**The terms & conditions you grew up with don't have to determine the rest of your life**
Terms & Conditions is an experimental memoir in both form and content. This is a memoir in glossary structure, allowing for analytical distance to the emotional impact of Goldmacher's many artifacts and memories, giving the author a new perspective on what they carry from the past to her desired future.
Terms & Conditions alternates between remembered and speculated past, and real present; experimental forms such as blackout/erasure, artifacts, diagrams, and hermit crabs allow deep exploration of themes of anxiety, death, love, and adulthood.
T&C is for fans of compressed prose like Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs and essay poetry like Claudia Rankine's Citizen, this book will appeal to those who suffer from anxiety produced by uncertainty, who long to recognize and let go of what no longer serves them; in particular, this book appeals to fatherless daughters, anxiety sufferers, and women in middle age and beyond who are learning how embrace the uncertainty of the second half of life.
You've never encountered a memoir like this. Terms & Conditions will take your breath away.
Approximately 110 pages
Paperback
To be published: October 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-90214-220-1
About Author Amy Goldmacher
Amy Goldmacher, Ph.D. is the co-author of Designing an Anthropology Career: Professional Development Exercises. Terms & Conditions is her debut solo-authored book. Winner of the 2022 AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Creative Nonfiction, she currently lives in South Florida.
Advance Praise for Terms & Conditions
“Sharply captures the unease and uncertainty of our health and heredity. With startling honesty, Goldmacher offers a glossary both personal and universal—an affecting, emotional story.”
— Dinty W. Moore, Author of Between Panic & Desire
“In this innovative memoir, Goldmacher wrestles with the tension between facts and experiences, scientific inquiry and emotional responses. A vulnerable, funny (yes, funny!) memoir about anxiety, grief, and finding a place to call home that can't be reached through maps, coordinates, or formulas.”
— Laraine Herring, Author of A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens
“Expertly maps the terrain between inheritance and escape, moving from the clinical language of genetic mutation to the intimate vocabulary of family trauma. Succinct and devastating, each entry is a meditation on love, loss, and what it means to survive.”
— Darien Hsu Gee, Award-winning Author of Allegiance and Other Small Histories
“A formally adventurous, intensely compelling addition to the genre of grief memoir. A methodical yet emotional meditation on what it means to lose a father at the cusp of one’s own adulthood, Terms & Conditions introduces us to a narrator for whom the quest for information—sturdy, static and quantifiable—means self-preservation and control. The elegant restraint of Goldmacher’s prose keeps the reader rapt and vigilant.”
— Sheila Squillante, Author of All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food