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The Trouble with Fairy Tales

Plum Johnson

The Trouble with Fairy Tales book cover image

September 30, 2025

Viking

  • Nonfiction
  • Memoir

The Trouble with Fairy Tales

Plum Johnson

The long-awaited second memoir from Plum Johnson, bestselling author of They Left Us Everything.

The Trouble with Fairy Tales is a wise and insightful reflection on the relationships that sprawl across a lifetime. In it, Plum explores how we often sacrifice our independence and identity in our love lives, falling for the fairytale notion of “happily ever after”, and how it can take years, and many detours, to fulfil the most important relationship—the one with ourselves.

Ripe with the humorous anecdotes, charming insights, and aching revelations so characteristic of Plum’s style, the book is our window onto her reinvention of self as she moves through the various roles that many women inhabit: from compliant child to loving mother, rebel wife, artist, and successful writer.

Plum’s writing urges her readers to turn inward to reach a deeper understanding of their own tangled relationships. Funny and resonant, The Trouble with Fairy Tales is the kind of striking personal narrative that will stir and inspire women of all ages.