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NonfictionHumorEssays

Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

From dubbing Michael Keaton an “Eyebrow Zaddy” to writing a treatise on barrister wigs “looking like a sad-ass Halloween costume and smelling like Seabiscuit’s haystack,” Phoebe Robinson is as hilarious as ever in her third book, Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes, the first title from the comedian-podcaster-actor-host’s new Tiny Reparations Books imprint.

As in her previous memoirs-in-essay (You Can’t Touch My Hair and Everything’s Trash, but It’s Okay), not only is the bestselling author’s work super funny, it’s also enlightening and thought-provoking. Whether she’s offering advice to aspiring bosses, dismantling the “patriarchal narrative [that] every woman . . . wants the same things” (especially motherhood) or explaining why the #ITakeResponsibility initiative in the summer of 2020 enrages her (“celebrities heard but did not listen to what Black people wanted and raced to put together something so shoddy and tone-deaf”), Robinson’s voice is sure and strong.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Phoebe Robinson shares what she hopes to accomplish as the publisher of Tiny Reparations Books.

Her essay “Black Girl, Will Travel” is particularly moving. She explains that, while her parents are team “#NoNewFriendsOrAcquaintancesOrWorldlyExperiences,” one of the benefits of her career is the ability to see more of the world. It can be “downright terrifying and life-threatening to travel while Black”—and the lack of movies, books, shows and ads featuring Black people abroad certainly makes it seem as if travel isn’t for Black people. But visiting unfamiliar places has changed her, and she urges readers to remember “evolving can’t always happen when we’re confined to our area code.”

In “4C Girl Living in Anything but a 4C World: The Disrespect,” Robinson describes a journey of a different kind: Her own rocky path to feeling at home in and with her hair. She examines the historical and cultural influences that have shaped Black women’s feelings about their hair and details the racism, colorism and cruelty that persists to this day. It’s a memorable, meaningful reading experience dotted with hits of poetry, anger and revelation—as is Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes as a whole. So slip into your inside cardigan (a la Mr. Rogers) and settle in for another rollicking and resonant Robinson read.

Not only are Phoebe Robinson’s essays super funny, they’re also enlightening and thought-provoking, dotted with hits of poetry, anger and revelation.
NonfictionEssaysAnimals

On Animals

Review by Alice Cary

“Well, for heaven’s sake, Susie,” Susan Orlean’s mother once told her. “You and your animals.”

Orlean has garnered well-earned acclaim writing about a slew of unlikely subjects, including orchid lovers, libraries, Saturday nights and more. However, she writes, “somehow or other, in whatever kind of life I happened to be leading, animals have always been my style. They have been a part of my life even when I didn’t have any animals, and when I did have them, they always seemed to elbow their way onto center stage.”

Regardless of whether you’re an animal lover, On Animals is a fabulously fun collection of essays, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker, where Orlean is a staff writer. “Lady and the Tiger,” for instance, tells the story of Joan Byron-Marasek, who collected tigers on her Jackson, New Jersey, property—well before Netflix’s “Tiger King.” Tiger hoarding, it seems, is a thing, and Byron-Marasek had lost track of exactly how many she owned when a Bengal tiger weighing more than 400 pounds was seen walking through the nearby suburbs.

Orlean is such a virtuoso of unexpected joys and delights that she can make even the story of a lost dog read like a thriller, as she does with the unlikely dognapping tale of a border collie in Atlanta. When writing about a champion boxer named Biff in “Show Dog,” her trademark humor shines through right from the start: “If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He’s friendly, good-looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools.”

In “Lion Whisperer,” Orlean profiles South African Kevin Richardson, who bonds with lions as cubs, cuddling and cultivating relationships through their adulthood, at which point they seem to accept him “on some special terms, as if he were an odd, furless, human-shaped member of their pride.” The essay blossoms into an especially intriguing tale with serious ethical concerns, which seasoned journalist Orlean duly explores. Her style seems meandering at times, but each essay always returns to its glorious point, even when following an aside about, in this case, a man who befriended a housefly named Freddie.

