It’s hard to write about Shame and Wonder, albeit for good reason. David Searcy’s collection of 21 essays are unlike anything I’ve read before, though they feel achingly familiar. The subject matter is the stuff of everyday life, or an era just passed: comic strips, the prizes in cereal boxes, the craft of folding a perfect paper airplane. But woven through each essay is a haunting quality, humor and loss uncomfortably conjoined on the page.

The book opens with “The Hudson River School,” in which Searcy’s dental hygienist tells him the story of her father, a Texas rancher who uses a tape recording of his infant daughter’s crying to lure a sheep-thieving coyote to its doom. Searcy is unseated by the tale and ventures out to meet the man and ask him about the story. It’s a genial exchange, but on the page it assumes the spaciousness of a haiku, eerie, wide-open and wild. The story of a trip to Turkey sponsored by a tourist organization is filled with the rush of scheduled activity punctuated by bottles of Orange Fanta, but on a coastal ride in a hired car, “[A]ll of a sudden there’s the water. There’s the blue you get in children’s paintings. Blue as that primordial blue you’ve had in mind since childhood.”

The accessible tone of Shame and Wonder belies the depths these essays plumb. They come in peace, then sock you in the solar plexus. Read them; you’ll see. 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Roger Angell, now 95, has had an extraordinary life. A longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker and one of the best-ever writers on baseball, he is the only writer elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Baseball Hall of Fame. His wonderful new collection, This Old Man: All in Pieces, is, he says, a grab bag, a portrait of his brain at this point in his life. The title piece, a moving and personal account of aging, received the 2014 prize for best essay from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

“Getting old is the second biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love,” Angell writes. “We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night.”

Some of my favorite selections are about writers. Angell reflects on the 20,000 or so manuscripts he has rejected over the years and addresses many misunderstandings about fiction, pointing out that there is no one way to write a story or to edit one for publication. He notes that his fellow fiction editors were very much alike in their passion for their work, but each went about the job differently. His own approach is to constantly ask tough questions about such things as clarity and tone, and, at the end, to ponder “Is it good enough? And is it any good at all?” In a postlude he writes, “[E]diting, I think remains a mystery to the world. Sometimes it even mystified me.” 

“Writing is hard,” he says, “even for authors who do it all the time.” He remembers his stepfather, E.B. White, rarely being satisfied with what he had written, sometimes commenting after sending his copy to The New Yorker: “It isn’t good enough. I wish it were better.” Angell need not worry about his own writing in this eloquent collection. It shares and illuminates and entertains in a variety of ways and is a reader’s delight.

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

“Gorgeous hair is the best revenge,” said Ivana Trump, she of the platinum blonde, sky-high hair. Hair as tool of revenge, as obsession, as embarrassment, as source of pride: Why does a long string of protein absorb so much of our attention? 

In Me, My Hair, and I, authors including Anne Lamott, Adriana Trigiani, Jane Smiley and Hallie Ephron explore women’s unique relationships with their hair. As Elizabeth Benedict, who edits this glowing collection of essays, writes in the introduction, “Hair matters because it’s always around, framing our faces, growing in, falling out, getting frizzy, changing colors—in short, demanding our attention: Comb me! Wash me! Relax me! Color me! It’s always there, conveying messages about who we are and what we want. Invite me to the prom! Love me! Hire me! Sleep with me! Don’t even think about sleeping with me! Take me seriously! Marry me! Mistake me—please!—for a much younger woman.”

The essays range from poignant—Suleika Jaouad writes about losing her hair to chemo at age 22—to hilarious—Alex Kuczynski explores trends in pubic hairstyling. All of them are illuminating, revealing that for women, hair is inextricably linked to identity, a visual cue to who they are and what matters to them. 

“I wanted so badly to be someone I wasn’t, wanted so badly to find a way to be comfortable in my skin,” writes novelist Jane Green in an essay that chronicles how her hair has changed to mirror her life circumstances over the years. “Hair was simply the easiest thing to change, the most obvious aspect of my appearance to alter.”

Thought-provoking and insightful, Me, My Hair, and I is a must-read for anyone who has ever dealt with frizz, gray hair, mothers insisting we get a haircut, fathers insisting we not, hair envy or hair disasters. In short, all of us.

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

Maxine Kumin, who died last year at 88, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist and children’s book author who served as U.S. poet laureate and bred horses on her New Hampshire farm. Kumin’s memoir, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, comprises five essays, four of which first appeared in American Scholar and Georgia Review. These charming recollections will now reach a wider readership in book form.

As the title signals, Kumin’s father was a pawnbroker, and her mother was a music teacher. The family was Jewish, but lived in the largely Protestant Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown. To add to the odd-man-out scenario, young Maxine attended Catholic grammar school. When she left home for college at Radcliffe, her “parochial Jewishness fell away.”

