“Breaking Your Heart Open without Breaking the Bank, Financial Tips for Single Parents”
Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo Edited by Rebecca Walker
Money, like politics and religion, has long been considered a taboo topic, one that you don’t talk about in mixed company. Rebecca Walker’s new essay anthology bucks that tradition—and for good reason. Over the course of 320 pages, writers including Rachel Cargle, Tracy McMillan, and Sonya Renee Taylor get honest about how staying silent about our finances is hurting women—especially women of color and transgender women. “The way money moves in women’s lives, mysterious and mystified, shuts us down just as we begin to speak,” Walker notes.
To break this cycle of silence, the collection shows how money impacts our relationships, health, and identities in ways we never imagined. In “Money Wounds,” Latham Thomas recalls how her money stresses stemmed from seeing her successful mom get arrested at their bank when she was young. Lily Diamond offers an insider’s look at the inauthenticity surrounding the “whitefluencer” movement. And Nancy McCabe’s essay on financial tips for single mothers quickly becomes a brutal look at the failures of a system that prioritizes profits over people. Women Talk Money shows why honest conversations about money need to happen—and the sooner the better.”
—Shannon Carlin, Bust
Novelist Walker (Adé: A Love Story) edits an essay collection about women and their relationships with money, particularly in relation to the COVID pandemic. Walker has selected previously unpublished essays by activists, models, poets, and novelists, including Rachel Cargle, Nancy McCabe, Tracy McMillan, Cameron Russell, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alice Walker (who is the editor’s mother). The anthology’s essays insightfully discuss women’s experiences with (and without) money: among them are personal tales of student loan and credit card debt, medical care with destabilizing costs, and money lessons learned from one’s mother. The book gives biographical information for each contributor.
VERDICT An eye-opening book with great insights drawn from individual experiences of money, with stories of success and less-than-success. These essays can start conversations going among women who wish to deal openly and honestly with money and finances. Highly recommended.”
“The Baby Room”
in Oh Baby: True Stories about Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love
Adoptions are the subject of some of the most poignant entries, including Mary A. Scherf’s “Becoming His Mother,” about spending several days in a women’s prison in Guatemala on kidnapping charges, and Nancy McCabe’s “The Baby Room”.
—Publishers Weekly
A few essays strike similar tones of levity and concern as they chart the divide between parents’ ideas regarding their impending new roles and their often different reality. The finest invite deeper engagement by juxtaposing multiple layers, such as. . . “The Baby Room,” a memory of adoption interspersed with studies on cortisol levels in adopted children.”
—Foreward Reviews
“Gifts”
in Every Father’s Daughter named by Parade Magazine a “2015 Sizzling Summer Read” and “Best Gift for Fathers Who Read”
I appreciated Nancy McCabe’s “Gifts,” in which she reflects on how she felt like the odd man out in her own family. “This is the real reason people have children, I think. Not just to pass on genes or wisdom to the next generation, not just to replace ourselves in the world, but because of the strange and miraculous way that the mere presence of children can heal lifelong fractures. We laugh a lot more. We don’t take ourselves so seriously.”
—Jenn McKee at Literary Mama
Kirsch, Claire. “One Book Launch. . . Nine Venues.” Publisher’s Weekly, March 24, 2015. Highlights Nancy McCabe’s participation in the national launch party for Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers.
“Threads”
in Prairie Schooner, Fall 2011
The first essay in the collection is “Threads” by Nancy McCabe. It is lovely, sad, and a little bit hopeful. It is a pleasure to read. In the essay, an American mother brings her adopted daughter back to her birthplace in China. The mother and daughter hope to discover something additional about the daughter’s past. McCabe writes: Ten years later, here I am again, searching for the one right question, looking for an answer that will assure my daughter of her enormous worth. But the sun and all the food have turned me sluggish or maybe just resigned, knowing that few of us ever really find any such question or answer.”
—The Review Review — Heavy and Hearty: The Thanksgiving Dinner of Literary Magazines
Nancy McCabe’s poignant essay “Threads” examines the triumphs and struggles of child adoption. . .”
—NewPages.com
“Can This Troubled Marriage Be Saved?”
in Bellingham Review
Nancy McCabe’s nonfiction contribution, “Can This Troubled Marriage Be Saved: A Quiz,” written in the style of a magazine quiz, complete with answer key, is quite distinct from the essays mentioned above in structure (the quiz), tone (sarcastic rather than earnest), and style (more casual, breezier prose).”
—NewPages.com
McCabe’s essay. . .is a remarkable example of how an essay can be crafted by simple subversions of an expected form.
—Brevity by Chelsea Bilondillio
“The End of the Tunnel”
This 25th Anniversary Edition . . . [demonstrates] the fine work that writers are producing today . . . A dazzling collection of essays fills this edition. . . Nancy McCabe’s striking memoir from Prairie Schooner, “The End of the Tunnel,” tells of Ms. McCabe’s . . . encounter with the Flashlight Man, and how she overcomes her fear and her sense of powerlessness.”
—Review of The Pushcart Prize 2011 XXV by Kim Chinqueean