In HOW TO LEAVE: Quitting the City and Coping with a New Reality, Erin Clune provides a hilarious tongue-in-cheek guide to surviving a dramatic move. Erin herself thought that she would be a New Yorker forever. New York City was the place she found herself as a young woman, and she willingly ignored its faults—until she had children. Suddenly the cramped apartment, the Hunger Games-style preschool applications, the rat race, the literal rats... it was all too much. So she and her husband moved to Madison, Wisconsin, which also happened to be the city where Erin went to high school.

Having quasi-successfully navigated the transition from city to suburb, Erin regales readers with priceless stories of her own experience leaving New York and adjusting to the culture shock of a new place. This irreverent take on a self-help program “will never promise you that life is adventure because people who say things like that during a difficult move deserve to be punched in the face.” Instead, HOW TO LEAVE encourages readers to laugh at their own shortcomings, adapt to their novel surroundings, and embrace their new home for what it is, even if the best description of that place is “livable.” It’s a book for burnt out young professionals dreaming of backyards, new parents tearing their hair out on public transportation, and any former city dweller trying to figure out how to stay true to themselves in a place far away from their personal Mecca.

ERIN CLUNE is a journalist and comedic writer whose work is regularly featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, PRI’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, and in Medium, The Rumpus, and many other media outlets where information meets funny. She is also the co-author (with Today show producers Alicia Ybarbo and Mary Ann Zoellner) of Sh*tty Mom for All Seasons. Clune lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with two kids, two cats, one husband, one dog, one guinea pig, and zero doormen.