Love Warrior: A Memoir

In this able, spiritual memoir, New York Times bestselling author Melton (Carry On, Warrior) inspires with her evolution from her alcoholic, bulimic, and promiscuous past, to today, when she feels on top of the world. When she becomes pregnant with her first child, she decides she’s sick of living a half-dead life and stops drinking. She marries the father of her child and moves forward unsteadily until she finds her husband deep into porn and involved in one-night stands. She takes this as a cue to become a person that she can respect. She kicks her husband out, starts talking to God, goes into therapy, and practices yoga. In these activities she finds a series of insights that allow her to transform her life. Spiritual development is idiosyncratic, and Melton struggles to translate her experience into something universal. “You are love,” she tells herself, and she’s ecstatic at this discovery while the reader is floundering. But she writes well enough to create moments of accessible beauty. Women will want to reread passages that describe a return to intimacy with her similarly evolving husband and the speech she gives her young daughters about how sexiness is self-knowledge and self-respect, not stilettos and short skirts. (Sept.)