Amy Scribner

NonfictionPop CultureMemoir

The Beauty of Living Twice

Review by Amy Scribner

It’s impossible to overstate just how famous Sharon Stone was in the 1990s. After the phenomenon of 1992’s Basic Instinct, the legendary beauty earned further acclaim for roles in Casino and The Muse and became one of the highest paid actors on the planet. As a result, her every move was scrutinized. She would have broken the internet—if that had been a thing back in 1996—when she wore a black turtleneck from the Gap to the Oscars.

In Stone’s generous new memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, she writes about it all, starting with her loving but fraught childhood in blue-collar Pennsylvania, where her family laughed hard and fought loudly. “They did a horrible, beautiful, awful, amazing job with us,” she writes of her parents. “They gave us their best. They gave us everything. All of it. The full Irish.”

Stone also reveals in this memoir that she and her sister were sexually abused by her maternal grandfather. That portion of the book is understandably vague and brief, but it’s clear this betrayal impacted the family irrevocably.

In fact, The Beauty of Living Twice alternates between vague summarization and incredibly personal recollections. Stone writes in detail about the massive stroke she suffered in 2001, which left her in financial and physical ruin that took years to recover from. She dishes on her experiences with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood and her philanthropic efforts around the world. But she only briefly talks about her experience of adopting three sons, one of whom became the subject of an acrimonious custody dispute with her ex-husband Phil Bronstein.

Overall, the book reads like an oral history, as if someone were typing furiously while Stone reminisced about her exceptional life. (“Remind me to tell you about James Brown,” she writes late in the book. She does not, unfortunately, tell us about James Brown.) Somehow, this old Hollywood narrative style works, and Stone delivers a bighearted, wonderfully rambling story full of wisdom and humor.

It’s impossible to overstate just how famous Sharon Stone was in the 1990s, and in her generous new memoir, she writes about it all.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Women of Chateau Lafayette

Review by Amy Scribner

The Château de Chavaniac, a beautiful stone castle in the remote reaches of the mountains of Auvergne, is the birthplace of the Marquis de Lafayette, a man who played an integral role in the French Revolution and who famously helped the American colonies win their independence from British rule. In The Women of Chateau Lafayette, the marquis is a mere supporting figure as author Stephanie Dray’s novel instead follows three women over three eras of the château’s history.

First there’s Adrienne Lafayette, the marquis’ wife. History has all but forgotten her role as adviser and strategist to her husband, but she put her life and family at risk in pursuit of liberty for all of France. Then during World War I, Beatrice Astor Chanler, a millionaire’s wife and former actor, uses the family fortune to restore the crumbling château, transforming it into a sanctuary for sick and orphaned children. Finally there’s Marthe Simone, one of those orphans, who grows up at the château and works there as a teacher as the Nazis occupy France. Marthe uses her gift as a talented artist to falsify paperwork and protect Jewish children at the manor.

Dray is a bestselling historical novelist who has previously written about Eliza Hamilton and Patsy Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. Her ability to create engaging narratives from history, incorporating rich details and fully drawn characters, is downright magical. Adrienne and Beatrice are both based on real women whose stories come vividly to life here, while Marthe is a composite character inspired by the manor’s female resistance fighters, an artist-in-residence and other figures from the château’s history.

In The Women of Chateau Lafayette, we move among the extravagance of Marie Antoinette’s royal court, the brutality of trench warfare in World War I and the misery of a French countryside slowly starving under Nazi rule. It’s an epic, gripping novel, a powerful depiction of the way brutal conflicts based on prejudice and greed tend to repeat time and again. And through it all, Dray poignantly reminds us of the undervalued contributions of women throughout history.

“I had freed my family by force of will,” says Adrienne. “Not only my family, but those who had been arrested for our sake. I had done it without sacrificing any principle or doing violence. It was not the sort of victory for which people built stone monuments, but I hoped it might still, someday, be remembered.”

Throughout her epic, gripping novel, Stephanie Dray reminds us of the undervalued contributions of women throughout history.
FictionComic Fiction

It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake

Review by Amy Scribner

Noni Blake is in a rut. Her teaching job doesn’t fulfill her. A nine-year relationship has come to its sad but inevitable end. She hates her hair and probably drinks too much. Noni decides what she needs is to shake things up.

Her first instinct is to revisit old flames, the ones who got away. But hooking up with the men and women from her past doesn’t give her what she’s seeking, and Noni realizes she needs something else. She needs a pleasure quest.

