Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir by Jillian Lauren

Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir Reviews

• 
  Tony DuShane

  Jillian is a writer with guts. This book is more than a memoir of adopting her son Tariku, it's about the human condition. Jillian dug deep for her third book and it shows. I can't recommend it highly enough.
  
  If you read her first book about her experience in a harem, you know that her life experience is deep. This memoir strips the layers back even more.
  
  I'm not a guy who runs out and searches for memoirs on adoption....yet this book is a punch in the gut and a warm embrace all at once.
  
  
• 
  Sandy Plants

  This book...this book...THIS BOOK! Fuck... it hits me so, so hard in the heart. I don’t remember anything making me feel this much emotion. She is such a brilliant writer but also, the story is just...heartbreaking and life-affirming at the same time. A week ago, I was thinking about the idea of becoming a foster parent or adopting at some point in the future and then SOMEHOW started reading this (not knowing even what it was about) and it just kinda confirmed all the thoughts I had. It sounds so cheesy but...to hear about childhood trauma talked about so vividly and tangibly was mind-blowing. I highly recommend this book to ANYONE. I’ve never had a child, and, except for a few moments in my life, haven’t even wanted one, but this softened my heart to the whole thing. I have so much more empathy for parents now.
• 
  Danna

  I am surprised by how much I loved Jillian Lauren's Everything You Ever Wanted, a book about the hurdles of parenting. As a childless, not-interested in mothering, single woman, a book about exactly the opposite held little appeal. I read it anyway because I was swept-off-my-feet in love with Lauren's first memoir, Some Girls.
  
  Lauren proves for the third time that she has a beautiful and uniquely poetic writing style. I was immediately caught by her story, and continually awed by her brutal honesty. It's a rare thing to hear how impossible parenting can feel, how challenging a child can be, and the flailing failures of motherhood. Lauren writes about it all, which aroused compassion and empathy in me. I wanted to see her son succeed; Lauren's desperation is palpable. Most of all, this is a book of faith. Belief that families can be grown, that love has the power to change, and that, above all, spirits are salvageable. Yes, spirits are salvageable.
  
  Favorite quotes:
  "Every mom I meet offers an endless list of things that can apparently make the difference between your child winning the national chess championship and winning the domino tournament in a maximum security prison" (91-2).
  
  "I lift the shades to a brightening sky smudged with clouds the color of Creamsicles and a full moon hanging over a little white farmhouse. Green and gold fields of sunflowers turn their expectant faces to the horizon. This kind of sunrise is a gift to baristas, farmers, insomniacs, and mothers" (157-8).
  
  "I have always thought that at the end of the world, Jen will be the last person standing, kept company only by the roaches and Cher" (196-7).
  
  "I am on Matt's couch again. Half the time I think I am irretrievably lost and half the time I know that I will not be here forever. This disgusting place with this love of my life. Not Matt, of course. Gross. Not even hero in. Okay, heroin, yes, heroism. But really it's the relief. The floating glaze of today and today and today. Is it so much to ask for, some relief? Says everyone who has ever made a deal with the devil. Is it so much to ask for?
  "This is how it feels: My back opens up with waves of light. Radiance flows around my shoulder blades, hooks through the web of my rib cage, and spreads out like wings. Then I rock shut and my need washes over me like rain. How can I leave?" (224-5).
  
  "...this same me, one hand always clinging to a buoyant balloon of hope, as ghastly as things seem. What on earth gave me the gall to dream of this life today, when I was nothing but appetite, a pure specimen of selfishness and single-minded desire?" (225-6).
• 
  Patrick O'Neil

  Beautifully written, strong, heartfelt, and deeply moving - READ IT!
• 
  Eileen

  I don’t have the words to express how much I liked this book. The author felt like she would be a friend or neighbor and you are with her on her journey.
• 
  Liralen

  Lauren was writing
  Some Girls at the time that the events of Everything You Ever Wanted were taking place, and while normally I'm not a huge fan of memoir-meta—that is, memoirists writing about writing their memoirs—it makes a lot of sense here because, well, it's part of the story. How do you become a parent when your uterus says no? How do you not, when it's the one thing you've been desperate to do? How do you reconcile a colourful past with a new, more 'traditional' role as 'mother'? How do you balance parent and writer? And, most pressingly, what do you do when there is clearly something wrong with your child, but doctors write it off?
  
