Considering the pain and suffering he experienced at the hands of no-nonsense headmasters during his Catholic school days in Limerick, Ireland, it's a wonder even to Frank McCourt that he went on to spend three decades as a high school English teacher in the New York City school system. Had he not, late in life, written Angela's Ashes, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and became, in his words, "mick of the moment," he would have slipped, upon retirement, from anonymity to obscurity: just another faceless, voiceless foot soldier on the frontlines of illiteracy. Today, the world seeks the insights and opinions for which, as a mere teacher, he was never asked.

"I think becoming a teacher was the craziest thing I could have done," McCourt says by phone from New York. " I would have been quite happy in an office somewhere, nine to five, although that would have driven me crazy looking at the clock. But I wouldn't have cared about what I was doing. There would have been no challenge. Going into the classroom was a mighty challenge." Submitted as proof: Teacher Man, the final book in his autobiographical trilogy (with Angela's Ashes and 'Tis), a more-bitter-than-sweet look back at age 75 on a teaching career about which McCourt has decidedly mixed feelings. Here, McCourt takes to task bumbling administrators, callous instructors and an educational system that seems perpetually intent on doing everything but educating. Suffice to say, this is no Up the Down Staircase.

What McCourt always wanted to do, he says, was write. But by the time he returned to America at age 19, his impoverished Irish childhood had shattered his confidence and left him with minimal expectations.

"The lowest! The lowest! I never expected to go to college. I was ready to settle for some low-level job, clerk in a bank or insurance company, anything. I would have made a great elevator operator or something like that," he says. "You get out (of poverty) but you don't get out; it's with you for the rest of your life unless you're very conscious and you go on and study what it was and look at the damage that was done and you remedy it. But I wasn't like that." In Teacher Man, McCourt describes how, fresh out of New York University, he was almost fired his first day of teaching at McKee Vo-Tech on Staten Island for intercepting and eating a flying baloney sandwich. His second day, he triggered calls from angry parents for a classroom comment about friendship with sheep. Just showing up for work in those Blackboard Jungle days took every available ounce of will.

"I had absolute dread similar to what I felt as a kid going to school in Ireland," he recalls. "We went to school in a state of terror because you never knew which way the schoolmaster would jump; you never knew what you didn't know and of course he would ask you what you didn't know and then he would pounce on you and drag you out of your seat and knock you around the room. Kids here complain about going to school but we had reason to be terrified. Our knees would knock." McCourt soon learned to use his lilting accent and natural storytelling gift to capture and hold the attention of a classroom full of adolescents. His techniques were admittedly unconventional; he once assigned students to write their mother's favorite recipes, then bring the finished products to a class potluck lunch in the park. By his estimation, it took him 15 years to figure out how to actually teach with authority.

"They knew I was a novice and I think they gave me a break, mainly because of my accent and my stupid inability to do anything right," he says. " Except that I would make an occasional breakthrough, which consisted of me being human and honest, and that's what carried me along for the next 15 years, going from McKee to Fashion Industries to Seward Park and Stuyvesant, which was heaven." The harder he worked, the more he resented the school administrators with their private offices, secretaries and leisure time.

"It's a big racket, they get so many benefits," he says. "The real hardest workers in the system are the people in the classroom. It's the only profession where you're paid more for not doing it! And there are the peripheral jobs: walking the hallways, checking the lavatories, supervising the cafeteria. This is demeaning, and you only do this to teachers. You don't expect a surgeon to mop the floor in the operating room, but that's the equivalent of what teachers have to do." If he had it to do over again, would he go into teaching? Probably not.

"I suppose in the back of my head the thing I always wanted to do was write, but write what? I didn't know. Nobody told me you had to find your own style; I wanted to be Hemingway or Sean O'Casey. In retrospect, I would have thrown caution to the winds and become a busboy and lived cheaply and repaired to my attic and struggled with my writing, but I didn't know enough. And I certainly wasn't going to write about my life; that was the last thing on my mind, to write about this poverty. The shame; it was the shame. But the opposite prevails in American life, which is, this is your material so get into it, buster. Which is what I did."

Does Teacher Man truly mark the end of his memoirs? "Yeah, that's it," McCourt says with finality. "If you call me next year, you won't find me talking about myself. I want to write a novel that has nothing to do with me; maybe the ideal me, a debonair buccaneer lover of the ages, a man who defies the Vatican and the White House, something like that. Maybe I'm entering my epic period!"

