Jackie Shannon Hollis - This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story

With honesty, generosity, precision, and insight, Hollis writes the story of her lifefrom her girlhood in rural Oregon, where she both broke and followed the rules, to her hard-earned self-acceptance at middle age. This Particular Happiness is a gloriously wise book about one womans unexpected path to becoming.

Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild

This Particular Happiness claims an important place in the conversation about what it means to be female, especially a female who doesnt follow the script written by a traditional rural family. Written in honest and intimate chapters, this stunning debut memoir is ultimately a love letter to the power of choice.

Sheila Hamilton, author of All the Things We Never Knew

Examining every feeling of sorrow, jealousy, need, regret and pain, she unspools her story like the counselor that she is; always asking why, always digging deeper.... Beautifully done with an open, honest voice, This Particular Happiness is a memoir of childlessness, happiness, and wholeness, and how those disparate things can entwine around a full life.

Dianah Hughley, bookseller, Powells City of Books

This book drew me in from the very first scene and gave me what I want in a memoir: the opportunity to see inside a very particular experience as well as to ponder big questions. What blend of family, culture, and personality inform our expectations? What do we seek from love and intimacy? How do we build defenses against trauma? How do we change? Hollis writes with a clarity and rhythm that makes the reading easy going even as she covers difficult and complex territory. The artful interweaving of storylines and time periods reveals a hard-won wisdom.

Zoe Zolbrod, author of The Telling

Jackie Shannon Holliss This Particular Happiness doesnt keep secrets. Its bare-naked honest. What a relief. Another sparkling moment of honesty, what we need, what we crave, what we try to remember.

Leanne Grabel, author of Brontosaurus: Memoir of a Sex Life

This Particular Happiness examines the particularly female journeyhow and where do we make room for love? And whether lover, wife, mother, or daughter, how can we be our most authentic selves? Jackie Shannon Hollis explores this rich terrain with clarity and courage, in spare and lovely prose evocative of the high plains landscape and fertile farmland she hails from.

Jennie Shortridge, author of Love Water Memory

This Particular Happiness is the eloquent unfolding of Jackie Shannon Holliss lifelong understanding of and relationship to her own body: what it could do for her, how it could be used against her, and, ultimately, how she claimed it as her own. Her prose is both achingly beautiful and precise, underscoring the journey of discovering integrity to oneself, and the promise of true love.

Liz Prato, author of Volcanoes, Palm Trees,

and Privilege: Essays on Hawaii

Sit down. Make tea. Hold This Particular Happiness by Jackie Shannon Hollis in your hands and read it slowly because she has written you a love letter. Maybe the intimacy in this prose comes from the tender way she observes. Maybe its the lyrical prose flexing, revealing the complicated choices one couple makes under the pressures of small towns, big events, changing times, and the relentless pursuit of understanding. Surely, its her writing that captures her wanting that is as open as the wheat country that formed her. In this love letter, you will find your own beautiful ache.

Kate Gray, author of Carry the Sky

Jackie Shannon Hollis takes a topic that is typically whispered about and stares at it unflinchingly: a womans decision whether or not to have children. She questions the cultural conditioning (told by movies, television, and our families), along with her own biological and emotional responses, that a childless woman is failing to fulfill her destiny. What she excavates during this psychological dig is the truth that what makes any womans life successful is the woman herself. A powerful book for both genders and any sexual orientation.

Kate Carroll de Gutes,

author of The Authenticity Experiment

This deeply engaging memoir wrestles with one of the most important questions of all: Why do we want what we want? Jackie Shannon Hollis explores how her own desires have been shaped by a culture that celebrates mother more than any other role for women, and the possibilities that open up when she chooses not to play the role. A vibrant, absorbing, intimate book.

Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

We all know that having a child changes everything, but so, too, does not having one, and in Holliss brave, moving memoir, she explores the bliss, the yearning, the making peace with a life she and her partner chose (and didnt choose), and how happiness takes on shapes we can never imagine. The perfect book for anyone contemplating motherhoodor not!

Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling

author of Pictures of You

Jackie mines the depths of who she is and how she wants to be in this complicated world. She doesnt settle for the obvious path, and even though theres some disappointment and heartbreak, she learns how to love and be loved in just the way she wants. This book is a celebration of living life using your own damn map.

Yuvi Zalkow, author of A Brilliant Novel in the Works

Content warning: The author wants you know that this is a story of her life, including joys and sadnesses, falling in love, and experiencing the death of loved ones. A sexual assault is also a part of this story. She hopes you will find many beautiful things here, as the painful parts of life can be transformed by sharing our experiences .

Disclaimer: The author has done her best, through memory and conversations with others, to relate the events told in this memoir as factually as possible. In scenes of her husbands childhood, she filled in images from stories he told her. In a few instances, names, identifying characteristics, or specific details of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others without altering the facts relevant to this story .

2019 by Jackie Shannon Hollis

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, with the exception of reviewers quoting short passages, without the written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hollis, Jackie Shannon, 1958- author.

Title: This particular happiness : a childless love story / Jackie Shannon

Hollis.

Description: Portland, Oregon : Forest Avenue Press, [2019] | Includes

bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019007726 | ISBN 9781942436393 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Hollis, Jackie Shannon, 1958- | Childfree choice--United

States. | Childlessness--United States.

Classification: LCC HQ762.U6 .H65 2019 | DDC 306.87--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007726

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton (copyright May Sarton) reproduced by permission of W.W. Norton and Company .

Thanks to The Sun magazine, Rosebud, Mary Journal , VoiceCatcher, and Flashquake , where some of the material in This Particular Happiness first appeared.

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Printed in the United States of America

Forest Avenue Press LLC

P.O. Box 80134

Portland, OR 97280

forestavenuepress.com

In memory of Mom.