ABOUT THE BOOK

It’s 2014 and Amy Daughters is a 46-year old stay-at-home mom living in Dayton, Ohio. She returns to her hometown of Houston over the Thanksgiving holiday to discuss her parents’ estate—and finds herself hurled back in time. Suddenly, it’s 1978, and she is forced to spend 36 hours in her childhood home with her nuclear family, including her 10-year old self. Over the next day and a half, she reconsiders every feeling she’s ever had, discusses current events with dead people, gets overserved at a party with her parents’ friends, and is treated to lunch at the Bonanza Sirloin Pit. Besides noticing that everyone is smoking cigarettes, she’s still jealous of her sister, and there is a serious lack of tampons in the house, Amy also begins to appreciate that memories are malleable, wholly dependent on who is doing the remembering. In viewing her parents as peers and her siblings as detached children, she redefines her difficult relationships with her family members and ultimately realizes that her life story matters and is profoundly significant—not so much to everyone else perhaps, but certainly to her. Amy’s guide said her trip back in time wouldn’t change anything in the future, but by the time her 36 hours are up, she’s convinced that she’ll never be the same again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A native Houstonian and a graduate of Texas Tech University, Amy W. Daughters has been a freelance writer for more than a decade — mostly covering college football and sometimes talking about her feelings. Her debut novel, You Cannot Mess This Up: A True Story That Never Happened (She Writes Press), was selected as the Silver Winner for Humor in the 2019 Foreword INDIES and the Overall Winner for Humor/Comedy in the 2020 Next Generation Indie Awards. Her second book, Dear Dana: That time I went crazy and wrote all 580 of my Facebook friends a handwritten letter (She Writes Press, 2022), has won several awards, including the 2023 Reader’s Favorite Gold Medal for NonFiction Relationships, and caught the attention of Kelly Clarkson! An amateur historian, hack golfer, charlatan fashion model, and regular on the ribbon dancing circuit, Amy — a proud former resident of Blackwell, England, and Dayton, Ohio, currently lives in Tomball, Texas, a suburb of Houston. She is married to a foxy computer person, Willie, and is the lucky mother of two amazing sons, Will and Matthew.

TALKING POINTS

• Memories are not static or definite, instead they are pliable, destined to be shaped and reshaped by our age and experience. 
• Do we really have any control over what we remember, how we remember or how we store memories?
• Human lives and stories matter, profoundly, regardless of their exceptionalism. 
• Being a woman in upper middle-class suburbia is as perilous as it is fortunate. 
• Living in the land of honesty is better than living as a slave to fear. 
• Reconciling with the younger versions of ourselves is a powerful, and perhaps even necessary, exercise. 
• Most every character in You Cannot Mess This Up is based on a real life member of Amy’s family. She can talk about how she was able to craft each character for her fictional story while staying true to their real life personalities, and her family’s reaction to her portrayals.
• Amy uses humor throughout You Cannot Mess This Up to provide breaks between emotionally-charged scenes; how she learned to walk the line between “too heavy” and “too funny.”
• Reflect on past experiences to help guide our futures.
• The 1970s – and the cultural icons of the decade that are so foreign to kids growing up today –  as the decade that shaped her childhood and her life that followed.