Memoirs are expected to be intimate, laying the groundwork for an author’s backstory and how they got to where they are currently. But it is less common for a personal account to be rendered in a way that’s hilarious, clever, profound and poignant at the same time, particularly one with food as its focus.

Geraldine DeRuiter’s If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury provides all these elements and more. As the James Beard Award-winning blogger who penned a viral response to celebrity chef Mario Batali’s ill-advised #MeToo “apology” (in which he shared a recipe for cinnamon rolls), DeRuiter is no stranger to writing about culinary escapades. In this meaty series of essays, she travels from her childhood encounters with food to the present day, with many experiences in between that are as entertaining as her gifted voice and knack for description.

Subjects that she covers include religion, teendom, dating and marriage, all the while sharing life lessons that will resonate with many readers. The result is a memoir that is raw, revealing and relatable, with particular attention given to challenges women face in patriarchal society. For example, in a chapter hilariously titled “The Only Thing in My Oven,” she defends her decision not to have children and smartly draws parallels between what others call “maternal instinct” with her desire, since, childhood, to bake. As she explains, “I think a prerequisite to being a parent is that you should want to be one. And there’s a long diatribe here that I could go on about, but simply: parenthood should always be a choice. But baking didn’t feel like a decision. It was a calling.”

Her articulations are sincere and nostalgic, particularly in the story of how she learned about her past and ancestral roots, and how she has processed (and is still processing) what she has discovered. She doesn’t shy away from grappling with childhood trauma, but If You Can’t Take the Heat is by no means depressing. Quite the opposite. DeRuiter’s divulging is comforting and significant to both women and those who have made a similar culinary journey. Readers will find this witty series of vignettes humorous and enlightening.

To playwright and performer Susan Lieu, the woman she called M&aacute was “more mystery than mother.” In her deeply moving debut memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter, Lieu excavates her family history and the painful narratives she’s stubbornly preserved over the years to answer the questions that emerged after her mother’s shocking death in 1996: How can you heal from intergenerational trauma if your family denies its existence?

When Lieu was 11, her family structure collapsed. Lieu’s mother, a dynamic 38-year-old Vietnamese refugee and successful nail salon owner in the Bay Area, went to a plastic surgery clinic for an operation that included an abdominoplasty, or “tummy tuck.” During the procedure, she lost oxygen to her brain, and 14 minutes passed before the surgeon called 911. She spent five days in a coma before flatlining. The surgeon, a white man who didn’t carry liability insurance, had been placed on probation four years before operating on Lieu’s mother, and remained on probation for years after her death. He specifically marketed his services to the Bay Area’s Vietnamese population.

Avoiding displays of grief, Lieu’s family refused to acknowledge the death of her mother, just as they refused to talk about their exodus from Vietnam. The emotional distance between Lieu and her father, who had suddenly become a widower with four children at 42, steadily grew as the years passed. As Lieu navigated adulthood, she struggled to make sense of her mother’s death, and her role as a daughter.

Lieu’s narrative provides a touching tribute to her mother and a probing investigation of destructive beauty standards. With considerable nuance and vulnerability, Lieu carefully deconstructs her own image of her mother as a victim without agency. Her journey to find closure is as vulnerable as an open vein, but eventually leads to a place of acceptance and forgiveness. To feel is to heal, and Lieu’s willingness to embrace emotional honesty, no matter how uncomfortable, is at the heart of The Manicurist’s Daughter.

After Sloane Crosley’s apartment is burglarized, she’s unmoored. The thief stole handfuls of jewelry that once belonged to Crosley’s grandmother—a cruel woman whom she didn’t like, Crosley’s mom reminds her. But the jewelry was Crosley’s, and she wants it back. She also wants the sense of safety that fled with the burglar as he exited her bedroom window and descended the fire escape onto Manhattan streets. That isn’t so easy to recover, so instead Crosley channels her uncertainty into detective work.

Crosley wrestles with her feelings about the burglary, writing, “Grief is for people, not things.” And on the one-month anniversary of the incident, her grief finds a new object. Her best friend, Russell, dies by suicide. If the burglary unmoored Crosley, Russell’s death sends her out to sea.

In her memoir Grief Is for People, Crosley attempts to write her way through the five stages of grief, which provide the book’s structure. Russell’s death trumps Crosley’s missing jewelry, but the two incidents are intertwined in both her psyche and her experience. She and Russell—a former boss from when she worked in book publishing—would spend hours at flea markets in search of treasures. The spice cabinet the jewelry was taken from was one of Russell’s finds, and a missing ring was one of the identifying factors Russell noted on Crosley’s resume during her job interview (“Long brown hair. Square ring”).

Crosley’s work is often praised for its humor, whether in her essay collections (I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number) or novels (Cult Classic, The Clasp). But Grief Is for People places at the forefront a remarkable willingness to face the dark questions that follow a suicide. Crosley began writing one month after Russell’s 2019 death in an attempt to convince herself that he was really gone (a conclusion she accepts, inconveniently, during the COVID-19 pandemic). Her search for acceptance is an impulse that readers who have mourned a loved one may recognize—an effort to map a new emotional landscape on what looks, to a non-mourner’s eye, like the same old world.