Whether she’s encountering a donkey laden with four televisions in Morocco, or extolling the global appeal of pandas, Orlean’s high-octane enthusiasm never wanes. After all, this is a woman who admits, “One day, I went to CVS to buy shampoo and came home with four guinea fowl thanks to a ‘For Sale’ sign I passed as I was driving home.” Likewise, Orlean’s readers will find themselves completely diverted by On Animals’ irresistible menagerie.

Susan Orlean is such a virtuoso of unexpected joys and delights that she can make even the story of a lost dog read like a thriller.
NonfictionEssays

Graceland, at Last

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Margaret Renkl’s name was already familiar to readers in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was the founding editor of the online literary publication Chapter 16, and to readers of the New York Times, where she is a contributing opinion writer. But when her memoir, Late Migrations, was published in 2019, Renkl’s celebration of the natural world and family drew praise from reviewers, readers and popular book club facilitators nationwide.

Graceland, At Last gathers a selection of Renkl’s columns from the past four years, inviting loyal readers and newcomers alike to take in Renkl’s perspective on the world. The collection is organized thematically, touching on topics present in Late Migrations and others such as politics, religion, social justice, arts and culture.

These essays can be read with their original contexts in mind, thanks to the inclusion of their publication dates. For example, in “Hawk. Lizard. Mole. Human.,” Renkl writes of “days that grow ever darker as fears gather and autumn comes on.” The column, published in August 2020, may remind today’s readers of the spike in COVID-19 cases that occured in the fall of 2020. But the columns hold up equally well without the recollection of where you were when they were first written.

Renkl often finds gifts in the mundane, such as in a power outage caused by storms, recounted in “The Night the Lights Went Out.” But her concern about the precariousness of our environment never wanes, showing up even in the midst of this celebration of the simplicity of a few days without power.

Whether extolling the wonders of a rattlesnake or lamenting Southern Christians’ support of oppressive policies, Renkl engages with her home region’s beauty and complexity. As she writes in the introduction, “To love the South is to see with clear eyes both its terrible darkness and its dazzling light, and to spend a lifetime trying to make sense of both.”

Whether extolling the wonders of a rattlesnake or lamenting oppressive policies, Margaret Renkl engages with her Southern homeland’s beauty and complexity.
NonfictionAudioEssays

You Are Your Best Thing

Review by Autumn Allen

In You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience (6.5 hours), Tarana Burke (creator of the #MeToo movement) and Dr. Brené Brown curate a collection of personal essays by Black writers and activists in an effort to apply Brown’s work on shame, resilience and vulnerability to the Black experience in America. Burke and Brown’s conversational preface feels like an engaging podcast as they explain the process of their collaboration.

The contributors, who include Jason Reynolds, Austin Channing Brown, Kiese Laymon, Laverne Cox and Imani Perry, read their own essays, infusing the listening experience with a range of voices and styles. These performances require the listener to reckon with poignant, often painful experiences that speak to the ways in which white supremacy adds an extra barrier to the process of overcoming shame. By narrating their personal stories, the contributors, along with Brown and Burke, demonstrate what is gained by bringing one’s authentic self to the work of deconstructing oppressive power structures. At the end of each essay, the authors’ biographies are read by actors Mirron Willis, Bahni Turpin, J.D. Jackson or L. Morgan Lee.

The production of this audiobook allows the listener to feel that the political is personal.

Tarana Burke and Brené Brown demonstrate the power of bringing one’s authentic self to the work of deconstructing oppressive power structures.
NonfictionAudioEssays

The Anthropocene Reviewed

Review by Anna Zeitlin

Based on John Green’s podcast of the same name, The Anthropocene Reviewed (10 hours) is a collection of essays structured as reviews of the human experience. Known for such young adult novels as The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, this is Green’s first nonfiction book for adults but hopefully not his last. From sublime sunsets to the unbearable feeling of mortification to odd fascinations like the Hall of Presidents and Piggly Wiggly, he makes even the most obscure topics compelling. 

