Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In most biographies, an epilogue provides the story of what happens after the subject of the book has died or somehow left the scene. It’s a wrapping up, a life-after-life afterthought.

Will Boast, whose Power Ballads: Stories (2011) won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, cannily reverses this usual order by turning the epilogue into the entire story of his life until now. In Epilogue: A Memoir, Boast plunges into the depths of his own heart to probe the ragged mysteries that bring families together, hold them up through the years and cause them to fall apart.

Having already lost his younger brother to an auto accident and his mother to cancer, Boast, at 24, loses his father to complications of alcoholism. Muddling through his father’s papers, seeking consolation in women and wine and generally wondering what life will bring next, Boast stumbles upon secrets his parents had kept from him. He learns that his father had been married, with two sons, before he met and married Boast’s mother. As he attempts to get to know his half-brothers in England, he contemplates the light that these new relationships can shed on the truths of his own childhood, and he imagines rewriting his own family story.

Absorbing and agonizing at the same time, Boast’s narrative refuses to cover raw wounds, instead leaving them open to the fresh breezes of love and renewal that blow into his life after his father’s death.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As a little girl in Augusta, Georgia, Jessye Norman absorbed the lessons of preparing to do a task well. Every Monday morning as she set off for school, her father would ask her if she had her poem ready to recite, and her mother would exhort Jessye to “stand up straight.” Norman discovered in those years that the act of standing in front of crowds and performing came as naturally to her as “passing around the Ritz crackers with pimento cheese at the end of a program.”

In the same soaring voice that has made her one of the world’s most beloved opera singers, Norman delivers an inspiring memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing!, in which she reveals her deep love for her family and community and the many ways that music is the thread woven through all aspects of her, and our, lives.

Growing up, she scarcely imagined that she would become a singer; in childhood, she wanted to play the games the boys were playing, like baseball and basketball, and by the time she was in junior high, she had set her sights on a career in medicine. Whatever she does, Norman credits her mother Janie for her strength: “My sense of self was inspired by Janie Norman, her mother, her sister, and the women who came before them—the people of whom I am wonderfully and fearfully made. . . . It is my legacy as a ‘little Norman’—a legacy of strength. A reverence for honesty and a will to speak to inequity when it rears its head.”

Norman profusely thanks her teachers for recognizing a gift that she herself had not acknowledged, and she gratefully recalls Mrs. Sanders, her middle school choral director, and her high school principal, Lloyd Reese, for encouraging and supporting her to participate in the Marian Anderson Vocal Competition in Philadelphia. Although Norman did not win that contest, Sanders took the opportunity to introduce Norman to Dean Mark Fax and music professor Carolyn V. Grant at Howard University, both of whom saw Norman’s tremendous potential and offered her a full scholarship.

Norman plainly and forthrightly shares the struggles she has faced as a black woman singing opera around the world, but it’s her joy that echoes gloriously throughout her book: “Singing gives me many rewards and blessings for all the hard work it requires and on which it depends,” she writes. “Singing, for me, is actually life itself. It is communication, person to person and soul to soul, a physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual expression carried by the breath. Life!”

Leah Vincent is a good girl who loves her rabbi father. In her Yeshivish community—a sect within ultra-Orthodox Judaism—she’s a girl “who would never sneak a kosher candy bar that did not carry the extra strict cholov Yisroel certification.”

Vincent yearns for little more than to live devotedly the only life available to her: Follow Jewish laws strictly, marry the right man and have his children. When she leaves her home in Pittsburgh to attend high school in Manchester, England, she meets her best friend’s brother, Naftali. It’s not long before she’s not only aching with lust and love for him, but also beginning to question her religious teachings. She writes letters to Naftali filled with theological questions. When her aunt in Manchester discovers the letters, Vincent’s life spirals out of control, as her parents turn their backs on her because of her “immoral” action of writing letters to a boy. Overnight, she is on her own without any financial or emotional support. 

In Cut Me Loose, Vincent details her harrowing journey as she wanders through harmful relationships and destructive actions, such as cutting her body. As she hits bottom, Vincent realizes that the “life she is trying to craft is doomed to failure.” Although she eventually achieves a measure of redemption, she learns that too much freedom, like too much restriction, has its pitfalls.

Vincent’s compulsively readable memoir draws us into her fears, her few joys and her complete aloneness as she struggles to navigate the course of a new life.