  As much as I loved Some Girls—which was a lot, considering that I'm hanging on to my copy despite the fact that I'm moving in a month and a half and really need to downsize my book collection—it would be hard for me to make an argument that it was better than Everything You Ever Wanted. Because...Everything is a harder story, I think. It doesn't have the 'you read a book about what?' factor to carry it through if for whatever reason things lag, and it doesn't need it. It's messy and honest and hopeful.
• 
  Kristan

  Not sure everyone will appreciate this book as much as I did. This memoir focuses on the adoption of her son and the following parenting struggles. I have a lot of respect for her brutal honesty when she writes about some of her toughest parenting moments.
• 
  Tami Elliott

  Wow.
• 
  Sam

  Beautiful book that echoes some of our own experiences with adoption. I honestly had no idea this book was about adoption, but am glad it fell in to my hands. It's beautifully written.
  
  P.S. I love Weezer and had no idea on the connection. 2 fabulous artists in one family.
• 
  Kristi Richardson

  I received an early copy of this book through the Penguin First to Read program.
  
  This story of a family adopting an Ethiopian child starts off slow, but builds to a wonderful ending, not quite "happily ever after", but more "merrily we go along" that brought me great joy.
  
  Jillian and Scott tried to have children on their own, but decided to go the adoption route and had to travel half way across the world to pick their child up in Africa. Neither of them are the "ideal couple" for adoption, she was once in a harem and had a drug problem and he is a bass guitar player for Weezer. They are both determined to be the best parents they can be. Isn't that what is really necessary?
  
  Tariku is not an easy child to raise, but they never give up on him and I was really pulling for them to make it past all their hurdles. I have six natural children of my own and could identify with all the individual problems you can have with a child. Tariku likes to bite and hit and they have a difficult time finding a school that will work with them to get him better adjusted.
  
  Finally things do come together and it seems that the hazardous journey will come to an end with a big Tariku sandwich hug.
  
  "He puts his arms around my waist and stands there beside me. He holds my hand and kisses it. He whispers in my ear, “I love you to the moon and back two thousand hundred times.”
  
  This is a remarkably truthful story of a family coming together and growing stronger every day. I highly recommend it.
  
  
• 
  Alanna Smith

  Wow, but Jillian Lauren has had a crazy life. And man, does she know how to write about it. This, her second memoir, focuses on her marriage and struggle with infertility and her ultimate decision to adopt a boy from Ethiopia. When he has attachment issues, her ability to throw herself into trying to figure out how best to help him is remarkable. I already knew that parenting was hard, but I can't even imagine dealing with a toddler who has had emotional trauma.
  
  Lauren keeps this book incredibly honest (something that I think is essential in a memoir) and it is often very sweet and funny and unbearably sad. And her wonderful writing makes the whole thing beautiful.
  
  
  
  Now I have to decide if I want to read her first memoir that details her life in a harem and as a drug addict...???
  
  
  4/11/19 I just read this for the second time, and I'm updating it to 5 stars. I think having read Lauren's other memoir, Some Girls and getting a better understanding of her backstory made me appreciate this book even more. Lauren is so very, very talented. I want to be best friends with her.
• 
  Elizabeth Ray

  I didn’t know anything about Jillian Lauren before, I just love adoption memoirs. This novel should probably be required reading before adoption so you are prepared to handle the challenges. Jillian struggles with infertility and then she and her husband decide to adopt from Ethiopia. This is the story of adopting Tariku.
  
  She gets to meet his birth mother while overseas before she takes him home. This holds special meaning for her, as she herself was adopted. When she brings T home, she faces unexpected challenges. He pushes her away. He is aggressive toward her and toward other child, biting and hitting them. He gets kicked out of preschool. Jillian searches for answers, but they don’t come easily. Eventually, she learns about trauma and sensory processing disorder. Although T will always have his challenges, Jillian and her husband become powerful advocates for their child.
  
