Why do teenagers use drugs, what happens to them when they do, and what can we do about it? Venturing into uncharted territory, mother and award-winning journalist Meredith Maran takes us inside teenagers' hearts, minds, and central nervous systems to explore the causes and consequences of our nation's drug crisis. In these pages we get to know the kids, the parents, the therapists, and the drug treatment programs at their best and worst. We're face-to-face with seventeen-year-old Mike, whose life revolves around selling, smoking, and snorting speed; fifteen-year-old Tristan -- the boy next door -- who can't get enough pot, pills, or vodka; and sixteen-year-old Zalika, a runaway, crack dealer, and prostitute since the age of twelve. In their relapses and rebounds we witness the anguish and resilience of teenagers in trouble -- a fact of life for far too many American families today.
Combining powerful on-the-street reporting, groundbreaking research, and Maran's own mothering story, Dirty is essential reading for every parent and professional who works with or cares about children or teenagers.

Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Maran, Meredith

Addiction & Recovery

HarperOne

Venturing into uncharted territory, mother and award-winning journalist Meredith Maran takes us inside teenagers' hearts, minds, and central nervous systems to explore the causes and consequences of our nation's drug crisis. In these pages we get to know the kids, the parents, the therapists, and the drug treatment programs at their best and worst. We're face-to-face with seventeen-year-old Mike, whose life revolves around selling, smoking, and snorting speed; fifteen-year-old Tristan - the boy next door - who can't get enough pot, pills, or vodka; and sixteen-year-old Zalika, a runaway, crack dealer, and prostitute since the age of twelve. Combining powerful on-the-street reporting and groundbreaking research, Dirty is essential reading for every parent and professional who works with or cares about children or teenagers.

Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation

This gripping story -a year in the lives of three high school seniors and their school-takes us deep into the hearts and minds of American teenagers, and American society, today. The seniors of Berkeley High are the white, black, Latino, Asian, and multiracial children of judges and carpenters, software consultants and garbage collectors, housewives and housekeepers. Some are Harvard bound; others are illiterate. They are the Class of 2000, and through the lives of three of them Class Dismissed brings us inside the nation's most diverse high school-where we glimpse the future of the nation. Autumn was ten when her father abandoned her family; since then she's been helping her mother raise her two little brothers and keep food on the table-while keeping her grades up so she can go to college. Her faith in God gives Autumn strength, but who will give her the money she needs when she's offered the opportunity of a lifetime? From the outside, Jordan's life looks perfect. He hangs out with the "rich white kids"; rows on the crew team, has a cool mom, applied early to an East Coast college. But Jordan's drug-addicted father died last year, leaving Jordan reeling with grief and anger that makes his life feel anything but perfect-and his future suddenly seem uncertain. A third-generation Berkeley High student, Keith is bright and popular, a talented football player who hopes to play college ball and one day, go pro. But Keith has a reading problem that threatens his NFL dream. And the Berkeley police have a problem with Keith that threatens his very freedom. Looking into the lives of these young people, in this American town, at this time in history, we see more than what's true---and what's possible--for Berkeley High. We see what's true and what's possible for America.

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

St.Martin's Press

Class Dismissed takes us inside California's Berkeley High, one of the most ethnically diverse high schools in the country. For one year, author and journalist Meredith Maran reported on the lives of three different but representative students from the Class of 2000: a troubled yet well-meaning young white man from an affluent family, a highly gifted and academically overachieving young woman from a biracial background, and a functionally illiterate African American young man who excels at football. 
In telling their stories, and in fully depicting their turbulent year as seniors―a year that saw arson, corruption, professional ineptitude, and dismal teacher morale―this book offers a fascinating, up-to-the-minute account of the socio-economic and racial realities in our public schools. 
Maran's eye-opening inquiry also shows how even a progressively multi-racial educational institution like Berkeley High can operate not as one school with a common objective but as several different schools under one roof, where students' opportunities and options are as limited as they are varied. Revealing as much about our society as it does about our teenagers, Class Dismissed is a must-read for everyone interested in the possibilities and truths behind American public education today.

St. Martin's: Griffin

“A funny, seasoned take on dashed illusions.”—O Magazine “I love everything Meredith Maran writes. She is insightful, funny, and human, and the things she writes about matter to me deeply. Her memoir, The New Old Me, is a book I don’t just want to read—I need to read it. So does everyone else who’s getting older and wants to live fully, with immediacy and enjoyment, which is to say, everyone.”—Anne Lamott, author of Hallelujah Anyway For readers of Anne Lamott, Abigail Thomas, and Ayelet Waldman comes one woman's lusty, kickass, post-divorce memoir of starting over at 60 in youth-obsessed, beauty-obsessed Hollywood. After the death of her best friend, the loss of her life’s savings, and the collapse of her once-happy marriage, Meredith Maran leaves her San Francisco freelance writer’s life for a 9-to-5 job in Los Angeles. Determined to rebuild not only her savings but also herself while relishing the joys of life in La-La land, Maran writes “a poignant story, a funny story, a moving story, and above all an American story of what it means to be a woman of a certain age in our time” (Christina Baker Kline, number-one New York Times–bestselling author of Orphan Train). Praise for The New Old Me: “High time we had a book that celebrates becoming an elder! Meredith Maran writes of the difficulties of loss and change and aging, but makes it clear that getting on can be more interesting, more fun, and a lot more exciting than youth.”—Abigail Thomas, author of the New York Times bestsellerWhat Comes Next and How to Like It “By turns poignant and funny, the book not only shows how one feisty woman coped with a ‘Plan B life’ she didn't want or expect with a little help from her friends. It also celebrates how she transformed uncertainty into a glorious opportunity for continued late-life personal growth. A spirited and moving memoir about how ‘it's never too late to try something new.’”—Kirkus