“I would never tolerate the things I say to myself if someone else was saying them,” Noni realizes. “I disregard my feelings. I don’t value my desires. I don’t nurture myself. I’m mean. Holy shit. Pleasure isn’t a person. It’s personal. And I need to work out what it looks like to me.”

With an unexpected windfall from the sale of her house, Noni embarks on a six-month sabbatical in Europe. She frequents London pubs with old friends. She buys lingerie in Amsterdam. She visits a retreat center nestled in the Scottish mountains. She reads and walks and thinks. And in Edinburgh, she decides to get a tattoo. The tattooist’s name is Beau, but Noni calls him “the Viking” for his gorgeous face and solid frame. (Picture Jason Momoa; I know I did.) Noni’s pleasure quest did not include plans to meet a beautiful Scottish man, but she finds herself drawn to the Viking. As she gets to know him better, Noni realizes the plans she has made for her life may be at odds with her heart.

It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake is, well, pure pleasure. An Australian playwright and novelist who previously published a young adult novel titled Beautiful Mess, Claire Christian is a deliciously fun writer, letting us peek into Noni’s mind as she learns to listen to her own voice. Amid gorgeous European landscapes, Noni and the people she encounters are wholly likable, even when making questionable decisions.

Sexy and joyful, this is the story of a woman grappling with the idea that it’s OK to seek—even prioritize—pleasure.

Noni Blake is in a rut. Her teaching job doesn’t fulfill her. A nine-year relationship has come to its sad but inevitable end. She hates her hair and probably drinks too much. Noni decides what she needs is to shake things up.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Let’s Get Back to the Party

Review by Amy Scribner

In 2016, Sebastian Mote is living a solitary suburban life as a high school art history teacher. Newly single, he throws himself into his work, serving as adviser to his northern Virginia school’s newly formed LGBTQ social group. In Let’s Get Back to the Party, we flash between the hot, sticky months of summer 2016, when Sebastian marvels at the ease with which the younger generation proclaims their sexuality, and memories of his adolescence, when as an insecure boy he found solace in the beauty of paintings and sculpture. His only friend was skinny, quiet Oscar Burnham, another boy questioning his sexual identity. They furtively explored their feelings, but when Oscar’s family moved away, he left Sebastian behind, no letters, no calls.

At a wedding in which Sebastian is his friend’s plus-one, he catches a glimpse of Oscar. A stilted conversation ensues, and Oscar spends the entire reception scrolling through a gay hookup app. Stung, Sebastian realizes he still feels abandoned by Oscar all these years later.

Their lives become entwined again as each grapples with what it means to be a middle-aged gay man, bookended by the generation that bore the brunt of the AIDS epidemic and by the kids who have come of age in a more open-minded America. Oscar and Sebastian are each pulled into a platonic yet complicated relationship with someone of another generation: Sebastian with a younger student and Oscar with an older writer made famous for his sexual exploits in 1970s New York.

Zak Salih’s first novel is a gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now. He imbues Sebastian and Oscar with complexity and flaws, two men unsure about the path their life is meant to take. Salih offers a cleareyed exploration of the sometimes fine line between friendship and romance, and how past slights can rear their heads in the most unexpected ways.

Set shortly after the Supreme Court’s historic marriage equality ruling and during the year of a divisive presidential election and the Pulse nightclub massacre, Let’s Get Back to the Party is a raw and captivating debut.

Zak Salih’s first novel is a gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Nobody’s Normal

Review by Amy Scribner

From autism to anorexia, people with mental illnesses or neurodivergent brains have long experienced stigma. The extent of what they endure depends on their culture—for example, some Nepalis are placed in restraints, and some Americans are incarcerated when they should be in treatment—but for centuries, humans have placed less value on humans who need more help. In fact, mental illness categories were first invented in Europe during the industrial revolution, to separate those who were not productive workers.

“We’ve long idealized the autonomous individual, dignified those who produce the most capital, and stigmatized those who produce the least,” writes anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker. In the fascinating and illuminating Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness, Grinker explores the origins of this stigmatization.

Much of how Americans think about mental illness stems from the traumas of war and our nation’s woeful response to troops’ needs. At the beginning of World War II, the U.S. Army only had 35 psychiatrists, most of whom were doctors with minimal training in mental health. In 1973, Vietnam veterans began lobbying for more attention to their psychological needs, as they experienced homelessness, substance use disorder and depression.