  This was an inspirational novel about the power of unconditional love and persistence.
• 
  Gretchen Stokes

  I was pretty ambivalent about this book from the start, although quite sure why.
  
  The story of her adoption coupled with how it provides meaning to her life up to that point was interesting, and mostly well written if a little navel-gazey. As the book went on the author became more comfortable with the audience, the book, and the writing process- and little details began to slip out- which were markers of what had made me so ambivalent from the beginning: her husband is in a chart-topping band, she is somewhat obsessive about Gwyneth Paltrow even while criticizing those who are, nothing passes hers or her child's lips that isn't vegan, gluten-free, dairy free, and generally fashionable in the competitive LA set. And therein is the problem, it is a book written from an LA perspective, with LA concerns- and therefore is only distantly related to the rest of us, and a bit hard to take seriously.
• 
  Jeff Matlow

  Let me explain my rating. I actually wanted to give it two stars based on the story. But then I realized that I'm not the target market and it's unfair for me to give a bad rating because the book wasn't written for me. If I were a mother of toddlers maybe I'd give it a four star rating. But I'm not.
  
  The book is decently written but not great, hence the three stars.
  
  That said, I'm the father of a very passionate four year old and I have to say, the stories in this book don't sound any different than what my child does. The hitting, the arguing, the tantrums. Yes it's tough but parenting isn't easy. So all in all, I felt like the book didn't really give any insight into or interesting story about motherhood. It's basically an inch to one side or another on the spectrum of what parents experience raising kids.
  
  Whatevs
• 
  H

  I have read Jillian's first memoir and feel like the reading of this second memoir was enriched because I "knew" her back story. This memoir is, however, a stand-alone tribute to the power of love, and the reward of tenacity. It is a vibrantly written story of a special little boy and all of Jillian's struggles to give him the best possible chance in life. She succeeds brilliantly, and I feel so much respect for someone who never once tried to make her amazing kid fit into the constraints of conventionality. She always saw him for the unique gifted child he was. This journey she has taken to give this little boy a great start in life is a wonderful thing to read about. Highly recommend this book for any parent or step parent who has ever struggled to meet the needs of their child.
• 
  Tricia

  Jillian Lauren gives a vulnerable, raw look at her adoption of an Ethiopian child. The parts that resonated the most with me were the beginning and end - the difficulties she had conceiving, the emotionality of that, and later on, when she finally "got what she wanted," which on some level was the ability to provide what her child needed. There were some chapters in the middle about all the various challenges and stigmas she faced after she and her husband brought their kid home that felt redundant. But I supposed they were a necessary to show how many tactics and ways they tried to cope with the situation they were in.
• 
  Patricia Murphy

  I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did, especially because as a child-free woman I sometimes don't like to swim in the monotony of lengthy descriptions about child rearing (and there were a few paragraphs of describing cake and etc that were more of interest to the writer than the reader) but the writing is so strong and poetic and compelling and contemplative. I found myself wanting to use many of the writing techniques here. I like how the relationships are shown in such a round way, with joys and failures as well.
• 
  Kat L

  Oh my. This is my life (minus the harem, drugs and rock star husband). This is my child and my life with my child. She says my truth... In a way I could never explain to people who don't have SPD kids
• 
  Elana Peled

  I loved every moment of this book. On a par with everything Anne Lamont wrote about being a single parent but framed around her experience as an adoptive parent, Jillian Lauren ultimately writes about the redemptive power of love.
• 
  Jessica Hawk

  Beautifully written. Thank you, Jillian, for sharing both the dreamy and traumatic sides of adoption. And offering your story as healing for others struggling through the same season in their story.
• 
  Sarah Fite

  What an amazing relief it was to read about another family struggling to understand SPD.
• 
  Sigrid Fry-Revere

  Might be worth reading if you are interested in adopting a child, but otherwise not worth the effort. The writing simply was not that good.
• 
  Fryeday

  The writing in this book is at times so pretty that it reads like poetry or what I imagine poetry to read like since I actually don’t read poetry. Because of that I almost thought I made a mistake in trying this one. I’m glad I kept going. The book is a really raw account on the author’s entrance into motherhood. She’s adopted a son from Ethiopia. Though her foray into motherhood looks different from mine, I quickly realized what I also very quickly realize talking to any mom, we can go through so many similar things that it really does at times seem to be one of the closest ways to relate to another human.
  