The New Old Me: My Late-Life Reinvention

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Blue Rider Press

Penguin Publishing Group

Meredith Maran lived a daughter's nightmare: she accused her father of sexual abuse, then realized, nearly too late, that he was innocent. During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy. Journalist, mother, and daughter Meredith Maran was one of them. Her accusation and estrangement from her father caused her sons to grow up without their only grandfather, divided her family into those who believed her and those who didn't, and led her to isolate herself on "Planet Incest," where "survivors" devoted their lives, and life savings, to recovering memories of events that had never occurred. Maran unveils her family's devastation and ultimate redemption against the backdrop of the sex-abuse scandals, beginning with the infamous McMartin preschool trial, that sent hundreds of innocents to jail—several of whom remain imprisoned today. Exploring the psychological, cultural, and neuroscientific causes of this modern American witch-hunt, My Lie asks: how could so many people come to believe the same lie at the same time? What has neuroscience discovered about the brain's capacity to create false memories and encode false beliefs? What are the "big lies" gaining traction in American culture today—and how can we keep them from taking hold? My Lie is a wrenchingly honest, unexpectedly witty, and profoundly human story that proves the personal is indeed political—and the political can become painfully personal.

My Lie: A True Story of False Memory

Mental Health

Jossey-Bass

In 1968 Meredith Maran was expelled from her prestigious New York high school for leading anti-war protests. Nearly thirty years later, with an ex-husband, two teenage sons, a female lover, and a mortgaged dream house on the edge of the Oakland ghetto, she's still trying to change the world ... but this time it's personal. In What It's Like To Live Now, Meredith Maran explores the gap between the dreams of the '60s and the realities of the '90s, in a book filled with uncommon insight--and her own wickedly subversive sense of humor. Reading What It's Like To Live Now is like having dinner with your funniest, most unshockable woman friend. You won't want it to end. From the Trade Paperback edition.

What It's Like to Live Now

Bantam]

"What we had in mind, when my friends and I threw away our bras, was power. We wanted the world to widen to women. We wanted more respect, higher wages, better marriages than our mothers', bigger lives than any generation of women had ever known." "We had big plans for men, too. The more optimistic among us envisioned a new breed of men who would cook and cry, go to therapy and diaper babies, assist us in achieving the multiple orgasms we so deserved, and then pop out of bed to clean the bathroom." Meredith Maran's first book, What It's Like to Live Now, was an amazingly candid and often hilarious memoir of her journey from a sixties idealist to a nineties new woman, complete with two teenage sons, a female lover, and a hefty mortgage. Now, with the same reckless honesty, she returns to explore life--hers and ours, female and male--in the wake of the women's movement. Today we earn more money than our mothers did, at jobs they never dreamed of doing. We are less likely to stay in unhappy marriages, to bear unwanted children. But have we achieved what we set out to accomplish? Do women--whether they're twenty or forty or sixty--feel more in control of their lives? Has feminism made us more--or less--fulfilled in our relationships with men and with each other? "I'd marched for reproductive rights, but I still mourned the baby I aborted when I was twenty. I'd been in a lesbian relationship for eleven years, but when my car broke down I still longed for a husband. I'd picketed beauty pageants, but I'd been secretly dieting for fifteen years." With her keen eye for contradictions, Meredith Maran finds our new realities in surprising places: on a racquetball court facing an unyielding female opponent; before a classroom of high school students, openly discussing her bisexuality; in a courtroom during a sexual abuse trial. Through her singular experiences she illuminates the issues millions of women confront daily: her thorny relationship with her mother; the politics of flirting; the struggle to raise caring, responsible children in the face of racism and violence. This is writing we need--alive with humor and emotion and totally engaged with the life of our times.

Notes from an Incomplete Revolution: Real Life Since Feminism

Notes From an Incomplete Revolution defies political correctness and anti-feminist pieties to reveal just how far we have come--and how far we have to go--since "women's lib" upended our culture a quarter-century ago. "I'd marched for reproductive rights, but I still mourned the baby I aborted when I was twenty. I'd been in a lesbian relationship for eleven years, but when my car broke down I still longed for a husband. I'd picketed beauty pageants, but I'd been secretly dieting for fifteen years...." Through the intimate eye of her own experience, Maran speaks to the passionate concerns of women today: from breast cancer and sexual abuse to the challenge of raising children in a violent world. But she also finds much reason for rejoicing. And whether she's reminiscing about "free love" in the '60's, talking shoe styles with a transvestite, or learning how not to play racquetball "like a girl," this is writing to celebrate: alive with feeling and deeply engaged with the life of our times.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Maran, Meredith. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Maran, Meredith

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Maran, Meredith. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic

Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic

Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation

Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation

The New Old Me: My Late-Life Reinvention

The New Old Me: My Late-Life Reinvention

My Lie: A True Story of False Memory

What It's Like to Live Now

Notes from an Incomplete Revolution: Real Life Since Feminism

Notes from an Incomplete Revolution: Real Life Since Feminism