Yet even as society began recognizing mental illness as a real issue, there remained significant controversy about how to treat it. Grinker recalls the grim midcentury period when a neurologist in Washington, D.C., performed thousands of lobotomies by inserting an ice pick into patients’ eye sockets. His patients included Rosemary Kennedy, who was institutionalized for the remainder of her life after this surgery.

Pharmaceuticals have, of course, helped individuals with mental illness live fulfilling and stable lives, and Grinker explores how use of drugs and therapy has evolved over time. His compassion shines through in this meticulously researched and carefully written book, a passionate call for humans to think about how we view those with mental illness. “Of course, it is impossible to end stigma completely—every society can find something to demean and marginalize,” Grinker writes. “But we can still resist, name, mute, and shape it. Stigma is not a thing but a process, and we can change its course.”

In the fascinating and illuminating Nobody’s Normal, Roy Richard Grinker explores the origins of the stigmatization of mental illness.
NonfictionHumorEssays

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are

Review by Amy Scribner

“What is normal?” actor and author Rachel Bloom asks at the beginning of I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are, her riotous collection of essays.

The creator and star of the hit TV show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" tackles this question from every angle. To begin, she examines growing up in Southern California as “a pale kid with transition-lensed glasses and a rolling backpack” who desperately wanted to be one of the popular kids. The only child of loving, if slightly overprotective, parents, Bloom struggled with feeling like a misfit and was later diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: We chatted with Rachel Bloom about theater, mental health and the difference between writing a book and writing for TV.

She eventually found her place in the theater, where she discovered that “being a theater kid was an easy explanation for the reason I didn’t fit in. It meant that I was a cultured and misunderstood eccentric whose interests made me wise beyond my years.” Bloom studied theater at New York University and spent years working her way up in the industry. A viral video—the name of which isn’t fit for print here, but look it up, it’s hilarious—opened a window of opportunity, and Bloom was contacted by a screenwriter about creating a musical TV show.

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are is a uniquely fun read in part because of the way that Bloom frequently switches formats. One chapter is a screenplay about why she loves theater, while another is a poem apologizing to all her former roommates for being terrible to live with, and she sprinkles excerpts from her real childhood diaries throughout. In addition to the laugh-out-loud portions, Bloom is brutally honest about her shortcomings, self-aware about her quirky approach to life and candid about the years of therapy that have helped her live with OCD.

The conclusion Bloom reaches, of course, is that there's really no such thing as normal. Perhaps even more to the point—who wants to be normal when you could live life as loudly and fully as Rachel Bloom?

“What is normal?” actor and author Rachel Bloom asks at the beginning of I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are, her riotous collection of essays.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Better Luck Next Time

Review by Amy Scribner

Back in the 1930s, Dr. Howard Stovall Bennett III, then known as “Ward,” was the handsome hired hand at a Reno ranch that helped women establish Nevada state citizenship to get quickie divorces. A Yale dropout, Ward got the job after his wealthy Southern family lost everything in the Great Depression. In the wonderful, sweet Better Luck Next Time, a much older Ward recounts his time at the Flying Leap Dude Ranch to an unknown listener, whose identity is revealed at the end of the book.

Ward’s job is equal parts ranch hand, driver, waiter and listening ear to women biding their time until a judge will grant them a divorce. He spends hours sitting outside attorneys’ offices, listening to the women tell their stories. “It was like listening to a celestial radio that only picked up the saddest soap operas,” he says, “its dial twisted slowly by the universe across the whole unhappy bandwidth without settling anywhere for long.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Better Luck Next Time is great on audiobook.

The trouble starts when Nina comes to the Flying Leap. A wealthy heiress heading for her third divorce, Nina takes the heartbroken Emily, who has fled a serial cheater in San Francisco, under her wing. Soon Nina and Emily are embarking on all sorts of liquor- and grief-fueled adventures and roping Ward in to their fun. When Ward realizes he’s falling in love with Emily, he assumes his days at the Flying Leap are numbered.

A longtime magazine writer, Julia Claiborne Johnson follows up her hilarious first book, Be Frank With Me, with this more serious—but still witty and charming—offering. She paints a vivid picture of a hot, dry Reno summer during which women wait to see whether their luck has run out or is just beginning. Ward is a thoughtful narrator, telling his story with the mix of joy and melancholy that comes with being elderly. “When you get to be my age,” he muses, “things that happened fifty years ago start seeming more real to you than what happened yesterday.” Indeed, this is a story that will stay with you for a long time.