Jay MacDonald writes professionally in Oxford, Mississippi.

Anyone who’s been near a television set during the past half-century has seen Bob Barker. For 35 years he hosted daytime’s “The Price Is Right”—the longest-running game show in North America. Before that, he spent 18 years hosting “Truth or Consequences.” No wonder Barker has been hailed as TV’s longest-running host.

Barker, the recipient of 19 Emmy Awards, retired in 2007. But he hasn’t disappeared behind the curtain. At 86, he remains a tireless animal rights advocate—and is a fledgling author. His memoir, Priceless Memories, written with Digby Diehl, provides a backstage pass to the shows that made him a household name.

There are also vignettes of his surprising past—including his upbringing on the South Dakota Indian reservation where his mother was a teacher, his training as a Naval fighter pilot and the love story he shared with his high school sweetheart-turned-wife, Dorothy Jo.

“We were a team,” Barker says of his wife, who died in 1981. “I couldn’t have done what I did if it weren’t for her.”

Speaking by phone from the Hollywood home he shares with his dog and rabbits, Barker explains that he purposely kept the tone of his book upbeat and non-controversial—in the tradition of his TV shows. “We didn’t solve the world’s problems. But we hopefully helped you to forget your problems for just a while.” As to why “Price Is Right” has proven so durable, he offers, “Audience participation. That’s the key.” In fact, shows like “The Price Is Right” were originally called “audience participation shows.” Recalls Barker: “They were spontaneous and unrehearsed. No one was tested or coached before they went before the cameras.” Also, once the cameras rolled, they kept rolling—and whatever happened, happened.

Barker got into television the old-fashioned way: via radio. He had a weekly show for Southern California Edison, the electric power company, which aired locally on CBS. With Dorothy Jo, who was his producer, he traveled to two cities a day to visit Edison’s “Electric Living Centers,” where he interviewed homemakers about the latest electrical wonders. “One day Ralph Edwards heard the show—and liked it. He was already considered a broadcasting pioneer, and a legend,” Barker recalls.

In 1956 Barker became host of the Edwards-created show “Truth or Consequences.” He was still doing “T or C” when, in 1972, he bounded in front of audiences for “The Price is Right.” For the next three years he did a juggling act—working both shows. When he opted to do only one, he couldn’t have guessed that he would spend more than three decades playing the straight man to contestants grappling with price tags. “The premise of ‘The Price is Right’ is simple—and powerful. Everyone identifies with pricing,” Barker says. “From cab drivers to executives, everyone’s interested in what things cost.”

Under Barker, the program observed several milestones. In 1987, after years of fooling with hair dyes, he rebelled—becoming the first host to let his hair go au natural. “I was the only guy on TV with gray hair,” he says, adding, “I had to get approval from the head of daytime programming!” Barker also began signing off with what was literally a pet passion: “Help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered.”

It was his late wife who enlightened him about the plight of animals. Following her cue, he became a vegetarian—and went on to convince producers of “The Price Is Right” to stop featuring furs and leather.  Later, as the longtime emcee of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, he sought to stop the contestants from parading in furs. When the show’s producer wouldn’t budge, Barker resigned—and the so-called “fur flap” became major news. “For the first time, many people understood about the cruelty to animals that resulted from the production of fur,” he says, adding, “Fur is no longer chic.”

In memory of his wife and his mother Tilly, who was also devoted to animals, Barker established the DJ & T Foundation, which has contributed millions to spay/neuter programs. Barker, who never had children, is also leaving a legacy of university endowments for the study of animal rights, and is himself active in animal rights legislation. He may no longer be in front of the cameras, but Bob Barker hasn’t stopped working.

Journalist Pat H. Broeske has a menagerie of cats and dogs—all spayed or neutered.

As a first-time mother trying to make sense of a colicky newborn—one who seemingly needed only a few minutes of sleep every 24 hours—only one thing saved me from running screaming from the house. It was Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, a hilarious, self-deprecating memoir chronicling her experience as a new mom. I read it obsessively, dog-earing certain pages and taking solace in the fact that another mother, somewhere, sometime, had found parenting a newborn as frustrating, stressful and draining as I did.

If only Home Game had been around then.

Michael Lewis, probably best known for his sharply reported look at the finances of major league baseball, Moneyball, now focuses his keen wit and sharp observations on his own family. Married to former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren (who took our cover photo), and the father of three young children, he knows the challenges of parenthood and isn’t afraid to talk about them.

