excerpt from Love You More:

In a moment of decisiveness, we decided to return to Illinois, several years after leaving it. We moved back to the town where we both had grown up, close to where much of our family lived. 

David got a job in software. We bought a house, outfitted its garage with snow shovels, a lawnmower and two cars. 

Within weeks, I learned that I was pregnant. Suddenly, my husband was the one with the full-time job. I spent my days padding around the house in my socks, doing laundry, paging through cookbooks and reading volume after volume of pregnancy and parenting books. 

As our baby grew inside me, I pined for New York. I missed my friends. I missed my job. I missed real bagels, restaurants that stayed open past nine, and the noise and color of neighborhood festivals and street fairs. I missed walking to church on Sunday mornings over uneven slate sidewalks and missed our old parish’s West-Indian congregation. I missed taking a taxi to the airport and making the long journey to the other side of the world to stop in on Emperor Tự Đức or eat soft-shelled crabs in a shack on the South China Sea.

I even missed the car alarms that woke me many times on Sterling Place. Sometimes I would walk around my quiet house, singing out the long symphony of buzzers and tones that used to irritate me.

At night, listening out my open window, all I could hear were crickets.

The conversations my husband and I had begun to engage in had plummeted from heady discussions about Waiting for Godot (“Why do you think only Vladimir remembers things from one day to the next?”) to the banal (“Should we go with the PPO, EPO, or HMO this year?”). I’d gone from a life where I might find myself drinking a bowl of chocolate and nonchalantly glancing over at Uma Thurman sitting a few tables over in a Greenwich Village coffee shop to standing in a long line to apply for membership at Costco. 

As tender as were my feelings toward my babies, I started to feel that I was changing from someone special into a lackluster suburban mom with a long “To Do” list and dark circles under her eyes.

It wasn’t that I didn’t connect with motherhood. I had always wanted to be a mother. I remembered the yearning I’d had, back in Brooklyn, for those children who were to come. I loved so much about the quiet early years of my children’s lives. Reading books. Letting them make detours on our walks so that they could break off a flower from a lilac bush or stop and watch a train go by. 

“You’ve got to be a parent someday. If for no other reason, it’s worth it for the bugs,” I said to a young friend recently. The bugs. Crouching on the sidewalk with your toddler to watch regiments of ants marching single file, transporting their obscenely outsized cargo. Learning about praying mantises, marveling at the aquarium of walking sticks at a nature center, counting the legs of a spider. I drank it all in.

But I wondered whether I would like the person I was turning out to be. What was happening to my brain?

After watching the movie for about the tenth time with my son, I found myself obsessing over Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Or “Chee Chee Bon Bon,” as he called it). What could it mean, I’d wonder, as he danced around the room singing “When you’re near us, it's so delicious. Honest Truly, you're the answer to our wishes”? Truly Scrumptious? Who has a name like that? What would my critical theory professor from graduate school make of it? I mused over the sexual politics of “You’re My Little Chu-chi Face.” I sardonically wondered whether Truly indeed was just a “doll on a music box”? Why wasn’t anyone writing academic papers about this film? I would do it myself, I thought, if I weren’t so busy winding up the baby swing and raking through the Lego bin trying to find Darth Vader’s light saber or that red headlight my son was missing.

Who was I becoming? 

praise for Love You More:

"Love You More is a powerful, tender, and eloquent memoir that captures the pain and angst, and ultimately the triumph and overwhelming joy of family, faith, and adoption.”
  -Maurice Possley, author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and adoptive father

“If you're looking for a warm cuddly story of the miracle of adoption, you should probably find a different book. But if you are longing for someone to unveil the beauty, the mystery, the grief, the wonder, the pain, and the messiness of adoption and parenting, then you have come to the right place. Jennifer Grant doesn't gloss over the hard truth that every adoption begins with a loss but that's what makes her story so compelling, so honest, so, so, so good. Told with grace, humor, and a generous spirit, Love You More is a gift for every parent who has ever loved a child.”
  -Carla Barnhill, author, The Myth of the Perfect Mother

“Tender, touching, and informative. The red thread Jennifer talks about will reach out and touch every person who picks up Love You More. It is a story that will make you laugh, give you goose bumps, and make you cry, sometimes within the span of a paragraph. More importantly, it is a story of God’s movement within the heart of a woman and her family that leads to a divine destiny called Mia!”
   -Anita Lustrea, executive producer/co-host, Midday Connection and author, What Women Tell Me

"I could not love Love You More more! Jennifer offers readers wisdom, wit and laid-bare honesty, resulting in a beautiful book that not only shows the Divine at work in her family, but helps us all see the Divine at work in our own families."
  -Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira, author, Grumble Hallelujah and Mama's Got a Fake I.D.

