching her infant son struggle to breathe in the ICU that Rollins could admit to herself the extent to which she'd bought into the false promises of both purity and diet culture: That if she controlled her appetites, she would be righteous. That if she made herself smaller, she would be safe. Blending memoir, research, and reporting, Famished untangles these lies and encourages women to reclaim their appetites for life, love, and food, both physical and spiritual. Interweaving her own story of disordered eating and sexual dysfunction with those of other women she interviews, Rollins discovers a sisterhood committed to finding freedom from body shame. Along the way she rewrites her own body's story to include a purpose much greater than its size or parts or the roles she fills as daughter, wife, and mother, a body well-loved by her and beloved by God. Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com

Find The Blue Dress here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374393595/thebluedress/ About this book: For fans of Jasmine Warga and Starfish, an Iranian American girl navigates complicated relationships with her mother, her best friend, and her body image in this unflinching and ultimately uplifting middle-grade debut. Sometimes Yasmin feels like her body isn't hers. And it's not just because puberty has mounted a full-on alien invasion, or that emigrating from Iran a year-and-a-half ago has meant one change after another. It's also because her mother constantly pushes her to lose weight, like sewing Yasmin a beautiful blue dress for Persian New Year that is too tight on purpose. At school, it doesn't help that Yasmin's best friend, Carmen, is petite and close to her own mother, or that popular-girl Zoe always has a mean comment to spare. Yasmin is sure her crush, Jack, won't ever like her the way she is, either. With the pressure to fit in closing in on all sides, Yasmin starts taking desperate measures. But if being thin is supposed to make her happier, then why does losing weight feel like losing parts of herself, too? From debut author Rebecca Morrison comes The Blue Dress, a heart-rending, funny, and hopeful book inspired by her own life, relatable to anyone who has ever needed to break away from someone else's vision of how they should look in order to embrace their true self I was born in Iran, immigrated to the United States in my teens, and now live in the Washington, DC, area. In 2020, after practicing law for over two decades, I decided to pursue my dreams of becoming a writer. My work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Newsweek, The Independent and HuffPost, among others. My debut novel, The Blue Dress, based on my childhood as an Iranian immigrant trying to fit into my family's expectations of beauty and my American homeland is coming out on March 24, 2026. I'm represented by Erin Niumata at Folio Literary Management for adult books and John Cusick at Folio Jr. for children's books. Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com

Buy For a Spell, here - https://uncpress.org/9781469690445/for-a-spell/ More about the book: In the Southeastern United States of the late 1970s, a regional network of radical communal gay households formed in the face of rising New Right terror. Consisting of primarily white, self-described sissies, the Southeast Network, as it came to be known, spanned from the Ozarks, to New Orleans, to Appalachian Tennessee. Though this network was short-lived, its legacy lives on today through Short Mountain Sanctuary, a thriving member of the international Radical Faerie movement. Jason Ezell's intimate account of the formation and dissolution of these sissie houses reveals a little-known history of Southern gay liberation, nonbinary gender expression, and radical feminism and femininity. Drawing on journals, letters, oral histories, collective manifestos, and newsletters, Ezell illustrates how these gay households nurtured their community through lesbian feminist practices such as collectivism, consciousness-raising, witchcraft rituals, and rural gatherings. As people and practices traveled from one house to another, these linked houses attempted to conjure underground sanctuaries for queer Southerners. Preserving their moving stories, Ezell details the visions, experiments, and shortfalls of these radical households in their attempts to build solidarity, resist mounting right-wing violence, and sustain their revolutionary dreams for queer movements yet to come. More about Jason Ezell - https://www.instagram.com/sjezell/?hl=en Find more on www.ParleyLit.com and www.totallybiasedreviews.com    or on Instagram at @ParleyLit Your host is Asha Dore. Find her at www.AshaDore.net  or on Instagram at @adjsbb Intro and exit music by Nuclear Peasant