Unabashedly frank, hilarious and sweetly sentimental (“I am addicted to my wife,” he admits at one point), Home Game is divided into three parts—one for each of his children. Lewis spoke with BookPage from his home in Berkeley, California, where he’d just returned from a family vacation to South Beach, Miami. Family vacation, yes. Family-friendly vacation, not entirely.

“My nine- and six-year-old girls, this was more exposed flesh than they’ve ever seen in their lives,” Lewis says of the notoriously scantily clad (and surgically enhanced) South Beach crowd. “There was a man in a gold thong. There was a topless beach. Both girls were saying, ‘Don’t look Daddy! Don’t look!’ It was hard not to. These (breasts) were like looking at the seventh wonder of the world. In Berkeley, all the boobs go down to the navels.”

Such is the life of Michael Lewis, Family Man—an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job, one that has allowed him to write bestsellers about the business of sports and the insanity of Wall Street (Liar’s Poker), and now, about his own life.
“It’s a little weird—I don’t know how to put this—normally, there’s a subject, a kind of substance to what I’ve written,” Lewis says. “Now it’s air—it’s just my life.”

Much of Home Game is drawn from several years’ worth of columns Lewis wrote for Slate called “Dad Again.” It’s a somewhat daring and in many ways groundbreaking book about what it’s like to be a father in modern America. Lewis is incredibly candid throughout, writing about his wife’s bout with postpartum panic disorder, his incredibly awkward vasectomy and the secret so many parents share but rarely talk about:

“The thing that most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel,” he writes. “Clutching Quinn after she exited the womb, I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement. The worst was hatred. I distinctly remember standing on a balcony with Quinn squawking in my arms and wondering what I would do if it wasn’t against the law to hurl her off it.”

Lewis eventually came to love all three of his children fiercely, of course, but admits it wasn’t instantaneous. He theorizes that society has something to do with the fact that more parents don’t acknowledge the hardships of raising a family.

“All you have to do is look around to see that, at least in the middle-class and above, anxiety about being a bad parent has reached epic proportions,” he said. “There were these enormous social pressures I felt: when I really wanted to do x, the world insisted I do y, so I did y, but I was pissed off about it.”

Home Game is intensely honest, and Lewis admits to a bit of nerves now that the book is actually being published.

“Writing the [Slate] columns over the years . . . was purgative,” he says. “It was therapy. Although I was really, really happy to dash off the articles, now I feel somewhat ambivalent about it.”

And how about his wife, who spends much of the book either pregnant, in labor or in tears?

“I think she knows readers will see through whatever I wrote and just feel pity and sympathy for her for being married to me,” Lewis speculates. “Really, though, she really liked that I was getting it down on paper, because you don’t remember so much of it after. We also were both shocked by how many bad things happen that we never knew existed.”

For all his confessional writing, Lewis clearly relishes being a dad. In one of the most poignant passages of the book, he details a night he spent camping with his daughter. Many hot dogs and frustrated attempts to set up camp later, Lewis and daughter Quinn call it a night. She awakens at 4:12 a.m. with an urgent thought.

“‘Daddy, I just want to say how much fun I had with you today,’ she says. Actual tears well up in my eyes. ‘I had fun with you, too,’ I say. ‘Can we go back to sleep?’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’”

After two daughters, Lewis assumed his family was complete. Not so. His wife felt someone was missing. Not long after, son Walker was born.

“Perhaps the only wise moment I had in this process was to be totally aware I had absolutely no say in how many kids we would have and when we would have them,” he said.
 
Being a writer, Lewis travels often for book tours and speaking engagements. He takes his children with him as often as possible.

“I try to work them into my work life as much as I can,” he said. “Eventually, if you take care of your kids, you’ll love them, but the trick is if you can really like them. I really like my kids.”

As far as writing about Quinn, Dixie and Walker, though, Lewis says he’s through. “I’m done,” he says, “certainly done in the sense that I’m not going to follow their journeys through adolescence with a pen and paper.”

Amy Scribner and family live in Olympia, Washington.

RELATED CONTENT

An excerpt from Home Game:

There’s nothing like seeing Buzz Aldrin’s name on one’s caller ID. His office is calling from California for part two of our interview to discuss his second memoir, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon. He sounds more relaxed this time around: there are no phones ringing in the background, no email alerts sounding on his computer and he’s not shouting out fax instructions to a staff member.

