Priscilla Kipp

At a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bookstore several years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Gail Caldwell paused her reading to say, “There’s a lot of heart and soul in this room, and I would like to share the evening with you.” Sitting with her memoir Bright Precious Thing feels like an invitation into her own heart and soul. With a breath-catching, lyrical grace, yet enough focus to avoid sentiment, Caldwell lays down the path her life has taken. She credits the women’s movement with inspiring her evolution from rebellious Texan teenager to acclaimed Boston Globe critic. The friends and lovers she spent time with along the way are vividly here as well, for better and for worse. Date rape, an abortion and a long love affair with alcohol run right alongside the things that have sustained and inspired her.

What makes Caldwell’s memoir so much more than a skillful retelling is the way she balances her long past with visits from her present-day neighbor’s child, Tyler. When they meet, the 5-year-old falls in love with Caldwell’s beloved Samoyed dog, Tula. Over the years, that love comes to encapsulate all three of them—the writer helping along the little girl’s imagination, Tyler flashing the fearless self-awareness she seems to have been born with, and Tula blessing them both with her steadfast company. Caldwell calls it “a mutual learning society.” The child reminds Caldwell of “the innocence of forward motion,” and she tries to give Tyler “a palette for all that hope.”

For Caldwell, that palette got its beginnings in the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which “delivered” her from the “traditional paths” of marriage and motherhood. Diving into the past, alternating with sprints into the present, she observes herself as a writer, swimmer, rower, dog lover and friend. She can see the totality of her experiences from her perch much better as she nears 70, and they compose a “bright, precious thing . . . my life.”

Children of the Land, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s powerful, poetically infused memoir, adds a soul-searing voice to the canon of contemporary immigration narratives.

It’s an old tale for Castillo, the journeys over the border repeating down through his family’s generations. Undocumented himself as he crosses over the desert into California as a child, temporarily blind from the stress, he is like his parents, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. Heading north, then as now, is to save loved ones from poverty and crime, to secure a chance to begin again, even though it often means leaving others behind and never being accepted where they land.

When Castillo is still a child, his father is deported and banned from the U.S. for 10 years. His mother resists following her abusive husband and tries to support her children with the low-paying work that many people who lack documentation must hold in order to stay invisible. When her children are grown, she tries to go home to Mexico, but it’s yet another journey fraught with complications. Castillo continues his own daunting border crossings as a DACA graduate student and, finally, as an adult clutching his hard-won green card. His interview with an immigration official is nerve-wracking for the reader; later, when it’s his father’s turn, we hold our breath all over again.

Castillo grows up riddled with the shame of his family’s invisibility. He cannot even talk about his family’s past, for fear of revealing his fragile hold in the U.S. He struggles to belong in a country with a long history of ambivalence about immigrants (as any visitor to Ellis Island can attest), while his family’s Mexican home lies literally in ruins. A 1917 practice of delousing naked migrants with chemical showers has given way to physical examinations, blood work and vaccinations—which cost the person immigrating hundreds of dollars. Being detained means sleeping on cement with shoes for a pillow. Asylum seekers wear ankle monitors for months so that their whereabouts can be tracked. Applying for permanent residence can take years and thousands of dollars more. Still, they come, seeking a better life.

Children of the Land shines a light on the true story of an immigrant’s plight and serves as witness to the power of hope.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

An engaging, literary take on language and its role in the diaspora of a scattered family, The Magical Language of Others speaks from—and to—the heart. 

When E.J. Koh is 14, her father lands a lucrative three-year contract with a Korean company in Seoul. Her mother goes with him to Korea, leaving Koh and her older brother essentially on their own in California. Their mother writes letters in Korean, her native language, dotted with attempts at English. Koh has yet to learn Korean and cannot write back. She can only blur and stain the indecipherable text with her tears.

The distance between mother and daughter grows. Visits to and from her parents are sparse and awkward. Her father, who seems to know only how to work hard, keeps renewing his company contract until, seven years later, he accepts that his American daughter can have no future in Korea, and he and Koh’s mother return. 

By then, Koh has learned her father’s native language, Japanese, while studying at a school in Japan, a country that once despised the Korean people. She learns about her grandmother’s traumatic years in Japan during World War II, adding another layer to her understanding of language and her complex family history.

Throughout this slim memoir, fraught with differences in culture, custom and, most of all, language, runs a thread of familial love and pain, a back-and-forth that, given Koh’s eloquence, needs no translation. It will take her years to translate her mother’s letters and decide if she was abandoned or if, as she tells a fellow resident at a New Hampshire artist colony, “my parents set me free. They gave me my freedom.”

Haben Girma was born deafblind in California, to refugee parents forced to flee war-torn Eritrea. While her mother and father struggled to cope as immigrants, Girma simply yearned to belong—“a deafblind girl in a sighted, hearing world.” As her vision and hearing continued to fade and her parents grew increasingly cautious, Girma fought for her independence. Against their wishes, she went to Mali to help build a schoolhouse, left home for college in Portland, Oregon, and moved across the country for Harvard Law School. Along the way, she found new ways to manage her disabilities, through technology, teamwork and self-education that included a “blindness boot camp.” Today Girma speaks from a global stage, advocating for improved access to education and services for disabled people. In her often hilarious and utterly inspiring memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, she shares her trials and triumphs.

Things get off to a riveting start when, at the age of 7, Girma is left alone on a plane after her father is forcibly taken off the aircraft. She cannot hear what the flight attendant is saying, and her vision is limited to a few feet. Her terror is palpable. Later there is a confrontation with a bull she cannot see, learning to salsa dance in Mali to music she cannot hear with a partner who is but a blur, and more—much more. Yet by the book’s conclusion, she has graduated from Harvard Law School and become an internationally acclaimed advocate for accessibility, lauded for her work by President Obama at the White House in 2015. 

While Girma’s narrative almost ends there (she adds a brief epilogue to bring her enthralled reader up to date), her mission continues. “A Brief Guide to Increasing Access for People with Disabilities” includes specific advice for the workplace and wisdom that comes from her own experiences of exclusion. “Disability,” Girma notes, “is part of the human experience.” Inclusion improves the world for everyone, she says, and she intends to make it happen.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Haben Girma.