An intimate look inside Jenny Lawson’s creative process—and a collection of strong but powerful lessons for embarking on your own, even on days when you can’t get out of bed.
BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS
by Jenny Lawson
Penguin Life, Spring 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS is an inspiring self-help book for the rest of us—the ones who haven’t successfully stacked a tower of Atomic Habits or cultivated the 7 traits that would make us highly effective individuals. Now more than ever, readers crave a book that meets them where they are. And where they are just might be still in their pajamas at 2pm, unable to turn on their Zoom video, and feeling worse every time someone recommends yet another book outlining a 10-step plan they can’t muster up the enthusiasm or energy to read, much less conquer.
The question Jenny has heard most over the past decade is, “How?” How did you —struggling with depression, anxiety, ADHD, chronic pain—manage to publish four bestsellers and open a successful bookstore (in April 2020, no less). Too often, people assume you must conquer your demons, cure your ills, and leave behind the brokenness completely before you can even begin to create your life’s work and succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Beautiful Hacks is the road map for this tribe.
Jenny Lawson has published four New York Times bestsellers, including Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy. She is the owner and proprietress of Nowhere Bookshop, a beloved independent bookstore and bar in San Antonio, Texas. She’s been writing her popular, award-winning blog (thebloggess.com) for over 15 years and has a very large social media following on X, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.
Muse, secretary, wife: these are some of the labels used to describe the women whose influence on history has been erased. Their achievements have brought honour and fame to the men close to them – such as Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Albert Einstein, who couldn’t have done what they did without their female friends, daughters or lovers – but they themselves remain largely unknown. The list includes scientists like Rosalind Franklin and Lise Meitner, who, unlike their male colleagues, were never celebrated for their discoveries; and authors and artists like Marie Hirsch, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Hedwig Thun, who hid behind male pseudonyms all their lives in order to be taken seriously. In « Stolen Fame », Schöler tells their stories, introducing us to the women who changed human history and showing that there are still issues around participation and visibility. Behind every successful man is a system that empowers him – and that system stands in every woman’s way.
In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito’s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a deeply personal way. Written from Ralph’s perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito’s family and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace.
Too many women depend on external approval to define their self worth. While that desire might initially drive people to high-performing jobs, it secretly sabotages their chances of the fulfilling life and career they desire. Brooke Taylor has transformed the lives of more than 5,000 high-achieving women in business by healing what she calls “the success wound” – the pain that comes from a person’s mistaking success for her self-worth.
Thomas Page McBee is at 42, he writes, one of the oldest trans people he knows, an “elder,”—and he’s also 12, “a man without a boyhood, alive at the end of the world.” Time is linear, but it’s also cyclical. This moment, with its fever-pitch of anti-trans rhetoric, a broken political system, not to mention climate change, can feel like the end of the world—as have other moments in our history. And yet, as Thomas writes, “the future is already here.” The seeds of what is to come already exist. We need to be asking different and better questions.