On a blind date in the final days of World War II, she met Victor Kumin, a young engineer who was working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. After some wartime separation and a few hard-to-arrange trips to the Southwest, the couple began a long, enduring marriage. After early years in Boston, they moved to their rural retreat, which Kumin named Pobiz Farm in a wry reference to the “poetry business” that was occupying her time.

Within this skeletal framework of a life, Kumin writes luminously about the everyday episodes that often found their way into her poems. The Pawnbroker’s Daughter has a comfortable rhythm, a feeling that one is sitting and hearing these quotidian details firsthand from the late-in-life Kumin, perhaps while foraging for mushrooms alongside her in the woods or by the fire on a winter’s day. Heartening rather than elegiac, this endearing volume is a lovely last expression of a formidable writer’s art.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, December 2014

When Meghan Daum published her first collection in 2001—the brilliant My Misspent Youth—her fresh, honest musings as a Manhattan 20-something immediately made her the envy of a generation of aspiring writers.

Now Daum is approaching middle age, but her voice is as singular and her insights as poignant as ever. A married newspaper columnist in Los Angeles, Daum deals with aging parents, health scares and her decision to remain child-free in a baby-obsessed world.

Right out of the gate, it’s easy to see why this collection of essays is called The Unspeakable. Daum starts off with the searing “Matricide,” in which she recalls her fraught relationship with her now-​deceased mother, a woman she calls a “flashy, imperious, hyperbolic theater person” with a “phoniness that I was allergic to on every level.” Unspeakable, indeed. And yet . . . who can say they’ve never been annoyed with their mom? The rest of us just don’t have the ability to say it quite as potently and incisively as Daum.

Reflections on love and death are woven throughout the essays. In the melancholy “Not What it Used to Be,” Daum writes wistfully of being her Older Self looking back on her Younger Self, “someone who took multiple forms, who could go in any direction, who might be a bartender or a guitar player or a lesbian or a modern dancer or an office temp on Sixth Avenue.”

In the bittersweet “Difference Maker,” Daum examines her decision not to have children, how she and her husband struggle to ignore an amorphous Central Sadness in their relationship and find satisfaction in their “life of dog hikes and quiet dinners and friends coming over on the weekends.”

Daum draws out larger truths about life whether she’s writing about Joni Mitchell, foodies or dogs. The Unspeakable is a stunner of a book about settling into one’s skin.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, October 2014

Let me confess: I’m a medical book junkie. That said, Terrence Holt’s Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories is my new favorite, both in terms of literary merit and intriguing medical details and drama.

Holt is uniquely qualified, having earned an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in English before turning to the study of medicine. Early on, he decided he wanted to write about the process of becoming a doctor. He eventually concluded that the best way to capture the essence of his journey without violating patient confidentiality was to write a series of “parables” that drew on his own experiences.

Whether or not you classify this collection of nine stories as nonfiction, they ring true in both details and spirit, starting with a doctor’s evolution from the first night on call as an intern and ending with ethical questions that a physician ponders 40 months later, his residency complete.

Holt describes telling a young woman that her death was imminent: “I’d like to say that I held her, or said soothing words. But I don’t hold female patients, even when they cry, and I had no soothing words. I knelt there and I watched her, and struggled to comprehend what I saw.”

Each account is equally compelling and thought-provoking. The narrator faces a dying woman who needs oxygen but finds the mask claustrophobic; an artist whose mouth and jaw have been eaten away by cancer; a mental patient whose mysterious but horrifying self-inflicted pain needs to be identified; and a young woman who arrives in the ER but has already, as it turns out, begun the act of suicide.

How can a doctor help patients such as these? What should or shouldn’t a physician do? How do doctors feel when confronted with such daily dilemmas and myriad personalities?

Dr. Holt never settles for easy answers, and the questions he poses—reflecting the frequent uncertainties of doctors and patients alike—will leave readers thinking long after the final page is turned.

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

Treasured by many readers for her 22 (and counting) mystery novels featuring the Venetian policeman Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon is also a practiced writer of sharply observed commentary about a range of subjects. My Venice and Other Essays collects some of these short and incisive pieces for the first time.

An American who has lived in Venice for 30 years, Leon straddles these two disparate cultures with a dexterous balance of affection and acerbity only afforded the perceptive expatriate. Leon clearly loves her adopted city, but she is not so pie-eyed as to overlook—and report to often hilarious effect—its idiosyncratic imperfections: dealing with a snail-like bureaucracy as her ancient flat crumbles, witnessing all manner of detritus furtively dumped into canals, enduring an aged, inconsiderate neighbor’s blaring television (and plotting how to kill off said irritant in one of her crime novels). Retreating to a house in the country, she encounters all sorts of singularly Italian critters—human and otherwise—including an attentive chicken, a wayward cat and a not particularly intelligent mole.

