Carla Jean Whitley

If you’ve read any of A.J. Jacobs’ bestselling books, you have an idea of what to expect from It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree. But if you haven’t, then, you’re in for a treat. Jacobs has established a brand by immersing himself in his subjects. There was the time he read the encyclopedia (The Know-It-All) and the time he took every command in the Bible literally (The Year of Living Biblically). He’s also applied that sort of immersive reporting as a writer for Esquire and as the host of the podcast Twice Removed. Jacobs doesn’t do things halfway.

That’s again the case in It’s All Relative, as he turns his attention to genealogy. It started with an email: “You don’t know me, but you are an eighth cousin of my wife, who, in my opinion, is a fine lady.” This email from Jules Feldman introduces Jacobs to the concept of a worldwide family tree—and, in typical Jacobs fashion, he goes all in.

Jacobs decides to organize the world’s largest family reunion. At some point we’re all related, right? And perhaps seeing one another as family could improve the way we treat strangers. You wouldn’t cuss at your fourteenth cousin twice removed in the carpool line, would you?

It’s an ambitious goal, and one that results in a romp through genealogical history and insight. Readers will meet y-Chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve, who weren’t the Earth’s original inhabitants but are those from whom we can trace our origins. They likely didn’t know each other, but their DNA has separately survived the centuries. They’re our eight-thousandth-great grandparents, so to speak.

Readers will delight in Jacobs’ other discoveries, such as his relationship to George H.W. Bush, and his uncertain approach to organizing the world’s largest family reunion. It’s All Relative is another installment in Jacobs’ brand of learning, with a lot of laughter along the way.

You might say New Orleans entered an existential crisis after Hurricane Katrina. People across the country weighed in on the city’s future: Should New Orleans rebuild? Or should it accept that life below sea level, on the coast, wasn’t meant to be?

Anne Gisleson and her fellow members of the Existential Crisis Reading Group could relate. In 2012, seven years after the storm, the New Orleanians banded together to read and discuss works that addressed life’s big questions. Together, they would process through the grief and uncertainty that so often accompany different phases of life.

For Gisleson, grief was not only civic but also deeply personal. In the group’s first month, her father died of cancer. Gisleson’s two youngest sisters, twins Rebecca and Rachel, died by suicide about 15 years earlier, 18 months apart. “Losing a sibling, especially in youth, is a particular blow, a lateral loss of shared history and DNA that lacerates your identity,” Gisleson writes. “Your old narrative is shattered. Your new narrative becomes shapeless, full of confusion and pain. Double that.”

The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading seamlessly melds together Gisleson’s story, New Orleans’ ongoing recovery and existential discovery. It also serves as something of a guide for readers wrestling with their own struggles, with an appendix of works cited for further exploration.

Through each month’s reading and discussion, Gisleson and her companions engage with big, sometimes bleak ideas. And no matter the grief that drew each of them to the group, they remain focused on a shared goal: living.

“This life is our cross,” one member says during the group’s interpretation of the Stations of the Cross (which they dubbed “The Way of the Crisis”). “Here we are together to engage and discuss, duke it out, support each other in our fight with this cross. Here we have gathered in our own ‘Fight Club.’”

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“If I wanted to have children with anyone,” he’d said, “it would be with you.” If was the key word. If was the problem.

Heather Harpham and Brian fell for each other quickly, in a classic opposites-attract scenario. They were both creative professionals, but the obvious common ground ended there. She was as carefree as her California upbringing would suggest, and her disposition was well-suited to her career in theater. Brian, on the other hand, embodied the expectation of the East Coast elite. He preferred time inside, alone, left to his writing.

Their dreams were also at odds: Harpham always expected she would someday become a mother, but Brian had no interest in being a dad.

When Harpham learns she’s pregnant, that news appears to end the relationship. She flees New York, heartbroken but determined to raise their daughter alone. But within hours of Gracie’s birth, doctors realize something is wrong with the infant’s blood.

Gracie’s doctors are unable to pinpoint precisely what is wrong, but frequent blood transfusions help. Harpham doesn’t know what Brian wants, even when he meets their daughter six months after her birth.

Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After follows Harpham’s unexpected pregnancy and all that follows. It is filled with both pain and beauty, and she shares a clear-eyed view of messy relationships and the journey toward something that resembles joy. Harpham’s powerful memoir is the tale of two people struggling to save their daughter while trying to discern what their relationship to one another is all about. “We find happiness, if we find it at all, on accident,” Harpham writes. “We trip over it on our way somewhere else.” And by sharing her own experience, Harpham provides light for others’ paths.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“The beautiful, vibrant, living world goes on.” Nina Riggs, who died in February, realized this truth during a mundane moment: While teaching her son to ride his bike, she stumbles and releases him. As Benny rides forward, he shouts behind him, checking on his mother.

It’s a simple moment, but to Riggs, whose triple negative breast cancer had been deemed terminal, it encapsulated so much more. When she was diagnosed at age 37, doctors expected her disease to be curable. It was one small spot of cancer, that was all. But it metastasized and, by age 38, Riggs knew the disease would kill her.

Riggs’ husband, John, longs for a return to normalcy. “I have to love these days in the same way I love any other. There might not be a ‘normal’ from here on out,” she responds. “These days are days. We choose how we hold them.”

As she endures chemotherapy and radiation, Riggs faces those days with a clear-eyed determination to fully live. Riggs, herself a poet, examines her impending death through her own lyrical perspective, informed by the writings of her great-great-great-grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and French philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.

Part of living, though, is death. Riggs must face it even before her own cancer is deemed terminal: Her mother’s multiple myeloma is fatal. The family concludes her mother’s funeral with an open-ended moment of silence, which Riggs struggles with. Shouldn’t they sound a gong or otherwise give those gathered permission to leave?

No, her brother says. “It’s about honoring the unknowing and the awkwardness and the mystery of dying. It’s unsettling—and that’s okay.”

Through this warmhearted memoir, Riggs writes her way to accepting her own death and the uncertainty that follows it. The Bright Hour is an introspective, well-considered tribute to life. As Riggs’ famed ancestor Emerson writes, “That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World.”

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.