Reading Maggie Scarf’s groundbreaking new book could change your life. In Secrets, Lies, Betrayals, the bestselling author of Unfinished Business, Intimate Partners, and Intimate Worlds brilliantly explores how the body holds on to painful episodes from the past–including secrets we may be keeping even from ourselves–and how we can release them to live freer, healthier lives.

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In Intimate Worlds, bestselling author Maggie Scarf takes on the most important, and most universal, subject of her distinguished career: the family. As the first social organization that we each encounter, the family is where we learn the most fundamental and enduring lessons of our lives. Yet for too many, those lessons turn out to be painful, perplexing, and emotionally crippling. In this luminous, beautifully written book, Scarf brilliantly examines the complex ways in which families create their own intimate rules and patterns of interaction, and how by understanding these dynamics we can each improve the quality of our own family life.

At the book's core are the stories of four fascinating families and the very different ways they enact the central issues of family life: power and intimacy; conflict and love; individuality and group identification. Spanning the spectrum of family health from dysfunctional through optimal, these families grapple with serious substance abuse, sexual problems, difficulties with attachment and nurturance, eating disorders, and buried resentments that surface generation after generation. As Maggie Scarf probes the motives and meanings of these compelling dramas, she reveals the essential truths of how families shape human identity. Combining lucid analysis with warm human understanding, Intimate Worlds is a major work that both clarifies and deepens our knowledge of family relationships.

"Wrought with care and commitment, it is meticulously researched and will, I think, serve as a valuable resource for families struggling to understand themselves."
–Los Angeles Times

"Scarf knows the intricacies of the family structure and, even better, knows how to write well about them. In Intimate Worlds, as in most of our lives, family is riveting, white-knuckle stuff."
–The Washington Post Book World

"Radiant… Compelling."
–The New Yorker

The compelling national bestseller that pushes beneath the surface of marriage to explore the depths of true intimacy.

"Anyone involved in, embarking on, or yearning for, an intimate relationship should buy, borrow or steal Intimate Partners."
–New Woman

"Intimate Partners is easy to read–and to identify with–especially if you're married. The author does not address the institution itself, but rather the individual, though quite universal, strains that pervade it."
–The Boston Globe

"Maggie Scarf…applies her prodigious energy to the task of diagnosing and treating the malignancies of marriage."
–The New York Times Book Review

"In Intimate Partners, Maggie Scarf takes on all the big questions, and manages to give some surprisingly substantial answers."
–Newsday

"Maggie Scarf has captured the essence of our search for intimacy…Anyone who is married or contemplating marriage will be richly rewarded by the reading of this remarkable book."
–Dr. Carol Nadelson, Past President of the American Psychiatric Association

In detailed, revealing portraits of women from their teens through their sixties, Maggie Scarf explores the core experiences of women's lives and discovers what can happen when the days and years scurry by, leaving unfinished the tasks that transform us from child to girl to woman.

"An extraordinary panorama of women's lives today."
–The New York Times Book Review

"Real-life problems are thoughtfully and sympathetically analyzed in Unfinished Business… Love and loss, deprivation and fulfillment, the pangs of growing up and, the plight of those who never do–these are Scarf's subjects, and she gives them the attention and respect rightly due such integral threads in the fabric of our lives."
–Cosmopolitan

"No woman or man will be untouched by Maggie Scarf's brilliant research… There is a gift for all of us in these pages–that freeing, exhilarating emotion: 'Thank God I read this book–I thought I was the only one.'"
–Nancy Friday

Why do people behave the way they do?

Maggie Scarf writes with remarkable clarity about complicated scientific topics. In the articles collected in Body, Mind, Behavior–some prizewinning, some never before published–she asks questions that highlight the frontiers of research in human behavior: When does a fetus become a person? What leads a woman to attempt suicide? How much do sex hormones contribute to behavior? How do you define sanity and madness? What is a hangover? (Surprisingly, no one really knows.)

Guided by a fascination in how and why we humans behave as we do, Scarf looks for answers in areas that extend from biomedicine to sociology to psychoanalysis. The experiments and technical breakthroughs she discovers are translated for the reader into language that is both readily understood and relvant to everyday life.

Scarf also interviews the people carrying on the most exciting work in behavioral science: Jane Goodall, famed for her work with chimpanzees in the Gombe Preserve; Jose Delgado, whose experiments in brain stimulation will one day, he hopes, help to construct "happier, less destructive, better balanced" people; John Bowlby, the English psychoanalyst who looks to ethology for insight into human attachment; Thomas Szasz, who claims normality is a square circle or a four-sided triangle; and R. D. Laing, psychiatrist, philosopher, prophet, social critic, and cult leader.

What these researchers–and Maggie Scarf–have to teach us is a far greater understanding of our selves.

"Scarf is a clear and responsible journalist who knows how to highlight her writing with a warm personal touch while keeping her own judgments in the background. Her book is an intelligent popular introduction to the range of new thinking on human behavior."
–Kirkus Reviews

"Maggie Scarf is a 'popularizer' of contemporary work in psychiatry and mental health in the best sense of the word. Her stance is critical yet open-minded, her reporting is accurate and lucid. I hope this book will receive the widespread attention it deserves."
–Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.