Julia Claiborne Johnson paints a vivid picture of a hot, dry Reno summer during which women wait to see whether their luck has run out or is just beginning.
NonfictionEssays

Where I Come From

Review by Amy Scribner

In this compilation of magazine columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun, Rick Bragg continues to weave chicken-fried stories of his life in the South. Best known for his extraordinary memoir All Over but the Shoutin’ and his Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalism, Bragg’s voice is as rich as ever as he finds fresh ways of telling stories both hilarious and poignant.

Where I Come From is a series of vignettes—little jewels on family, faith, food and Fords. Bragg’s Alabama roots especially shine through when he writes about his family, and oh how we love hearing about his family. On the trials of finding a gift for his mother, he writes, “I got her a classic, two-tone blue 1956 Chevrolet. She used it as a greenhouse. I got her a house. It had too many lightbulbs. I got her another. The driveway is too steep. I got her false teeth. She spit them out in the weeds, just outside Pell City, Alabama.”

But Bragg balances the quaint by dipping his toe into current events—something he has typically shied away from in his writing. In a chapter called "The Best of Who We Are," he reckons with the ugliness that remains as our nation grapples with its racist roots. “I grew up in an everyday racism; the Confederate flag license plates that rode on the front bumpers of our pickups hurt others like a thumb in the eye,” he writes. “It took me a while to get it, but it came to me, even as a boy. I do not need a statue or flag to know that I am Southern. I can taste it in the food, feel it in my heart, and hear it in the language of my kin.”

In lighter, more mouthwatering chapters, Bragg reveals himself to be a heck of a food writer. His description of a po’boy sandwich (“shrimp are cooked in butter and spices, then stuffed into hollowed-out bread and drenched in the buttery liquid from the skillet”) had me wishing I could hop a plane to New Orleans. Alas, such a trip is not in the cards, but it was hard to feel too sorry for myself when I was immediately laughing at his next line: “If I were a sandwich, I think I would be a po'boy, overstuffed, a little sloppy, relatively cheap, and bad for you.”

Where I Come From is vintage Bragg: comforting, thought-provoking and as heartfelt as it gets.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Love audiobooks? Check out Where I Come From and other nonfiction audiobook picks.

In this compilation of magazine columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun, Rick Bragg continues to weave chicken-fried stories of his life in the South. Best known for his extraordinary memoir All Over but the Shoutin’ and his Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalism, Bragg’s…

NonfictionFood & Drink

American Cheese

Review by Amy Scribner

Warning: Reading this book will make you very, very hungry.

Author Joe Berkowitz, an editor and staff writer at Fast Company magazine, wanted to get his wife an amazing Valentine’s Day gift. He booked two seats for a tasting at Murray’s, a Manhattan cheese shop. As Berkowitz sampled cheeses that ranged in flavor from milky to dank (his word), his eyes were opened. “It wasn’t just the taste of one spectacular cheese though,” he writes. “It was the dawning realization that cheese was a miracle food, an edible unicorn. So many things needed to go just right in order for each one we’d tried that night to reach us and taste the way it did.”

In the entertaining and informative American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World, Berkowitz dives deep into the fascinating world of American cheesemaking. Although our country is fairly late to the centuries-old cheese party, some of the best cheeses in the world come from places like Vermont and Northern California. Berkowitz travels to festivals, competitions and a Parisian cheese cave to understand this delicious and varied food and the people who make it.

“The cheese world is made up of misfits, rebels, rogues, and romantics; venturing forth from all corners of the country, leaving their old lives behind, to work with something tactile and tasty that they truly love,” he writes. “In the year and a half that followed my cheese awakening, I would meet former accountants, psychologists, literary agents, and many others whose professions had involved open offices, Slack channels, and stand-up meetings first thing in the morning.” Berkowitz also meets food scientists, restauranteurs and Erika Kubick, a blogger who put on a cheese-themed burlesque show called (what else?) Strip Cheese.

Berkowitz writes with unbridled glee about the subject of “cakey blues and bloomy rinds and marbly cheddars.” The result is a thorough, fascinating and hunger-inducing (but never cheesy) examination of the culture of cheesemaking.

Warning: Reading this book will make you very, very hungry.

