Glennon Doyle Melton was a mother in crisis when she turned to Facebook. “I’m a recovering alcoholic and bulimic but I still find myself missing binging and booze,” she wrote. Readers instantly responded. Melton’s website, Momastery, has become a go-to for mothers seeking straight talk and compassion, and her first book, Carry On, Warrior, was a bestseller. Now, in Love Warrior, Melton turns her truth-telling gaze toward her husband and shares the story of their marriage: how they came together, how they fell apart, and how they reunited.

It sounds like a straightforward story, but it’s not. Parts are incredibly difficult to read. From the first days of the marriage, Melton felt alienated from her body during sex and struggled to establish emotional closeness with her husband. When he reveals a stunning betrayal, Melton is instantly scarred to the core. She is ready to throw the marriage away, to align herself firmly with her children and move on. But then things begin to happen. In the midst of the disintegration, Melton makes a new kind of connection with God. She finds answers on the beach and in hot yoga studios. She keeps taking one small, precise step at a time. Meanwhile, Melton’s estranged husband is doing some discovering on his own. The two circle each other cautiously while their three children watch. Their slow return to intimacy is a breathless story, beautifully told. They find out who they really are as individuals, an invaluable discovery as the couple finds the strength to stay together at the memoir’s close, though they announced their separation a month before the book’s publication. 

Love Warrior, which resides in the same realm as books by Brené Brown and Elizabeth Gilbert, presents an intense and absorbing narrative while reaching for something bigger and more quixotic, the mystery of intimacy itself.

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

Which is harder to come to terms with: a 23-room clapboard mansion filled to bursting with “stuff,” or 60-plus years of complicated family relationships? Plum Johnson tackles both in They Left Us Everything, a memoir that’s both humorous and thoughtful.

An artist and former publisher, Johnson doesn’t seem particularly well suited to preside over the emptying of the rambling lakefront house in Oakville, Ontario, when her widowed mother dies at 93. But she tackles the task with gusto, moving in for well over a year (the original plan was six weeks) and getting down to the business of making it presentable enough to put on the market. 

It should be noted that Johnson’s mother was a character, in every sense of the word. She’s very much alive in the hilarious first chapter, which baby boomers caring for elderly parents can instantly relate to, and remains a strong presence throughout the book. So, for that matter, does Johnson’s father, who ran the family with an iron fist until falling victim to Alzheimer’s disease. Inevitably, Johnson’s clearing out of the family home becomes intertwined with better understanding her parents.

Some things (plastic bananas, old oxygen tanks, etc.) simply get tossed, while others are divvied up among siblings in a ritual akin to the National Football League draft. 

But rest assured, there are plenty of treasures—chief among them a trove of 2,000 letters written by Johnson’s mother, plus wartime letters between her parents. Understanding was there all along, it turns out, somewhere between the canned tomatoes and the boxes of National Geographic magazines.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Johnson about They Left Us Everything.
 

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

How does an award-winning journalist contemplate a transformative change in her own life? With prodigious research that finds room for the blind love growing in “a whole new chamber in my heart.” Lesley Stahl, longtime correspondent for “60 Minutes,” has a lot to share about Becoming Grandma.

Bowled over by her “thunderstruck” reaction to the birth of her first granddaughter, Stahl decides to examine grandparenthood in all its scientific, psychological, familial and cultural dimensions. She begins by looking for an explanation for her unexpected euphoria and discovers there’s a scientific reason for it: Oxytocin, the hormone that the female brain releases upon childbirth, works for grandmas, too. Stahl compares the experience to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, altering women from within and changing “what even the most career-oriented woman thinks is important.”

Stahl surveys the mothers, stepgrandmas and surrogate “grans” of today’s fluid families, including great-grandmother Whoopi Goldberg, columnist Ellen Goodman and Stahl’s “60 Minutes” colleagues. 

Stahl calls the rewards of grandparenting the “extra bonus points” that come with aging. Now well into her 70s, she is still working—and her two beloved granddaughters are keeping her young.

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

It’s a match made in heaven: Aziz Ansari, one of America’s top comics, and the subject of love. In Modern Romance, Ansari delivers dispatches from the front lines of dating in the digital age and proves to be as befuddled by love as the rest of us. 

The “Parks and Recreation” star is up front about the fact that his own lack of success with the ladies provided the motivation for writing the book, but it’s much more than a comic romp. For research assistance, Ansari enlisted NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg, and Modern Romance is filled with their findings—case studies, factoids and hard data that demonstrate how dating has evolved in our device-driven era, a time when the quest for amour is both aided and complicated by the omnipresent Internet. 

A smartphone is like “a 24-7 singles bar,” Ansari says. “Press a few buttons at any time of the day, and you’re instantly immersed in an ocean of romantic possibilities.” Of course, navigating that ocean can be a challenge. While technology expedites connection, it comes with its own set of singular difficulties, and Ansari explores many of these, providing survey-supported info on the best way to initiate a date (phone call versus text message), how to take a winning photo for a dating site (girls, avoid using pix in which you’re posing with an animal or guzzling a Bud) and more.

Ansari broadens his scope by reaching into the past—he talks to seniors at a retirement home about what their love lives were like—and pondering timeless questions: How prevalent is cheating? Do you need to get married? His report on the contemporary pursuit of a perfect partner mixes solid research with hilarious riffs—all delivered Ansari-style. It’s an irresistible pairing.