Hillary Adams
Essayist. Author. Editor.
Hillary Adams writes across the creative nonfiction spectrum, from hybrid personal essays to reportage, with a keen focus on experimental forms. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sierra Nevada University where she also worked as managing editor for the Sierra Nevada Review. She is a Community of Writer’s Alumna and finalist in New Millennial Writers. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Entropy, The Normal School, and This Is Not a Punk Rock Anthology.
Raised in rural Nevada, she studied French and English literature at the University of Nevada, Reno and taught high school English for three years before moving to France where she gave birth to her first child. Now a mother of five, she has written two young adult novels, Exchanged and Beautiful. Neither have been published, although their parts were sacrificed for the greater good of her current essay collections Tinderness and Care Instructions. When she’s not writing about modern love while knee deep in laundry, she works as a technical and grant writer.
Tinderness
Tinderness
I started dating after twenty-two years of marriage with the fresh optimism of a Mormon missionary on her first day out in the field, my crisp white shirt and black name tag, out to discover some souls to love. At the time I told people I was jaded, but I was only jaded to the traditional roles I’d bought into.
Tinderness is a collection of hybrid essays from a newly single mom of five who explores modern dating culture through the premise of a writing project, which morphs into a search for both self and soul mate.
Care Instructions
Every day I must remind my daughter that I won’t survive the loss of her. I will never come back from that devastation.
Maybe my mom guilt can tether her to this earth while I search for a cure.
Is it possible to vanquish the monsters of genetics?
As the mother of a suicidal teenager searches for treatments for her daughter’s major depressive disorder, she examines the cultural and genetic forces at work in generations of adolescent girls and asks, What do our Lolitas and Ophelias need to thrive in the modern world?
These Care Instructions mix gallows humor and life celebration for three daughters who all struggle with versions of her own demons. She can’t change their double helix or her own trauma, but can she heal herself and them through care instructions?
