Announcing my next book: THE ART OF FIGHTING

And it is available for pre-order TODAY!

Priya Parker

Feb 24, 2026

I can finally share some news with you that I’ve been holding quietly for a long time.

For the last five years, I’ve been working on a new book that answers the question: How do we fight with those to whom we want to belong?

It’s called The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict. It will be in bookstores everywhere on September 8th, and I am so happy to get to tell ALL OF YOU HERE first, before the rest of the world sees it via People magazine later today. It’s available for pre-order now.

Pre-order The Art of Fighting now

I am thrilled to reveal the gorgeous cover, designed by Helen Yentus of Riverhead Books, who also hand-painted (!) the cover of The Art of Gathering. When my daughter saw it, she exclaimed, “It’s like The Art of Gathering. But smushed and messy!”

I believe one of the reasons we are so lonely today is that we have lost the skills to fight well. We’ve forgotten how to do it. Over the years, I’ve watched so many friend groups, teams, and communities implode around me. And because of my day job as a conflict resolution facilitator, I’ve had a front-row seat to many of these reckonings. Folks, I believe we are deeply confused about conflict, we don’t know how to hold healthy heat, and we have very few collective rituals in modern life that teach us how to fight well together. When life gets tough, or complicated, or messy, or hurtful, many folks find it easier to bounce rather than to bother. And that’s a mistake.

I wrote The Art of Fighting to teach all of us how we can have better, richer, more meaningful, and longer-lasting relationships at home, at work, and in our communities. If The Art of Gathering looks at how we can bring people together meaningfully, The Art of Fighting explores what we can do with those people when shit gets real.

I didn’t write this book as someone who finds conflict easy. In fact, quite the opposite: I hate conflict. Though I am from a bi-cultural, bi-racial, bi-ideological family, I am a third-generation ostrich on both sides. When things get tense, I and the people I come from are very good at sticking our heads in the sand. So I come to this book as a conflict-averse conflict resolution facilitator. Which is why I know that conflict and the holding of healthy heat in our relationships is a skill we can learn. I learned it. And I want to teach it to you.

People magazine will publicly reveal this cover today. But you get it first. Ain’t she pretty?

Just as I did in The Art of Gathering, I examine in The Art of Fighting a wide array of groups from all walks of life. A decades-old friend group imploding over the election of a certain president. A church in the 1990s grappling with whether it can both allow gay marriage and keep its congregation together. A government agency erupting in a “flag war” among colleagues who have worked together for decades about Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. The first important fight among founders of a famous gathering in a desert debating whether they can have an internal hierarchy if they are also trying to build utopia. I look at football teams and drumming circles and a social justice non-profit navigating its own staff unionizing. You will learn about fights in community gardens and playgrounds and (maybe my favorite example in the book) a 150-year-old open-water swim club that splits into two camps at the invention of the wet suit.

You will meet the actual people who find themselves in the middle of these reckonings, and learn intimately and in great detail how they held conflict, how they decided whether to face it or to avoid it, and how they created and innovated collective fighting rituals to help them have the conversations they needed to have to get to the other side.

Also, a number of you are in this book. You know who you are :) Close readers and long-time listeners might remember the many polls and Google forms I’ve sent out over the last five years asking you questions like: “Have you ever had a group you love implode? Tell me about it!” “Have you ever been part of a group that had to end and chose to mark it in a meaningful way?” You have shared with me and trusted me and let me come into your groups and lives and I am so grateful, and I have learned so much from so much of your wisdom and grit. Thank you.

As I’ve said in this newsletter before, we are awash in the tools of self-help. But these tools don’t help us answer the questions of our shared life. We also need group help. And, I wrote The Art of Fighting to add another book to our GROUP HELP shelf.

I’ll be sharing more about The Art of Fighting in the coming months, but for now, the biggest way you can help is to pre-order it today.

If you want to have closer relationships, fight more. And fight better.

With so much gratitude,

Priya

Pre-order now