With storytelling skills from years as a podcaster and YouTuber, Green makes for a fantastic narrator. This is a truly gratifying listening experience; only the audiobook edition offers the opportunity to be part of a melancholy World War I singalong. 

No matter how you know of Green, whether from his previous books, podcast, vlogs or as a YouTube world history teacher, you’ll find something to enjoy in this audiobook.

With storytelling skills from years as a podcaster and YouTuber, John Green makes even the most obscure topics compelling in his audiobook.
NonfictionAudioEssays

The Wreckage of My Presence

Review by Anna Zeitlin

You may know Casey Wilson from her brief stint as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” from her role on the beloved sitcom “Happy Endings” or maybe from her podcast on the Real Housewives, “Bitch Sesh.” But if you’re not familiar with her, you’ll certainly want to be after listening to her collection of essays, The Wreckage of My Presence (6.5 hours). As author and narrator, Wilson touches on all these projects, but you don’t have to be a pop culture devotee to find something relatable in her essays. 

Each story is moving and hilarious, whether she’s trying to get out of an awkward dinner party, processing the death of her mother or recounting all the ways “people don’t know how to act.” Listening to Wilson’s narration is like getting good gossip from one of your funniest friends. She’s grounded but oh-so-hilarious, a combination that makes this audiobook a must-listen.

Read our review of the print version of The Wreckage of My Presence.

Listening to Casey Wilson’s essay collection is like getting good gossip from one of your funniest friends.
NonfictionEssaysBody, Mind & Spirit

Yoke

Review by Alison Hood

In the introductory essay of Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, Jessamyn Stanley relates the time a reader, who happened to be a freelance editor, found a mistake in the early pages of Stanley’s first book, Every Body Yoga. Stanley was attempting to define the Sanskrit word for yoga, which means “to yoke” or “to join together the light and dark of life, the good and the bad . . . to marry breath, thought, and movement, to connect the body, mind, and spirit.” Instead of writing the word yoke, however, Stanley had inadvertently written yolk. Oops.

Anger and shame ensued—a welter of feelings that propelled Stanley to her yoga mat for some calming breaths. Thus, Yoke was born, a collection of 13 autobiographical essays that are brash (with salty language aplenty), outspoken, funny, insightful, honest and occasionally spiced with dashes of self-deprecating melodrama.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jessamyn Stanley shares how her guide to the ancient practice of yoga turned out to be deeper and more demanding than she ever imagined.

The essays in Yoke explore Stanley’s belief that “everything is yoga, every day,” and that fully entering yoga/yoke means integrating the light and dark of life with the hardscrabble work of everyday living. “My yoga has many intersections and edges,” she writes, “because like the universe, I’m always unfolding. My yoga is finding out what it means to be a Black queer woman in a world that doesn’t want me to be.” Her reflections on topics such as meditation, imposter syndrome, wealth inequality, racism, cannabis use, sexual abuse and the sacredness of music are heartfelt and often searing. She is strongly declarative, and this makes for a narrative that allows readers to really know this author, which is, after all, what many readers want: connection.

While the writing occasionally meanders or goes a bit off point, any discomfort readers might feel in response to Stanley’s blunt-edged anger can give rise to self-reflection and stir compassion for our collective human frailty and suffering. But this honest chronicle of a journey toward self-acceptance and purpose wraps on a bright note. As Stanley writes, “I’m enough. Exactly as I am right now. I don’t need to know more or do more or be different at all.”

The 13 autobiographical essays in Yoke are brash, outspoken, funny, insightful, honest and occasionally spiced with dashes of self-deprecating melodrama.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Don’t Let It Get You Down

Review by Priscilla Kipp

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.

