Gold Medal for the 2025 IPPY Award Winner of the 2025 International Book Award in Best New Nonfiction ​Finalist for the 2025 International Book Award in Nonfiction: Creative Urgent, meditative, and searching, Thank You for Staying with Me is a collection of essays that navigates the complexities of home, the vulnerability of being a woman, mother-daughter relationships, and young motherhood in the conservative and religious landscape of the Ozarks. Using cosmology as a foil to discuss human issues, Bailey Gaylin Moore describes praying to the sky during moments of despondency, observing a solar eclipse while reflecting on what it means to be in the penumbra of society, and using galaxy identification to understand herself. During a collision of women’s rights, gun policy, and racial tension, Thank You for Staying with Me is a frank and intimate rumination on how national policy and social attitudes affect both the individual and the public sphere, especially in such a conservative part of the United States.   "Bailey Gaylin Moore's essay collection . . . reads like a friend who walks you back to yourself after you've been lost in the woods. It's full of wonder and sharp observations, rooted in the red clay and complicated heritage of the Missouri Ozarks."―Elizabeth Austin, Hippocampus Magazine "[Moore's] essays, which rawly address subjects like motherhood, assault, and sexism but also include reveries on the cosmos, vignettes on nature, and appreciative moments of common humanity, encourage readers to spend less time trying to bring everything to a center and pay attention instead to life's continuous surprises."—Nick Hilbourn,  Rain Taxi “ Thank You for Staying with Me isn’t just a great book; it is a necessary one. Bailey Gaylin Moore’s writing is as powerful as writing the hard truth gets. She grew up in the Ozarks, a conservative part of this country, but what happened to her there could have happened anywhere—and does. I was bowled over by the immediacy of her prose and moved by the magical grace of her blessings. This is astonishing writing.”—Abigail Thomas, New York Times best-selling author of What Comes Next and How to Like It “A breathlessly beautiful, exhilarating collection throbbing with power and life. Bailey Gaylin Moore writes with impressive wit, shattering tenderness, and aching vulnerability. Mother-daughter relationships, selfhood, systemic injustice, and reckoning with the past are all delivered with stunning insight and love. This is a gorgeous, highly recommended collection.”—Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of When Trying to Return Home “In Thank You for Staying with Me , Bailey Gaylin Moore offers exegeses of music (‘the importance of dissonance’), of history and lore (‘the myth of vagina dentata’), and of modern philosophy (‘Heidegger’s non-choices’), and the hilariously titled section ‘Hegel Exercises’ through a telling of her personal history in Missouri, in relationships with men, and in academia, using a dizzying blend of comic moments, sober revelations, and urgent lyrical explorations. Thank You for Staying with Me is meta, metal, and metaphysical. With a lens that encompasses the astronomical and the microscopic—as well as the human-scaled phenomena of Spencer’s Gifts and baseball dads—this book takes the reader on a thrilling journey of the detours and digressions of a mind coming to terms with a world in flux. Treat yourself and read this book.”—Phong Nguyen, author of Bronze Drum and Roundabout “This is a full-throttle, working-class, single-mother, progressive, hard-drinking, feminist series of essays/meditations/rants on where America and the author’s life are headed as the midwestern homemade Trump signs blur past. Go along for the ride—if you dare. You won’t regret it.”—Sue William Silverman, author of Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul “In Thank You for Staying with Me Bailey Gaylin Moore restlessly and ingeniously proves that a dedicated engagement of home becomes—as we age and evolve—in turns an act of redefinition and refusal, of dismantling and reconsecration. Such acts, in this brilliant essay collection, carry with them a narrative vulnerability that is as electric as it is raw, as it is exhilaratingly curious, filtering intense formative experience through inquiries into psycholinguistics, the behavior of the cosmos, legislative policymaking, philosophy, symbology, entropy, and more. Such ruminations gather an uncommon gravity as they twine to become one of the more earth-shattering comments on family that I’ve ever read. These essays—and their urgent drive to make sense of the human experience in both macro and micro ways—stand not only as testaments to but also as demonstrations of love.”—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers “We read to understand the world and ourselves a little better. To enter the mind and heart of another through the power of words. To feel se