At 79, the former Apollo 11 astronaut and the second man to walk on the moon is incredibly active, traveling the world promoting space exploration and his space lottery idea and also just enjoying himself. He’s been to the North Pole (on an expedition with ABC’s Hugh Downs for “20/20”) and is finalizing a South Pole excursion. A longtime avid diver—he’s the guy who developed many of NASA’s underwater training procedures for the Apollo program—he shot B-roll shark footage for the 1981 Bond flick For Your Eyes Only, visited the Titanic wreckage with a British documentary team and still dives regularly.

Aldrin’s schedule remains almost as packed as the world tour he and crewmates Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins took—or, rather, were subjected to, in his opinion—after their July 1969 moon flight. Along with his annual visit to the Paris Air Show, he’ll also make a number of appearances in observation of Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary.

“I’m standing by for NASA endorsement of different events,” he says, his gravelly voice assuming a cadence indicative of his many years of military training. He says he’ll squeeze in some sort of book tour when he can. But what he really wants is a spot on Oprah’s show. “I would appreciate that invitation. . . . This is a book that’s about a human,” he pauses, then laughs, “drama.”

Magnificent Desolation is an account of Aldrin’s difficult years—decades, really—following the moon landing. He discusses alcoholism (no, he wasn’t drunk when he punched that Apollo hoax theorist), infidelity, divorce, financial troubles, a frequently strained relationship with his father, depression and a stalled career, among other things.  He’s right, this is definitely Oprah territory. As hard as it has been for Aldrin (and many of his fellow Apollo astronauts) to talk about their experiences in space—more on that later—you’d think he would have found it nearly impossible to open up about personal matters, or that it was perhaps difficult to revisit some of the most trying periods of his life.

“No, I don’t think so,” Aldrin says. “The stories, the photographs, the activities have been related in progressive interviews over 30 years now. It’s just a question of deciding: what is the output going to be? Are we looking for a dramatic movie to reach large numbers of people, or are we going to try to put more detail, more things down in writing because there probably won’t be another real chance to do that.”

He spent less than a year working with co-writer Ken Abraham and also bringing in other people for interviews. “It was quite satisfying to renew some of those acquaintances,” he says. There were astronauts, family members and Aldrin’s children. “[to get their] perspective now on their adolescent observations, and teen-aged and subsequent witnessing of the progressions in my life,” Aldrin says somewhat ruefully.

Magnificent Desolation starts on a high note, though: July 16, 1969, the morning of the Apollo 11 launch. It makes for a great opener. “It always has,” Aldrin laughs. He takes readers through that morning and does a marvelous job of putting the technology of the day in perspective for those used to 21st-century devices: “Many modern mobile phones have more computing power than we did. But those computers enabled us to measure our velocity changes to a hundredth of a foot per second, determine rendezvous and course corrections, and guide our descent . . . to the moon. You couldn’t do that with a slide rule.”

Aldrin spends the first three chapters in space, describing what he saw and how he felt about it. He describes the astronauts’ relief at having landed successfully, the deafening silence once the Lunar Module’s engines shut down, planting the American flag (“I still think it’s the best-looking flag up there out of all six”), and just wanting to sleep on the return flight to Earth. He writes about the mission’s iconic images, including the ones he shot of his footprint: “Framed in the photo was the evidence of man on the moon—a single footprint. . . . That’s kind of lonely looking, I thought. So I’d better put my boot down, and then move my boot away from the print, but only slightly so it’s still in the frame. . . .”

That’s a lot more than he’s willing to say over the phone. The question, the one every interviewer has to ask, is met by a pause just this side of uncomfortable. “Well, I know it would be nice to pinpoint, but there was a continuity associated with kind of moving beyond each achievement successfully and the culmination is being in the Pacific Ocean,” he concludes with a laugh.

OK, but is there one thing in particular, one tiny detail about being on the moon that stands out even after all this time? “We were sightseeing, looking back and seeing the gradually diminishing size of the back side of the moon, and I think most everyone who’s seen it would say the crater named after the Russian pioneer Tsiolkovsky is probably the most unique feature that stands out. You gotta take our word for it,” he says, his voice becoming slightly mischievous, “because only 24 people have seen it, plus the cameras.”