“Love You More is a wonderful story of family and faith, hope and love.  For those considering adoption, this book is both inspirational and practical.  To the rest of us, the book is a delightful and personal story of a very special family.”
  -Dale Hanson Bourke, author, Embracing Your Second Calling

 “’Listen to your life,’ Frederick Buechner famously urged us. The sacred is all around us, all the time, in the sorrows and in the joys, in the moments that seem trivial and in those that feel almost epic.  From page one of her courageously vulnerable, intoxicatingly funny memoir about faith, family and so much more, it is clear that Jennifer Grant listens to her life with great care. She finds the God of grace — the One who makes connections between people that we’d never make ourselves — in each pot of mac-and-cheese, sticky little hand, doctor’s visit, late-night lawn mowing and unlikely-friend-turned-family-member that decorate her life. Love You More will bring a tear to your eye, a lump to your throat and more than a few gut-busting laughs to your soul as Grant invites us into her life, gives us a seat at her kitchen counter (with a cup of fair-trade coffee and a granola bar), and tells us her stories. Love stories, really, written by God for all of us to share.”
  -Cathleen Falsani, award-winning religion columnist and author, Sin Boldly

 “If you are a mom, or await the privilege, you will be captivated by Jennifer Grant 's Love You More: the Divine Surprise of Adopting my Daughter. It is a love story; a story of a mother's love; for God, for herself, her husband, her children, her friends, and for a toddler, living worlds away, awaiting her adoptive mother's arrival. This book glorifies our most precious role--mom. Read it and then pass it on to every mom you know.”
  -Amy Hilbrich Davis, mother of seven, founder and CEO of inspiringMoms.com

“So much written about adoption seems to overlook this essential truth: adoption is about love. Jennifer Grant's story demonstrates this, in every sentence and paragraph, on every page. She tells a story of adoption that is smart, funny, and brutally honest, in prose that shines. I finished her book feeling like I'd found a wise new friend.”
  -Jessica O'Dwyer, author, Mamalita

“Jennifer’s story opens the reader’s eyes and heart to the very personal process of becoming a family.  From the opening pages I knew this was a story about the truth of parenting—all the ways that dreams and expectations bump up against reality and our selves.  Jennifer’s is a blessed journey as she ‘shortens the thread’ that connects her to Mia and Mia to her destiny to live, laugh, and love with Jennifer, David, Theo, Ian, and Isabel. This book is the Eat, Pray,  Love of parenting books with honesty and self-awareness for the divine journey of becoming a family and getting to know, I mean ‘learning to know’ one another.”
  -Karen Deerwester, author, The Entitlement-Free Child

“Anyone who has ever welcomed a child, whether through birth or adoption, will see themselves in this sweet family memoir. Jennifer Grant writes beautifully, evoking laughter and tears, often on the same page, as she shares her family’s journey. Her story is not just about adoption, but about how motherhood transforms us.”
  -Keri Wyatt Kent, author, Breathe, Rest, and Deeper into the Word

“Using words in place of brushes, Jennifer Grant paints a compelling portrait of a loving family, led by God's invisible threads...Divine Alignment...to adopt a baby born in another land.”
  -SQuire Rushnell, author, When God Winks book series

“Jennifer Grant's moving and memorable Love You More stirs your heart, her thoughtful and beautiful prose engages your mind and soul, and her family anecdotes make you wish you could meet them in person, right away! This is not just a book for those considering adoption or who are currently adoptive parents. It's a book that will touch anyone who has experienced more love for their family members than they can express in words. Thankfully, Grant has found a way to do so.”
  -Helen Lee, author, The Missional Mom

“Jennifer Grant writes beautifully, and from the heart. Her journey through mothering, parenthood, family life, and the serendipity of adoption is shared with infinite wisdom and humor.”
  -Christie Mellor, author, The Three-Martini Playdate

Contact Stephanie Newton 
for more information and interview requests:
telephone: (615) 902-2320
fax: (615) 902-2129
Twitter: @stephnewton
email: snewton@thomasnelson.com