Buy The Power of Parting here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/733809/the-power-of-parting-by-eamon-dolan/ Find Eamon Dolan Here: https://www.instagram.com/eamondolan?igsh=bjk3YTdrcXRmZnBw&utm_source=qr About the book: A myth-shattering, inspiring book that combines research, reportage, and memoir to explore the growing phenomenon of estrangement from toxic relatives—showing it not as a tragedy, but as an empowering and effective solution to the heartbreak of family abuse. After decades of enduring his mother's physical and psychological torment, after years of trying in vain to set boundaries, Eamon Dolan took a radical step: he cut his mother out of his life. No more phone calls, no more visits, no more contact. Parting with his abuser gave him immediate relief and set him on a path toward freedom, confidence, and joy like none he had ever felt before. In The Power of Parting, Dolan has written the book he wishes he'd had when he was struggling to free himself from his mother's abuse. In the process, he discovered how widespread estrangement really is. At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a parent, sibling, or other family member. He also learned why so much stigma surrounds this common—and often lifesaving—phenomenon. Even among therapists—the professionals who would seem most attuned to the pain relatives can inflict—there's a bias toward reconciliation, when millions of their patients need instead to escape their abusers' grip. Estrangement, Dolan realized, should be understood and embraced, not shrouded in shame. Drawing on his own suffering and healing, as well as experts' advice and the testimony of other courageous survivors, Dolan first explains why abuse is much different and more prevalent than we may think, how it harms us in childhood and beyond, and why limiting or eliminating contact might be our best possible choice. Then, he walks readers through the steps of a successful, positive estrangement: how to take crucial time for yourself; how to make sure no one can gaslight you into minimizing or forgetting; how to set rules for your abuser and—if they can't or won't respect your limits—how to end a toxic relationship. He also offers valuable counsel on how to ease the guilt and grief that often accompany parting, and how to break the cycle of abuse that was likely passed down to you through many generations. With a convincing blend of clarity and empathy, Dolan encourages others to do what he ultimately did for himself: determine whether the people in your life treat you with the care and concern you deserve—and part ways with them if they don't. Your host today is Asha Dore: www.ashadore.net  & @adjsbb on Insta Edited and Curated by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth Produced by Parley Lit and Parley Productions www.ParleyLit.com Intro and Exit music by Nuclear Peasant

Buy Painful Forms: https://uncpress.org/9781469688947/painful-forms/ Find out more about Anna at her website or follow her on Bluesky: https://annaioanes.com/ @annaioanes.bsky.social About the book: Unsettling art unsettles our normalization of violence In the wake of World War II, Americans struggled to grasp the shifting scale of violence brought on by the nuclear era. To grapple with the overwhelming suffering of the sociopolitical moment, new ways of thinking about violence—as structural, systemic, and senseless—emerged. Artists and writers, however, challenged the cultural impulse to make sense of these new horrors, mobilizing what Anna Ioanes calls "aesthetic violence." Searching for the strategies artists employed to resist the normalization of new forms of crushing violence, Ioanes examines the works of major cultural figures, including Kara Walker, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known artists such as playwright Maryat Lee and riot grrrl figure Kathleen Hanna. Grounded in close reading, archival research, and theories of affect, aesthetics, and identity, Painful Forms shows that artists employed forms that short-circuited familiar interpretive strategies for making sense of suffering and, as a result, defamiliarized commonsense notions that sought to naturalize state-sanctioned violence. Rather than pulling heartstrings, stoking outrage, or straightforwardly critiquing injustice, Ioanes argues, aesthetic violence forecloses catharsis, maintains ambiguities, and refuses to fully make sense, allowing audiences to experience new ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing about suffering. Your host today is Asha Dore: www.ashadore.net & @adjsbb on Insta Edited and Curated by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth Produced by Parley Lit and Parley Productions www.ParleyLit.com Intro and Exit music by Nuclear Peasant