Though he gets why people feel compelled to tell him where they were on the night of July, 20, 1969, he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life reliving those seven hours on the moon. Instead, he’s interested in promoting continued space exploration and developing new rocket technology (he holds a couple of patents for rocket design).

“I’m known as an astronaut, and I am still thrilled with that designation,” he writes in Magnificent Desolation. “But I don’t want to live in the past; as long as I am here on Earth, I want to be contributing to the present, and I want to stride confidently into the future.”
 

In her beloved and powerful memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, author Azar Nafisi wrote about using literature as a source of strength while she lived under the oppressive government of Iran. Now she returns with a new memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About, in which she opens up even more about her life, from her complex relationship with her mother to how she survived long-ago sexual abuse.

Honest, introspective and at times painfully direct, Things I’ve Been Silent About is a compelling follow-up memoir, one that exposes the cost of family secrets. Nafisi recently talked with BookPage about her decision to open up her life to millions of readers.

You are incredibly honest in your memoirs, which is all the more striking since discussing personal experiences is considered taboo in Iran. How has your family reacted to the very personal details you reveal about life in the Nafisi family and in Iran?
My family has been very supportive. This does not mean that they do not have their anxieties and reservations, but they, specially my immediate family, have been considerate of my work and me to such an extent that I often went to them to seek encouragement and consolation. My brother has been amazing. I know how difficult this has been for him, but he provided me with information, with photos and documents, without interfering in the story in any way. 

As the title suggests, you write honestly about a lot of painful experiences in Things I’ve Been Silent About, including the sexual molestation you suffered as a child. What made you decide to share this and how difficult was it to write about?
At first I avoided writing about this and other painful events in my life; this was almost instinctive, perhaps from a desire to protect myself. But while an author is and should be in control of her book, every book, like a child, has a life of its own; it will also bring in its own rules and norms. The events I chose to talk about were the ones that were most pertinent to the main themes of my book. I have avoided mentioning individuals and incidents that were not integral to my story and this one was such an integral part of the story. One of the main themes of this book focuses on victims and authority figures, on ways through which we do or do not overcome our victimhood and the choices we make in relation to it. This event was in many ways crucial to the development of these themes, not just in personal terms—it resonated on so many different levels, cultural, social as well as universal.

You write, "If at home I was subdued into compliance, at school I quickly developed a reputation as a difficult child." How much of your childhood self do you see in yourself now?
That self for better or for worse is still alive and kicking—in some ways I remain a "problem child!" Looking back, more than anything I was reacting to authority figures, and although now those figures have changed, my reaction to authority and authority figures has in some ways remained much the same. I am instinctively suspicious of them, especially when it comes to political authorities and ideologies. On some level I believe with John Locke that "All authority is error." I don’t mean we do not need a system that helps create and maintain order or one that holds us all accountable, but I am wary of people and systems that try to take away your power of questioning. I believe now my reactions are not as impulsive as they were in my childhood, they are more measured and I hope I have learned to base my life not on reaction to others, be they authority figures or not, but on my own actions.

You’ve written, "I left Iran in 1997, but Iran did not leave me." Do you think you’ll ever return there?
Well, every time I write or talk about Iran, I feel that I have returned. When I was physically in Iran there were so many restrictions that I, like some others, tried to act as if we lived somewhere else. But to return to your more direct question: I do expect to return for visits if for nothing else. I consider that my natural right.

Newsday said Reading Lolita in Tehran "reminds us of why we read in the first place." Why do you read?
I read for the same reason that I write: I cannot help myself. It is like falling in love, there must be a number of reasons why one falls in love, but when it comes to explaining them, one can feel tongue-tied. I think the basis for both reading and writing is a sense of curiosity, the desire to know, to go places where you have never visited before. There is a sense of incomparable freedom and liberation in our ability to respond to this urge.

During the summer of 1998, Sue Monk Kidd, whose best-selling books include The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, found herself in a free fall toward her 50th birthday. As a consolation gift for herself and a college graduation present for her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, she whisked the two of them off to Greece. Thus begins Traveling With Pomegranates, a memoir of their journey together, literal and spiritual, written by both women. It was a journey that allowed them to discover and appreciate each other as adults, as well as mother and daughter.

Kidd and Taylor reconvened recently at Kidd’s home in Charleston, South Carolina, the city where both women live, to reflect on their unique joint project. According to Kidd, the most difficult aspect of the book was figuring out how to structure it.

