thrive portrait: alice

This is my sweet friend, Alice Bradley.  I've known her for about 10 years.

So, let's just start with the first thing you should know about her:  she is a writer.  Like a serious writer.  Her short stories and personal essays have been nominated for and won writing awards, including a nomination for the prestigious Pushcart Prize for nonfiction.  She's the co-author of Let's Panic About Babies, a bestselling "parenting-advice" book.  She's working on another book, and I've already seen a couple of first drafts of parts of it -- and I can't wait for it to be finished, it's so incredibly good.

Secondly, you need to know that Alice is funny.  Like, hella funny.  One of the first things I ever read that she wrote was the story of her son's birth (warning, not for the squeamish), and to this day, Marcus knows Alice as "you know, my friend who moo'd when she gave birth?"  She also most recently shared a story of her 16th anniversary which ... well, didn't go quite as well as she'd planned, and I might have laughed more at this story than the one where she moo'd.  

She is funny, is what I'm saying. 

But for me, the most important thing about Alice is that she might be one of the most caring people I know.  When she sees something patently unfair going on in the world, Alice is one of the first people to express her dismay -- by either writing about it, or protesting about it.  If I mention that I'm in the middle of a rough patch, Alice is one of the first people to check on me, even though she lives half a continent away -- and will do so, in a sweet, mindful way, until she's sure that I'm doing okay.  She shares her own struggle with mental illness in a brilliant new podcast called The League of Awkward Unicorns with the amazing Deanna Zandt, a podcast which The Guardian called "funny, frank and accessible" -- and I've listened to it, and it totally is, but it's also what I would call gentle.  And kind.  

Which is no surprise, because Alice is all of those things.

So I was so happy when my sweet friend agreed to be in my Thrive Portrait Project.  You should definitely check out what she had to say about thriving, and then check out the rest of her work.  Because she's seriously the kind of writer I hope one day to grow up to be.

Thanks, Alice, friend.  The world needs more of your light.