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What Life Taught Us: Entering Adulthood, by Keith Emory. Book One of the What Life Taught Us series. Releasing late 2026.
Somewhere along the way, the chain of hand-me-down knowledge got broken. This book hands it back. Ten chapters of plain, field-tested guidance for the years right after eighteen, written the way a mentor talks: money, first jobs, first apartments, hard days, and the decisions nobody sits you down to explain.
Buying for someone about to step into the world? This is the book you wish someone had handed you.
Reserve a first edition, personally signed by the author, for a deposit of just $4.99. Your deposit comes off the price of the book when it ships, less applicable sales tax. Signed First Editions are done one at a time, so a reservation is how a copy gets held with your name on it.
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Read a little first
From Why I Wrote This
I grew up in a house where money was always short, and it was nobody's fault. My parents worked hard, more jobs than I could count. It wasn't that they were careless with it. Nobody had ever sat them down and taught them how money actually works, and you can't hand down what you were never given. Our clothes came from secondhand stores and yard sales, we made do, and honestly I grew up thinking that was just how life went for people like us.
The book's closing lines
There was never a manual, and there still isn't one — not for him, not for Naomi, not for you. There's only a stack of tools, a plan with dates on it, people willing to hand you what they learned, and your own hand on the wheel, one ordinary Tuesday at a time.
You don't need the whole road lit up to start driving. You just need to stop drifting.
Turn the page. It's blank. That's the point. Your road is in front of you now — not behind you.
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