“There was my story, there was Ann’s story, and then we had this third story which was about the two of us and our relationship. So really, there were three intersecting layers to this book,” Kidd recalls in an interview with BookPage. “It just got more and more complicated. The main thing was, we knew this had to be the narrative of our relationship. But trying to figure out how to make all these different layered stories work together and feel seamless and flow into one another was the biggest challenge.”

The title, Traveling With Pomegranates, resonates on several levels, beginning with the significance of the pomegranate. In Greek mythology, Hades, lord of the dead, kidnaps the young maiden, Persephone, and takes her with him to the underworld.

Persephone’s mother, the Earth goddess Demeter, goes into deep mourning, allowing crops to wither and turning fields and orchards into a wasteland. To save the Earth and its people, Zeus orders Persephone released, but she has eaten four pomegranate seeds while in captivity. Thus, she must return to the underworld four months of the year, while her mother again mourns her absence and the land sleeps in winter. Kidd and Taylor were going through some difficult life experiences of their own at the time of their trip to Greece. Kidd was coming to terms with aging, looking for the courage to try writing a novel (her first, which became The Secret Life of Bees), hoping to reconnect in a meaningful way with her daughter, and realizing that as a person with great drive and ambition, her life lacked the joy of just “being.”

“This reconciliation of the opposites, the reconciliation of these poles of polarity we’ve lived and experienced in life, it seems like they come home to roost as we get older,” Kidd says. “It became something about learning how to both ‘be’ and to accomplish and write andcreate and make a difference. That was a very hard reconciliation for me. It went right to my core.”

Taylor had just broken up with her fiancé and was struggling with the “what do I do with my life” issues young people often face. The shattered romance and lack of direction had put Taylor into a fairly severe depression. As she writes in the book, “Being in Greece did not resolve the big questions for me, but I did discover some things. I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing. I learned there is a name for how I feel—depression— and I had to face up to that. I learned that Persephone does eventually come back from the underworld and that maybe I would, too. That I could talk to my mother. That while I have no idea what to do with my life, I am not a total loser.”

Speaking from her mother’s home, Taylor says she sees special significance in the story of the pomegranate. “The pomegranate and the swallowing of the seeds, it’s such a perfect example of how a symbol can take on individual connotations. For my mom it was about Demeter’s loss. For me, it was about Persephone’s transformation and the return that she made back to the world from this naïve, untested girl to someone transformed.”

In fact, symbols and talismans form a huge subtext in the memoir. Kidd wears a small silver bee charm around her neck, hoping it will inspire her to write her novel. She buys two glass pomegranates for herself and her daughter while in Greece, to remind them of Demeter and Persephone. She carries a small statue of Mary, Jesus’ mother, on the trip. Kidd believes symbols and talismans can tell individuals a great deal about themselves. “Symbols take us to a world that is deeper than our conscious minds are usually operating with. They open the door to a world that’s often under the surface and that has larger meanings than the ones we are consciously, on the surface, dealing with on a day-today basis. So a pomegranate is not just a piece of nutritious fruit.” Laughing, she continues, “I was compelled by the pomegranate because of the myth, and when I explored that myth, I was amazed to discover a whole story about a mother’s necessary loss and finding reunion. That took me in a very moving and meaningful direction in my life. So I came through being open to symbols. They give me courage.”

It was almost 10 years after that first trip to Greece together (the book also chronicles a return trip to Greece and one to France) that Kidd and Taylor finished their memoir. The two women had kept detailed journals, which proved invaluable when writing their story. But Kidd believes memory is like a muscle—the more you flex it, the stronger it becomes.

“Memory can be very elusive, but I do think it’s almost like a living, breathing thing inside of us. It’s all there, somewhere inside. If we can learn how to tap it, it does come flooding back. ” An afterword to Traveling With Pomegranates closes with one of Kidd’s favorite quotes:

“‘We write to taste life twice,’ Anais Nin wrote, ‘in the moment and in retrospection.’ Living the experiences in this book and then writing them was a privilege and a gift, but what I savored most was doing so with Ann. Tasting life together. Twice.”

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

RELATED CONTENT

An excerpt from Traveling with Pomegranates:

The overwhelming popular and critical reception for the film Rain Man, which received eight Academy Award nominations, has helped to focus national attention on autism. In psychiatry, autism is defined as a pervasive developmental neurological disorder, characterized by impaired communication, excessive rigidity and emotional detachment.

