“I don’t know how Michele Weldon made wrestling, breast cancer, and single parenting tie together so naturally, so beautifully, but in fact each is a perfect metaphor for this book’s message of soulful triumph.”   —Elizabeth Berg, New York Times–bestselling author, The Dream Lover
 
Deftly lacing heartbreak with humor and insight, Michele Weldon provides a potent antidote to the crazy, harried, single mom stereotype in Escape Points. Untethered from a comfortable, upper-middle-class life with a handsome but abusive attorney husband, Weldon relates the challenges and triumphs of the years that followed as she raised three growing sons alone in the face of cancer, an ambitious career, and the shadow of her ex. As she maneuvers through a complicated life of long daily commutes, radiation treatments, supporting three boys’ all-consuming high school wrestling careers, and trying to mitigate their hurt and resentment at an absent father, Weldon shows that single mothers, and their children, can succeed when others—neighbors, family, teachers, and in this case one incredible wrestling coach—step in to fill the void and the remaining parent stays the course with common sense and dutiful love.

 

"With affable, heartfelt text, Weldon shares the intimate details of her trial-and-error parenting of three competitive wrestlers, each in varying stages of resentment over their father's heartless disinterest in them." —Kirkus Reviews

“There are so many things to admire about Escape Points. The honesty. The heart. The compulsive readability. I don’t know how Michele Weldon made wrestling, breast cancer, and single parenting tie together so naturally, so beautifully, but in fact each is a perfect metaphor for this book’s message of soulful triumph.” —Elizabeth Berg, New York Times bestselling author of The Dream Lover

“Escape Points is the riveting memoir of a mother and her sons, a compelling story of life, love, and family, told through the prism of the sport they adore, wrestling. Michele Weldon is a beautiful writer. This is a beautiful story.” —Christine Brennan, USA Today sports columnist and ABC News, CNN, and PBS commentator

“Journalist and single mother Weldon is the Everyperson voice of parents everywhere who are raising children on their own… for anyone who has been through a contentious divorce, or breast cancer, or child support battles, or kids’ wrestling matches and cauliflower ears or anything similar, Weldon’s voice will ring of truth and wisdom and hurt and, yes, the beauty of it all.” —Booklist

“Weldon’s honest reflections—sprinkled with humorous anecdotes—read like a stream of consciousness, somehow relating cancer, divorce and motherhood to sports, all the while maintaining a strong undertone of hope.”  —West Suburban Living

Michele Weldon is an assistant professor emerita at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, and a senior leader with The OpEd Project. She has been a journalist for newspapers and magazines for more than 35 years, and her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, CNN, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Slate, More.com, Christian Science Monitor, and others. She is the author of Everyman News, which won the National Federation of Press Women’s Best Nonfiction Book Award; the memoir I Closed My Eyes: Revelations of a Battered Woman, which has been translated into seven languages and featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2002; and Writing to Save Your Life. She lives in the Chicago area.