“What are you?” was a common question asked of Savala Nolan when she was growing up. Her answers in Don’t Let It Get You Down are haunting.
NonfictionEssaysBlack History

Carry On

Review by Amy Scribner

When longtime Georgia Congressman John Lewis died from pancreatic cancer in 2020, President Obama said, “He, as much as anyone in our history, brought this country a little bit closer to its highest ideals.” This lovely book offers Lewis’ meditations on everything from love to public service and affirms that he indeed represented the best of our nation.

Carry On: Reflections for a New Generation is divided into short sections in which Lewis shares hard-earned wisdom from his years on the front lines of the civil rights battle. The son of a sharecropper, Lewis joined Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders as they protested segregation across the South. For someone who faced injustice, police brutality and racism, Lewis remained remarkably optimistic. “Yes, we were jailed, arrested, firebombed, bloodied,” he writes in a chapter on activism. “But we never felt hate, and even though it can be hard to hold back our anger, it is worth the effort because it works in the end. We changed America, and now the time has come for more change.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Actor Don Cheadle narrates the audiobook edition of Carry On.

Lewis devotes much of the book to the current expression of our nation’s racism. He compares the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin to the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and urges his fellow Americans to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement.

There are lighter chapters, too, in which Lewis writes about art, sports, clothes and books. He loved comic books as a kid, and a favorite hobby as an adult was frequenting flea markets searching for old books. These chapters read like someone shooting the breeze with an old friend. He recalls telling Congressman Elijah Cummings, for whom he was often mistaken, that he was going to get a tattoo on the back of his head so people would stop confusing them.

Carry On is a bittersweet book, coming so soon on the heels of Lewis’ death, but a beautiful reminder of finding hope and joy in the simplest things. “Happiness is being at home after a long day, playing with and feeding my cats,” Lewis writes. “I’m a happy person.”

This lovely book offers John Lewis’ meditations on everything from love to public service. It’s a beautiful reminder that he represented the best of our nation.
NonfictionAudioEssays

Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

Review by Tami Orendain

In her collection of intensely personal essays, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing (9 hours), Lauren Hough explores her identities—lesbian, Air Force airman, blue-collar worker and cult survivor—and uses them to critique systemic issues in contemporary American culture.

The audiobook’s narration is shared by Hough and actor-producer Cate Blanchett, who reads the two essays that bookend the collection. Blanchett’s clear, sharp tone allows the wit of Hough’s writing to shine, while Hough’s narration is deadpan, her steady voice capturing each essay’s unabashed honesty. Together, Hough and Blanchett create a heartbreaking and intimate experience for listeners, inviting them to reflect on the possibility and value of genuine human connection.

Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing is for audiences who are unafraid to face suffering, loss and vulnerability. Despite its challenging content, it offers a safe place for listeners to discover that they are not alone.

Read our review of the print version of Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing.

Author Lauren Hough and actor-producer Cate Blanchett create a heartbreaking and intimate experience for listeners.
NonfictionAudioEssays

Festival Days

Review by Tami Orendain

Essayist Jo Ann Beard explores life, death and the craft of writing in Festival Days (7.5 hours). Actor Suehyla El-Attar, known for her roles in Ant-Man and the Wasp and Green Book, reads in a calm, steady voice that emphasizes the collection’s sweeping gravitas, but she also gives personality to each unique piece. In “Werner,” a story about a man escaping an apartment fire, she creates a flowing contrast between firm descriptions of pain and the wistfulness of memory. She narrates “Maybe It Happened” in a lilting, sing-song tone, giving it a nursery-rhyme quality. And in “Close,” a discussion of craft, she is animated and personal, making the listener feel like they are learning from the author herself.

El-Attar’s narration pulls listeners in, highlighting the way a well-constructed sentence can bring an emotion, a scene or an idea to life.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of the print version of Festival Days.