Author Joe Berkowitz, an editor and staff writer at Fast Company magazine, wanted to get his wife an amazing Valentine’s Day gift. He booked two seats for a tasting at Murray’s, a Manhattan cheese shop.…

FictionPopular Fiction

The Switch

Review by Amy Scribner

Leena Cotton was on the fast track in corporate London, where she was the youngest senior consultant at Selmount Consulting. But after her beloved sister dies, Leena loses her footing. Panic attacks are threatening to derail her career. She’s placed on a mandatory two-month sabbatical.

At the same time, Leena’s grandmother Eileen is feeling lonely and lost after her husband left her for their dance instructor. Life in the village of Hamleigh is slow, and Eileen finds herself ranking the available men. (Typical pros include "own teeth" and "full head of hair," while cons range from "tremendous bore" to "always wears tweed.")

Clearly, Leena and Eileen need shaking up, and they agree to switch homes for several weeks. Eileen—whose own London career dreams were cut short when she got pregnant so many years ago—eagerly moves in with Leena’s colorful roommates. She is immediately struck by how disconnected Londoners seem; the tenants in Leena’s apartment building don’t even know each other’s names. She begins an effort to bring the community together, particularly the lonely, isolated older residents.

Meanwhile, Leena is adjusting to just how connected Hamleigh is. Everyone knows each other’s business—and has an opinion about it. When Leena volunteers to help with the annual village celebration, she must navigate the meddling of Hamleigh’s longtime residents. She also reconnects with a childhood friend who is now a single father and the village’s most eligible bachelor. Leena finds herself wondering whether she can trade her fast-paced London lifestyle for the village, where memories of her sister are everywhere.

Despite the bucolic setting for much of the story, Beth O’Leary’s second novel is brisk and engaging. Her writing is warm, funny and oh-so-British. The characters she creates feel real—especially the older residents of Hamleigh, who are hilariously cranky and nosy but never lapse into caricature. In this time of increased isolation, The Switch offers a hopeful reminder to reach out to our neighbors with an open mind. It’s a cozy, lovely story about how community matters more than ever.

“These people. There’s such a fierceness to them, such a lovingness,” Leena says. “When I got here, I thought their lives were small and silly, but I was wrong. They’re some of the biggest people I know.”

Beth O’Leary’s second novel is a cozy, lovely story about how community matters more than ever. In this time of increased isolation, The Switch offers a hopeful reminder to reach out to our neighbors with an open mind.

NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Once I Was You

Review by Amy Scribner

In Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa offers a searing, clear-eyed account of growing up in America after she emigrated from Mexico as an infant. Weaving her own life story with key milestones in U.S. immigration history, she produces a brave examination of the United States’ shortcomings.

Written in Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice, Once I Was You is, quite simply, beautiful. 

Hinojosa’s family traveled to the U.S. so her father could work as a researcher at the University of Chicago. When she was a child, they would drive from their home in Hyde Park into Chicago to see the big city, where Hinojosa would gaze at public housing developments, “massive brown cement towers, twenty floors of fencing around balconies and doors. No windows. I wondered why they had no windows even though they were built overlooking this beautiful lake. It seemed like a purposeful punishment.” It was an early glimpse into the inequities of racism to which Hinojosa would devote her journalistic career.

Hinojosa moved to New York City to study at Barnard College, where she found her voice as a radio host at the college station, cementing her career path. She took jobs at NPR, CNN, CBS and PBS, where she produced pieces that celebrated diversity and shone a light on immigration issues, including a groundbreaking report on “Frontline” about the immigration industrial complex and physical and sexual abuse at detention centers. She developed PTSD from the countless interviews she conducted with detainees, who told her stories of their horrific treatment.

As Hinojosa reported these stories, she maintained the objectivity that’s so crucial to journalists’ credibility, but she also kept close her own immigrant experience and her belief that America is long overdue for a reckoning. “My husband [the artist German Pérez] says that the reason this is so hard for me is because I believed in the promise of this country,” Hinojosa writes. “I bought into the exceptionalism. It’s hard to accept how ornery and normal and mediocre this country really is. I thought we were better than this. But we aren’t.”

Once I Was You is, quite simply, beautiful. Written in Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice, this memoir takes readers on a journey through one immigrant’s experience. Hinojosa was able to realize the American dream, but she urges us not to look away from all the others for whom America is a nightmare.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Maria Hinojosa reveals what it was like to narrate her memoir’s audiobook: “I am the character, she is me!”

In Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa offers a searing, clear-eyed account of growing up in America after she emigrated from Mexico as an infant. Weaving her own life story with key milestones…

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Comeback

Review by Amy Scribner

Grace Turner was a rising Hollywood star, a beautiful actor taken under the wing of legendary director and writer Able Yorke. As her fame grows, so does Able’s control over her. He molds her into the perfect starlet, but behind the scenes, his growing manipulation and verbal abuse spiral into something even darker.

“He wanted Marilyn without the overdose, Winona without the shoplifting, Gwyneth without the health shit,” Grace explains in the novel. “I was untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling down a path to immortality so rapidly, so immaculately, that not one person stopped to question how it all worked so well, a fortysomething man and a teenager being so inextricably linked.”

By the time she’s 21, Grace is addicted to vodka and pills. On the eve of her first awards season, Grace steps away from the spotlight, fleeing first to her parents’ home in unfashionable Anaheim, California, then to a moldy Malibu beach house in the shadow of Able’s home. The paparazzi flock to capture her dazed, disheveled appearance as she adjusts to living on her own for the first time in her life. A trip to the gas station to buy food—dill-flavored potato chips, a pack of Babybel cheese, water and a slice of pizza (she doesn’t know how to cook)—is like throwing bread crumbs to seagulls. Soon photos of her are plastered across gossip websites, and Grace is at a crossroads: Will she be a Hollywood cautionary tale, or a comeback story?

The similarities to Harvey Weinstein are inescapable, but in an author’s note, Ella Berman writes that she began the novel months before the New York Times and The New Yorker began publishing bombshell revelations about the disgraced megaproducer’s history of mistreatment and sexual assault. The Comeback flirts with but never devolves into a formulaic revenge plot, which would cheapen what turns out to be a surprising and satisfying story. First-time novelist Berman deftly captures the entertainment industry in all its fickleness and offers a complex, compassionate portrait of the lasting scars of abuse and trauma.

The similarities to Harvey Weinstein are inescapable, but in an author’s note, Ella Berman writes that she began the novel months before the New York Times and the New Yorker began publishing bombshell revelations about the disgraced megaproducer’s history of mistreatment and sexual assault.
NonfictionMemoir

Grand

Review by Amy Scribner

“My social media would tell you I was a working comedian with hobbies, love, a close family, and important opinions on trending topics,” author Sara Schaefer confides in her powerful memoir, Grand. “But inside, there was this impossibly tight knot, hissing at me, suffocating me, sucking the joy out of almost everything I did.”

Schaefer is a successful comedian who has worked for Jimmy Fallon and hosted a talk show on MTV with fellow comedian Nikki Glaser. In Grand, she toggles between her childhood in Midlothian, Virginia, and a 40th-birthday Grand Canyon rafting trip with her younger sister. 

For most of her early years, Schaefer and her three siblings lived a privileged life as the children of a lawyer and a stay-at-home mom. Her parents both drove Porsches. Her mom’s closet was “a jungle of textures: beads, suede, fur, silk.” Their Christmases featured mountains of presents. But after Schaefer and her siblings learned that their dad had misappropriated his clients’ funds, their family’s opulent lifestyle was replaced by low-paying jobs as they rebuilt their lives and repaid their debts. 

The rafting trip is a way for Schaefer to face her fears, both literally (she is afraid of water) and spiritually (she hasn’t fully grieved the death of her mom a decade earlier). Schaefer and her sister travel through Class VIII rapids and learn how to check their campsite for scorpions before bedtime. All the while, Schaefer’s writing is radiant, whether she’s describing the wonder of the Grand Canyon or her early years as a stand-up comedian in New York City. She tells her story with a generosity that never lapses into sentimentality.

“The sound of the rushing river canceled out all the other sounds,” she writes of her first night sleeping in the canyon. “I thanked the universe for this moment, made peace with my demons, and finally became one with nature. I fell into a deep, soul-restoring sleep. Just kidding—I tossed and turned and cussed for six hours straight.” The melding of humor and pain makes Grand a fresh and engaging read. It is a wise, funny acknowledgment that we are not always in control—and that growth is most likely to happen when we let go.

“My social media would tell you I was a working comedian with hobbies, love, a close family, and important opinions on trending topics,” author Sara Schaefer confides in her powerful memoir, Grand. “But inside, there was this impossibly tight knot, hissing at me, suffocating me,…

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features