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Manual Not Included

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
In thoughtful, candid, and often funny vignettes, Hilaria Baldwin—mother, wellness expert, and star of TLC's The Baldwins—reveals the highs and lows and unpredictable outtakes from her different and not-so-different life.
There's no set of instructions when it comes to navigating the challenges life throws at us. However, by sharing our narratives and finding our commonality, we can better deal with what comes our way.

After meeting her husband, actor Alec Baldwin, Hilaria found joy and purpose entering the public eye, where she sought to build community and connection with others. She also faced the challenges of the uglier, more toxic parts of the spotlight, living under a warped magnifying glass. Through the ups and downs, Hilaria leaned into wisdom and support offered by others, learning that optimism, kindness, and a sense of humor can put life into perspective. And additionally learning that we are not alone, that we are more alike than we are different.

In Manual Not Included, Hilaria writes about the relatable, hard-earned insights she's gained from her experiences as an individual, a partner, and a parent—from feeling empowered, to having a fulfilling relationship, to being as good a mother as possible, all while still being a work in progress.

Within chapters about love, motherhood, and friendship, Hilaria offers up her candid stories around common themes facing women—from feeling like you're too much and also not enough, to grappling with the expectation to be a "good girl," and to striving for unattainable perfection. While there is no one right way to live, by sharing what we've learned along the way, with compassion and without judgment, we can each create our own perfectly imperfect manual.
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    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

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    A publication with images and logos, converted to meet EPUB Accessibility specifications of WCAG-AA level. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images and logos, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order, structural navigation, and semantic structure. Blank pages from print have been removed in this ebook, with related page number spans set on the first following in-spine page. Certain front and back matter pages have been adjusted in the reading order sequence from print, with related page references reordered in the page-list order.

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    • The publication contains a conformance statement that it meets the EPUB Accessibility and WCAG 2 Level AA standard.

    • This publication claims to meet EPUB Accessibility 1.0 WCAG 2.0 Level AA.

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    • Kirkus

      June 15, 2025
      "Not a Cinderella story." Baldwin's loosely written memoir is about motherhood and pregnancy loss, marriage to a celebrity, being the target of gossip and criticism, the experiences of neurodivergency and bilingualism, and more. "When Alec and I met, I was twenty-seven and he was fifty-three," she writes. "Now, it's nearly a decade and a half later....People always ask me: What is life actually like with seven kids (and an Alec)? It's amazing and chaotic." This book comes on the heels of the first season of the family's reality show, The Baldwins, seemingly designed to answer the same burning question. While the author seems like a nice, well-meaning person, one comes away from this memoir hoping the television version, with the story sculpted by professionals, is the more entertaining response. Given the fact that there has been controversy about Baldwin's background, perhaps she should have written a straightforward autobiography. But she has not, and the reader might need to do some research to understand the nature of some of the attacks she writes about. The veracity of her Spanish identity has come under fire, as her birth name is Hilary, she was born in Boston, and is not of Latine descent--but you won't learn those facts from this book. The author's relative youth, her choice to have her sixth child via surrogate, and Alec Baldwin's involvement in the death of a colleague on a film set have all been media fodder. She discusses several specific nemeses without naming them, which is not very interesting. "I grapple with the question: Why am I here in the public space? Why am I 'relevant'? Am I here because an actor fell in love with me? Am I here because I'm a yoga teacher and have things to say about mental and physical health? Am I here because I had a lot of kids?" It's not clear that she knows, and neither will you. Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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