The Goodbye Year: Wisdom and Culinary Therapy to Survive Your Child's Senior Year of High School (and Reclaim the You of You)

For many mothers, a child's senior year brings about a serious look back on the past eighteen. Every event—from Halloween to Mother's Day—becomes The Last Time. Toni Piccinini knows exactly what that's like, and in The Goodbye Year, she offers the loving support every soon-to-be Empty Nester needs. 

Think of Toni as your bossy-but-loving Italian auntie, with modern sensibilities and a packed pantry. With the wisdom she's acquired from saying goodbye three times to her own children, she reassuringly holds your hand while encouraging you through the insanity of the college application process, the rejections and the acceptances, and the teary dorm drop-offs. Even better, she reminds every mother that the best is yet to come—freedom, creativity, flexibility, and the Me Years.

Toni Piccinini was born in a tiny coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania on an unseasonably warm November evening. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in biology. At the University of California San Francisco, she researched the efficacies of antibiotics, which led to publications most notably in The Journal of Clinical Pathology and The Journal of Microbiology.

Toni opened a San Francisco “Top 100” restaurant and has won several recipe contests, one of which awarded one hundred pounds of pasta to the San Francisco Food Bank in her name. She has written essays, cookbook reviews, and recipes for national and local media, including Roadwork, SheWrites, and The Marin Independent Journal. Her essay “House Affair” was a Narrative Magazine “Story of the Week.” She lives in Marin County, California.