Photo: Sharona Jacobs
I Felt My Life With Both My Hands
a story collection, April 2026
"In this moving, thoughtful and heartfelt collection, ordinary people and ordinary encounters yield extraordinary moments of insight and inspiration. What a lovely, loving book! Highly recommended." —Gish Jen, author of Bad Bad Girl
"The women who narrate the remarkable stories in Jessica Treadway's I Felt My Life with Both My Hands find the same kinds of hopes and sorrows filling and emptying their hearts—overtaking or abandoning them with power so startling but so intimately familiar that we recognize on every page our own sense of how often we are strangers most of all to ourselves."
—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize award for Tinkers
Flannery O'Connor Award-winning author Jessica Treadway's eighth book and fourth story collection, I Felt My Life With Both My Hands (Cornerstone Press, April 14, 2026), contains stories narrated by ordinary fictional women who become extraordinary by virtue of allowing us into their minds and hearts. From different ages, sexualities, family/social backgrounds, and life experiences, the speakers explore subjects including motherhood and childlessness; partner relationships; careers and job loss; the quest for spirituality; guilt and sacrifice; illness and grief.
In "An Early Departure," selected for The Best American Short Stories 2025 edited by Celeste Ng, an aunt must choose between granting her niece's request for help or risk losing a relationship she has always cherished in the absence of having children of her own. In "Cliché," a wife recovers from vertigo and the discovery of her husband's infidelity, only to find them linked in a way she would never have guessed. And in "The Daughter's Story," Treadway offers a companion tale to the late Andre Dubus's classic "A Father's Story," in which a father sacrifices his spiritual integrity and a lifelong friendship to save his daughter from facing the consequences after she commits a fatal crime.
The New York Times Book Review called Jessica Treadway "a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth." Her collection Please Come Back to Me received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her novel How Will I Know You? (Grand Central, 2016) was a People Magazine Book of the Week, and her novel Lacy Eye (Grand Central, 2015) was a Target Book Club selection.