Like the 12 essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body, Savala Nolan is powerful and complex. She is Black, Mexican and white. She yo-yo diets, hates and loves her body, was raised in poverty but educated among privileged white people. Her mother tried to involve her in local Black communities growing up, but Nolan didn’t feel Black enough. “What are you?” was a common question. Her answers are haunting.

Nolan is a lawyer, speaker, writer and the executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. The daughter of an incarcerated Black and Mexican father and a white mother descended from owners of enslaved people, Nolan is also the wife of a white man and mother of their biracial child. She worked her way through school as a nanny for rich people, seething over any connections to the Mammy stereotype. She craves designer clothes, cringes over past experiences using hot irons on her hair, has longed for inclusion among wealthy white people (she calls it “self-erasure”) and is dismayed by her own occasionally white-tinted perspective. When mistaken for hired help, she is repelled. When her husband neglected to vote in the 2016 presidential election, she was flummoxed and furious.

In the titular essay, “Don’t Let It Get You Down,” Nolan’s agony spills over as she says their names: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis and Renisha McBride, challenging her readers to confront the ongoing realities of racial violence. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son, Nolan’s essays speak to both young and old Americans about our country’s pervasive history of racism. Recounting her pregnant great-great-grandmother’s murder by white supremacists, Nolan says such stories, "including how we learn them, or why we’re sheltered from them . . . [are not] a reason to turn away. It’s a reason to go deeper.” In Don’t Let It Get You Down, Nolan brilliantly does so.

Oh, does Lauren Hough have a story to tell. Born into an apocalyptic cult called the Family (also known as the Children of God), Hough grew up in group homes in Germany, Japan, Switzerland and elsewhere, often without enough food, and steeped in the strange prophecies of cult leader David Berg. Because of the Family’s theology, Hough had to smother her identity as a gay kid throughout her adolescence.

After high school, Hough joined the Air Force during the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era (1993–2011) and was stationed in South Carolina. This is where we first meet her in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing—in 1999, standing in her yard watching her new car burn. Someone, likely another airman, has set it on fire, but the sheriff thinks Hough is the prime suspect.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of the audiobook! Author Lauren Hough and actor-producer Cate Blanchett create a heartbreaking and intimate experience for listeners.

In the 11 linked essays that make up Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, Hough recounts these sorts of experiences, such as her last days in the Air Force, when she was more or less pushed out for being gay; her desperate search for a job and home; her work as a bouncer at a gay club in Washington, D.C.; her first romantic relationships with women; her stint in jail for an assault she may or may not have committed; and her years working as a cable guy. Beneath all her turmoil is the trauma of growing up in the Family—the sleep deprivation, the endless singing, chanting, praying and preparing for Armageddon, the proselytizing and selling posters on the street, all while trying to avoid adults’ and boys’ sexual advances, which the Family tacitly encouraged.

These essays are funny, profane and deceptively loose, as if Hough is talking to you late at night in a quiet bar. But they’re also well crafted and make unexpected connections among Hough’s disparate experiences, her search for identity and the larger culture. Most of all, Hough’s writing is about voice, and her distinctive style is what carries the reader through. By the collection’s end, you feel you know her, and you know she’s finding her own way through writing. Hough is a writer to watch.

Girlhood is a time of life that’s often idealized as innocent and safe. This, of course, speaks to our gendered expectations for the so-called fairer sex. But the truth about girls’ early lives is more complex. Girlhood can be exploited just as often as it is protected, and Melissa Febos brings these complications to the fore in Girlhood, a collection of seven memoiristic essays.

The author of Whip Smart, about her time working as a dominatrix, and Abandon Me, another essay collection, Febos is a dab hand at the memoir genre. The essays that compose Girlhood tell a story of Febos’ life that reaches back to her childhood on Cape Cod and her young adulthood in New York City to examine her internalized beliefs. While her route to making sense of her own life is usually circuitous, her thoughtfulness as she reaches toward a conclusion is a delight to follow.

Many of Febos’ girlhood experiences stemmed from her body developing maturely at a young age. She fearlessly interrogates her adolescent reaction to these changes and the attendant shame, voyeurism and almighty male gaze that subsumed her young life. Each essay is layered like a sfogliatelle: Recollections of a growing girl in a sexist culture lay upon her adult analyses and rich cultural references, from Greek myths to 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault. Sources listed at the book’s conclusion range widely from Black feminist and race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw to British art critic John Berger.

In one of the strongest essays, “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” Febos and her partner attend cuddle parties. Based on the belief that there is a primal need for human touch, a cuddle party is when strangers gather together to experience consensual, nonsexual touch. These parties prompt Febos to examine her history of accommodating and prioritizing men’s needs over her own.

Girlhood offers what some may view as a dark portrayal of young adulthood, in which opportunities for degradation are seemingly limitless. And some of Febos’ later-in-life experiences, such as heroin addiction and sex work, won’t be shared by every reader. But anyone raised as a girl will be able to relate to something in Girlhood, and those who weren’t will marvel at this book’s eye-opening, transformative perspective.