Loyalty is so thrilled to welcome Bethanne Patrick and James Tate Hill for a virtual event celebrating Life B! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice. You can also order the book on our website to be automatically added to the event's registration list. Donations will go to NAMI. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

A bracing and fresh look at a lifelong struggle with depression and mental illness

Plagued by depression her entire life, it wasn’t until her early fifties that writer and book critic Bethanne Patrick, advocating for her own care, received a medical diagnosis that would set her on the path to wellness and stability.

Recognizing the intergenerational effects of trauma and mental health struggles, Patrick unearths the stories of her past in order to forge a better future for herself and her two daughters, dismantling the stigmas surrounding mental health challenges that can plague families into silence and resignation. Life B is an intimate portrait we haven’t yet seen—of a lifelong struggle with depression, of midlife diagnosis and newly found strength. Most important, it’s a life-affirming blueprint of how to accept and transcend the limitations of mental illness.

Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comments on books and literary ideas to over 200K followers. Her work appears frequently in the Los Angeles Times as well as at The Washington Post, NPR Books, and Literary Hub. She sits on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the host of the Missing Pages podcast.

James Tate Hill is the author of a memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff (W. W. Norton), a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2021. His fiction debut, Academy Gothic, won the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Lit Hub, Shondaland, Salon, Poets & Writers, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and his work has been listed as Notable in three editions of The Best American Essays. He serves as fiction editor for Monkeybicycle and contributing editor at Lit Hub, where he writes an audiobooks column.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Bethanne Patrick and James Tate Hill for LIFE B