Heather Seggel

When Kevin Powell appeared on the first season of MTV's “The Real World,” he developed a reputation for hostility toward his white roommates. I remember thinking he was an adult miscast in a show full of kids, always running out the door to work. In The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey Into Manhood, we learn about the grinding poverty and loss that fueled that anger, which resurfaced time and again to threaten all he held dear.

Powell grew up in a series of grimy apartment buildings in and around Jersey City. With no father to speak of, his mother, aunt and cousin were his world, and his mother's repeated abuse left Kevin fearful and angry. His successes—going to college, doing groundbreaking journalism as rap music underwent major changes, and even that MTV gig—often led to dead ends or being let go as a result of his temper.

At its best, Powell’s memoir is richly descriptive. A preacher from his childhood has "an elastic honey-coated face, a short-cut afro with a razor-sharp part chiseled in on the left side, and a river-wide grin that felt fatherly and protective." But it's not until Powell visits Africa and, back at home, searches for his absent father, that his anger and rage abate, and those qualities often make him a less-than-sympathetic figure. It’s hard to reconcile his complaining about a girlfriend who left him with the revelation, casually mentioned several chapters later, that he cheated on her. He works to overcome his violent tendencies, but even as he’s speaking in public about the need to stop violence against women, he struggles to take his own advice.

The Education of Kevin Powell is not an easy read, but it feels necessary in this moment, both for its unflinching look at abuse and its consequences, and for showing the value of working to overcome all obstacles, including those of our own making. Powell seems to have found both a measure of calm and a new drive and vitality by story's end, and we can only hope the peace is lasting. 

Celebrity memoirs often have a predictable arc: I was born, and for a brief while I was much like you, eating cereal and riding bicycles, then (big famous thing) happened and now here I am, not much like you at all. These memoirs fill a need, because we want to know about the famous thing but also the steps that led to it, in hopes that we might trade our own cereal bowls for shrimp forks. By that metric, Mary-Louise Parker’s Dear Mr. You, a memoir written by an actress, is the farthest thing imaginable from a celebrity memoir. For this we can rejoice and be glad.

Parker has written a collection of letters, many of them poems in epistolary drag, to men in her life: a grandfather she never knew; her father (“To convey in any existing language how much I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.”); an amazing neighbor; a doctor who saved her life; the hippie co-op colleague whose loincloth made him look like a “Malibu Jesus doll.” She apologizes to a cabdriver she screamed at one day and tackles the three heads of disastrous ex-boyfriends. There’s a tiny bit of beekeeping advice, but not a fried green tomato to be found. 

Dear Mr. You keeps many of its addressees vague, letting flashes of poetry and telling detail sketch an outline we can nearly feel. A few are clearly also famous, but if you can identify them, your fame-tracking software is more finely tuned than mine. Some, like the “Future Man Who Loves My Daughter,” are still pending.

Don’t pick up this book looking for gossip about “Weeds” or life on Broadway. Parker offers instead a portrait of a human life apart from the cycles of fame: private, flawed, strange, funny, polished and reflective of the people she’s encountered along the way.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Readers familiar with Jenny Lawson, as either The Bloggess or the author of the 2012 bestseller Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, are aware that she has created a tribe of perfectly flawed followers by telling hilarious stories about some of the darkest times in her life. Furiously Happy is similar in focus—you’ll find taxidermy, riotous fights with husband Victor and funny if slightly scary family stories—but Lawson’s latest book is even more open about the challenges posed by illness. It will make you laugh to the point of tears, but it could also help you make it through the toughest stuff life has to offer.

Lawson’s diagnosed illnesses, mental and physical, stack like layers of a wedding cake, and she often finds herself in the midst of a panic attack or rheumatoid arthritis flare-up while facing the public demands of her job. “It’s hard to understand anyone’s being depressed or anxious when they’ve been given a gift it seems anyone would kill for. . . . But still, it happens,” she writes. As a result, she has learned to show up for life even when it’s scary, but also to savor time at home, reach out to folks on Twitter for support on bad days and pay very close attention when things are going well. 

This adds up to a kind of mission statement, a commitment to wild joy in the face of adversity. If the downside of being a Bloggess is tough, the perks include asking the IRS for stuffed armadillo deductions, dressing as a koala to the great confusion of the Australian tourist industry and having the kind of connections needed to get new limbs made for a dead raccoon who suffered a postmortem rollercoaster mishap. Living well may be the best revenge but instead, why not be “furiously happy”?

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.