ELLE MAGAZINE’S 2012 GRAND PRIX NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
Moonlight on Linoleum was chosen as ELLE Magazine’s 2012 Grand Prix Nonfiction Book of the Year (December issue, pg. 232). “Our readers favored Moonlight on Linoleum—about how Helwig and her five younger sisters survived their mother’s booze-fueled, man-crazy, and peripatetic lifestyle and indeed thrived—over work by Augusten Burroughs, Anne Lamott, Paul Auster, and others.” Kathleen Hefley wrote: “I was moved not out of pathos for Helwig’s plight nor because of anything especially heroic about her survival. She does not apologize and does not want our sympathies, and this made me respect her all the more as a writer. The power of this story is in the universality of celebrating the child who searched for the door, as she puts it, and how she ends victorious, whole and rich in her relationships with her sisters.”