  The author is really open about her challenges, frustrations, anger and despair. That made the book very easy for me to read. I could picture everything so clearly. She’s careful to note that this book is her experience solely and that her son reserves his right to tell his own story so there were things that she felt may border a line of preventing him from authentically doing that one day and so she left them out.
  
  There’s such an interesting theme of trauma in this book and how society can kind of downplay what that may look like from person to person just because of the thought that everyone deals with some kind of trauma. This book makes clear that that’s no reason to ignore someone’s trauma and not treat it the best you can or be compassionate towards it. I definitely look at it in a much different way than I did before.
  
  Interested to read more from this author.
• 
  Jessica

  Another in the canon of white adoptive mom memoirs. This one stands out for a couple reasons - the mom is an adult adoptee, they’re in LA and so lots of stuff is recognizable (especially Ruth Beaglehole and Echo Parenting), and a large part of it deals with learning to parent a kid with SPD and PTSD and attachment difficulties. What was not relatable was their ability to throw every resource possible at the problem (at one point they’re paying the equivalent of Harvard tuition to provide their son with a one-on-one aide in preschool). There is a lot of oversharing of her son’s story - I realize this sort of memoir would be impossible without that, but it still feels wrong. She literally says at one point that it’s her responsibility to tell his story until he can - in the context of writing a letter to his preschool so they don’t kick him out, sure, but not in memoir format! I also disagree with some of her opinions (love is not, in fact, enough, though she says it is while acknowledging that in adoption circles it’s popular to say that it isn’t). Relatedly, she seems to know what to say to appear to be self aware in the face of a white lady parenting a black child, being of immense resources, being a memoir writer whose parents cut her out because she exposes her childhood in a different memoir, etc etc - without fully convincing me she’s actually self-aware. All that being said, the latter half of the book might be reassuring for other parents trying to navigate parenting adopted toddlers with challenging behaviors.
• 
  Lauren DePino

  When I picked up Everything You Ever Wanted, I already knew I loved Jillian Lauren’s writing, but I didn’t think it was possible to love it even more. From the beautiful lyric opening about Los Angeles light to the candid passages about the struggles that come with parenting—Jillian has written a gorgeously told story about how she builds her adoptive family. Perhaps what I love most about the book is how Jillian’s love for her son is so big and real, it spills off the page and into the heart of the reader. I underlined too many passages to cite, but a couple are:
  
  “…even shaking with fear, you can still scale the fence.”
  
  “A yoga teacher once told me: if you truly knew all that people had been through, you would get down on your knees and kiss the feet of every person you came across.”
  
  “I have learned to release my expectations. Sometimes, you have to be content to face east instead of west, miss the eclipse, feel the strangeness at your back, and know that there will be other marvels. You have no idea. The world is full of them.”
  
  We all have deep yearnings. Through her poetic, honest prose Jillian reminds us, it’s not the getting that matters, but “it is the yearning that counts.” And if we let life unfold as it will, in messy and unpredictable ways, we sometimes attain the very yearning we never even knew to wish for, but makes our lives just right.
• 
  Jill Blevins

  Some people think you shouldn't write memoirs unless you're famous. I am not one of those people. In fact, some of the best memoirs I've ever read are those written by people who aren't well-known, but have gone through some incredible experiences, triumphant over obstacles the rest of us would not even consider conquering.
  
  This author is known for being part of a harem and writing about that. She's also known as the wife of the bass player for Weezer. So she's kind of famous. But that isn't the compelling narrative of her story. There's a whole lot of triumph over tragedy here that her fame and book-worthy life experiences actually make worse for her. And yet. There is something about the voice in this memoir, something about the grit, the determination, the pure love of life and determination to be a mother that brings you close. This is what life well-lived is like, well-written and well-enjoyed, pulling everything out of every opportunity and hint of opportunity that one human could manage.
  
  Such a wild ride and so normal, all at the same time.