Actor Suehyla El-Attar reads in a calm, steady voice that emphasizes the sweeping gravitas of Jo Ann Beard’s collection.
NonfictionHumorEssays

The Wreckage of My Presence

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Casey Wilson’s The Wreckage of My Presence kicks off with an essay that zigzags from archly funny to matter-of-fact to poignant and back again, nicely setting the tone for the 20 essays that follow. In “Bed Person,” Wilson explains that she “wants to recline at all times,” whether in Pilates class, at parties or in a movie theater. She and her husband routinely eat dinner in bed, and baths are a regular part of her routine. “I am simply a person of comfort and excess,” Wilson writes, which she learned from her parents, an intelligent and eccentric duo prone to displaying big emotions in ways that made her feel humiliated or exhilarated, sometimes simultaneously.

It was devastating when Wilson’s beloved mother died suddenly at 54, not least of all because her passing came at a time of great professional and personal change for Wilson, who’d just left “Saturday Night Live” and was newly cast in the show “Happy Endings.” Overwhelmed, she found solace in watching “The Real Housewives” of various cities. The reality TV franchise became an emotional and career-augmenting lifeline: Wilson's obsession helped her to reckon with her grief, and she now co-hosts the beloved Housewives podcast “Bitch Sesh.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Summer reading 2021: 9 books to soak in this season

Fans who want more deets about “Happy Endings” will enjoy Wilson’s behind-the-scenes tidbits about the show and its stars. She also provides a list of amusingly pointed don’ts in “People Don’t Know How to Act” (e.g., “don’t not know if you aren’t funny”), details her fascination with Scientology in “Flyentology” and shares a tear-jerkingly lovely Louie Anderson story in “Cool Girl.”

Throughout, Wilson is forthright about everything from her romantic regrets to her experiences with depression and anxiety. She’s successful in many arenas (screenwriting, comedy, movies, TV, podcasting) but views herself as a work in progress, whether as a mother of two, wife, colleague or friend. Her voice in The Wreckage of My Presence is funny and bold, occasionally manic or melancholy, and always hilarious and heartfelt. Fans will turn the last page wanting more.

The Wreckage of My Presence is funny and bold, occasionally manic or melancholy, and always hilarious and heartfelt. Fans will turn the last page wanting more.
NonfictionEssays

White Magic

Review by Catherine Hollis

White Magic is divine, incantatory, a riddle, an illusion. In Elissa Washuta’s hands, this collection becomes more than the sum of its parts. The subjects of these essays are parts of a bigger story—like a spell with the intention to make whole what has been wounded. Readers of Washuta’s two previous nonfiction books will recognize some of the same terrain, but this collection creates a new narrative, a reckoning with healing and with growing up.

White Magic begins with Washuta's urgent desire to decolonize witchcraft and other spiritual practices. For example, the Native American practice of smudging with white sage has been commodified so thoroughly that sage bundles were recently offered for sale at Sephora. Washuta, who is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, wishes for “a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder,” although she doubts whether such a thing exists.

Tapping into her roots, Washuta explores the ecology of the Seattle region through Native mythology, as well as the history of the region’s colonization by white settlers. Multiple essays focus on the legacy of sexual violence against Native women, contextualized through Washuta’s own harrowing experiences. These essays move deftly between the personal, cultural and historical to create resonances across time.

Some of the best essays in White Magic are the most intimate, especially the ones that wrestle with the piercing sorrow of romantic attachment. Why do we love those who cannot love us back—or worse, who might kill us? Under Washuta’s dexterous touch, these questions gain symbolic weight through nuanced excursions into pop culture, from Stevie Nicks and “Twin Peaks” to the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. These subjects might sound disparate, but Washuta’s gift for weaving metaphorical strands across essays creates a strikingly harmonious narrative whole.

White Magic is divine, incantatory, a riddle, an illusion. In Washuta’s hands, this collection becomes more than the sum of its parts.

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