Moving beyond Italy, Leon is often less tolerant, but no less mordant, in her assessments of the U.S., particularly its foreign policy, militarism (something she witnesses up close as a teacher at a military base), and consumerism. Yet, there are endearing portraits of the somewhat eccentric members of her American family and a sprinkling of sweet childhood memories to soften her mounting discomfort with her native land. She also offers a scathing appraisal of Saudi Arabia, where she taught at one time.

An unabashed opera lover, Leon includes a handful of snappy pieces on the pursuit of that art form. She closes the collection with some thoughts on writing—including Suggestions on Writing the Crime Novel (“I refuse to call it ‘literature,’” she writes self-deprecatingly). One particularly arresting piece contrasts the life and death of Princess Diana to the fate of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth.

My Venice and Other Essays might fail to register on the radar of those unfamiliar with Leon’s fiction, which would be a pity. Savoring these short and engaging pieces is akin to sharing a latte at a Venetian café with an entertaining, opinionated, intelligent friend.

Perhaps you love Ann Patchett’s novels, like State of Wonder and Bel Canto. Truth & Beauty, her standout memoir about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, might have a special spot on your shelf. Or maybe you heard how she co-founded Parnassus, an indie bookstore in Nashville that opened its doors after two other local bookstores closed. She’s something of an all-star, and however you arrived at Patchett fandom, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage has something for you.

Fans of Patchett’s fiction will be fascinated by her views on writing nonfiction, which she says is a great way for a novelist to make a living—much better than waiting tables or teaching college kids. She’d much prefer to “knock off an essay” than do the grueling work of “facing down” the next chapter of her novel-in-progress. And as the book shows, Patchett has knocked off quite a few essays over the years, about experiences ranging from driving an RV across the American West (“My Road to Hell Was Paved”) to the title story’s tale of how she fell in love with her husband, by way of an ill-fated first marriage and her subsequent rejection of the very idea of matrimony.

This collection gathers writing across 20 years of Patchett’s life and lets readers in on her best personal stories. Did you know, for instance, that she once seriously trained to enter the L.A. Police Academy? That she considers her grandmother to be one of the great loves of her life? That she still has relationships with some of the nuns who taught her in grammar school? These stories and more are told in simple, appealing prose that feels like a phone conversation with a good friend.

And the book is a great read. Essays are artfully selected and arranged—certain pieces read back-to-back provide a fuller, more interesting story than one would alone. Patchett tells us that early in life she knew she had “a knack for content” when it came to writing. This collection is evidence of that knack, across many different contexts and over many years. It will be a welcome addition to many bookshelves, including my own.

What seems to be there, but isn’t?

As Dr. Oliver Sacks explains in Hallucinations, his latest collection of absorbing essays, “Hallucinations, beyond any other waking experience, can excite, bewilder, terrify, or inspire, leading to folklore and the myths (sublime, horrible, creative, and playful) which perhaps no individual and no culture can wholly dispense with.”

Hallucinations, which differ starkly from dreams and imagination, are often associated with wild visions induced by fever, madness or drugs. They come in much greater variety, however, and include hearing voices, music or noises, feeling things or smelling odors—none of which exist. This multitude of illusions has a grand litany of causes, including injury, illness, migraines, trauma, epilepsy and more.

As always, Sacks, the best-selling author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, describes a fascinating cast of patients, starting with a blind, elderly woman named Rosalie, who suddenly began seeing a parade of people in colorful “Eastern” dress and animals, and later a group of somber men in dark suits, and finally, crowds of tiny people and children climbing up the sides of her wheelchair. These crowded, complex visions rolled before Rosalie’s unseeing eyes like a movie, sometimes amusing, and at other times boring or frightening. Sacks diagnosed Rosalie with a fairly rare condition called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which causes visually impaired people to hallucinate.

In addition to Rosalie, he shares stories about a patient who keeps hearing Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” play repeatedly, a Parkinson’s patient who watches a group of women trying on fur coats in her doctor’s waiting room, a man who feels peach-like fuzz covering everything he touches and a narcolepsy patient who sees the road rise and hit her in the face as she drives. Hallucinations, we learn, can range from terrifying to inspirational, from annoying to entertaining. One of Sacks’ elderly patients greatly looked forward to her visit each evening from “a gentleman visitor from out of town.”

In these 15 essays, Sacks clearly explains and categorizes an amazing assortment of hallucinations, trying to make sense of phenomena that seem to defy logic. He shares his own tale of a voice he heard when alone on a mountain and suffering from a dislocated knee. Just when he was tempted to lie down and sleep, a voice commanded, “You can’t rest here—you can’t rest anywhere. You’ve got to go on. Find a pace you can keep up and go on steadily.”

No doubt his many avid readers are deeply grateful that the good doctor followed the orders of this life-saving hallucination.