Farm Girl is a memoir of urgent grace that crosses boundaries of genre and time. In her second year of college, Megan finds herself bonded to a lover spiraling into addiction and two thousand miles away from her heart’s home—a stretch of forty certified-organic acres along the banks of the Connecticut River separating Vermont and New Hampshire. In the crucible of a rainy Portland winter, Megan is forced to decide whether to embrace her future as a farm girl or to continue growing into the woman everyone hopes she’ll become. Farm Girl is about two love affairs that force a decision: the love between two people and the love between Megan and the landscape. With innovative prose and lush description, Farm Girl raises the earth up as a character and asks questions about the work we choose to sustain us—how careful attention and devotion to the earth transcends human tragedy. A startlingly lovely memoir about how things die, how things grow, and how we reap what we sow...even when we might wish differently. Baxter's language is as rich as the soil she tends; it will be a joy to see how she blossoms in her career. - Jodi Picoult, #1 NYT bestselling author of THE BOOK OF TWO WAYS This book explores entanglements: with others, with the Earth, with our expectations. Baxter is indeed a farm girl, but she is also keen observer, a fine prose stylist, and a writer who marries the impulses of the head and the heart. There is deep sentiment in this book, but it never tips over the line into sentimentality. Farm Girl is too clear-eyed for that. From cultivating strawberries to trying to heal an addicted boyfriend, Baxter chronicles her journey in language that speaks with an emotional clarity certain to resonate with readers. - Sue William Silverman, author of HOW TO SURVIVE DEATH AND OTHER INCONVIENCES "This is a book about groundedness, I think -- about the soil into which one can sink one's feet when the going is impossible. It's a remarkable account." - Bill McKibben, author of RADIO FREE VERMONT In a world of needs, those of our own as well as those of others, needs whose pursuit and fulfillment illuminate paths to becoming who we're meant to be, how do we choose which need to meet, which path to walk? The question lies at the heart of Farm Girl, an exquisite debut memoir by the award-winning essayist and poet Megan Baxter. In oscillating passages reflecting the demands for her devotion, she chronicles with visceral eloquence the heart-wrenching tension she experienced over a tumultuous year between her makeup-and-pearls college life in Oregon with her troubled boyfriend, and her dirt-on-the-knees farm life in Vermont whispering her home, all in writing as clear and honest and true as water. Megan Baxter is a writer to watch. --Robert Braile, former environmental correspondent and book critic, THE BOSTON GLOBE An expertly rendered memoir of land, loss, and love. Farm Girl confronts and ultimately celebrates the beautiful, painful complexity of both the earth and the human heart. - Stephanie Anderson, author of ONE SIZE FITS NONE: A FARM GIRL'S SEARCH FOR THE PROMISE OF REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE In this memoir, the reader experiences the sweat, blood, and tears that go into working at a farm in New England: the frosts, the failures and the brilliant moments of grace. Megan Baxter grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, just across the river from the fields she grew to love during her days as a farm girl. She worked as a farmer while earning her BFA in poetry and directed an urban nonprofit garden during her MFA program. Megan’s essays have won numerous national awards including a Pushcart Prize, and have been listed in The Best American Essays of 2019 .