Although the character Raymond, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, is autistic, he is also an idiot savant, which most autistic persons are not. But the film, however well done, is a work of fiction. There are many families that must cope with the realities of autism each day. Such is the family of William and Barbara Christopher and their sons John and Ned. Mr. Christopher is perhaps better known to the public as “Father Mulcahy” in the immensely successful television series “M*A*S*H.” In a new book, Mixed Blessings, due for May release, the Christophers have written about the extraordinary challenge of raising their autistic son, Ned. Alan Alda says that theirs is “A book that brings you right into the center of their hopes, confusion, love, exasperation and grit. This book is alive . . . Bill and Barbara’s strength is contagious . . . their humanity is healing.” Mike Farrell comments: “A faithful and heartfelt rendition of their experiences . . . People are in sore need today of (such) examples of the true meaning of parenthood.” And R. Wayne Gilpin, President of the Autism Society of America, writes that Mixed Blessings is “Rich in caring, concern, and grace.”

Editor Roger Bishop interviewed William and Barbara Christopher last December. The edited excerpts from a long conversation about their important new book appear below.

RB: For whatever else it may be Mixed Blessings I saw as a story of the parents’ love for their two sons and of the parents’ extraordinary patience, persistence and intelligence in dealing with the physical disability of one child. Are there other things that you would like to say describing this book?

BC: I think you have said it very well. We think of it as a family story too. Only one family member has autism, the rest of us fortunately do not, and the kinds of challenges that we faced as a family are certainly parallel to any challenge that you meet as a family. And almost every family has some challenge.

RB: Early in the book you say that Ned’s teachers say that he’s the smartest boy they have had in their class, but then you receive a note from the Christian Nursery School expressing some concern about his behavior. The note in part says, “We would like to have some professional advice so that we can help him . . . we’re worried about Ned and we know you are too.” I think there are other parents that might find themselves in a similar situation. Would you talk a bit about this first visit to the psychologist?

WC: When the Christian Nursery School expressed their concerns to us, we thought it was time maybe to ask some questions, and we felt very good about their raising him.

BC: One of the things that happens, I think, is that you have your doubts, and you’ve talked to the pediatrician and he is very reassuring, and that makes you feel very good and you think, “Well . . . I don’t know a lot about children, I guess he’s O.K. He’s not much like John, but trust the pediatrician, he’s fine.” And then the next thing happens that makes you feel uneasy. So when the teacher finally says, “We know you are worried about him too,” I think I felt very devastated. On the other hand, it was almost a relief.

WC: Yes, we were in a partnership with these people. Neither one of us has the answers quite, but their suggesting get a little help, and then we can proceed. That sounds smart—that sounds like the way to go. We never thought going to get that little help would open up something much bigger.

RB: Toward the end of the book, there is a quote from a leading biologist in the study of autism and she says, “Autism is no longer a diagnosis, it is a description.” Would you elaborate on what you learned about autism?

BC: Well it is a pervasive, life long neurological disorder which is incurable. It affects the person afflicted with varying degrees of problems of all kinds—language disability, communication, socialization, and sensory organization. And these basic neurological problems manifest themselves sin different ways in different autistic people—there’s the full range of intelligence, there are retarded autistic people, and there are genius autistic people. I think when Mary Coleman said that about autism no longer being a diagnosis what she meant was after you get this label of autism, there are many subgroups—there are many variations on the theme and there are many approaches. I know that Ned would be called autistic and some kid over here, who’s very different, would also be called autistic. It’s very hard to generalize.

Many autistic people don’t socialize at all. Ned has always had certain people in his life that he really had affection for and an interest in. Some autistic children I’ve met have a real stone wall. Others progress into what is very close to a normal life and normal ability to relate.

RB: It’s understandable certainly, from what you’ve said here and from reading the book, that the general public would be quite confused about what autism is.

WC: We hope we drew a clear picture of what Ned was like because we don’t think of ourselves really as being expert in autism, but we did feel we had an interesting story in Ned. It’s hard I think for us as parents now after having written the book to know whether the book is going to make people say, “Yeah, I know what that kid is like.” I hope people do know what he’s like from reading because I’ve read other books and I sometimes wanted to know clearly just what the boy being described was like.

RB: May I ask where the idea for the book originated?

BC: Abingdon Press came to us and asked if we would be interested. Bill had received an award from an organization called Religion in the Media, and Abingdon was also receiving an award at that same banquet. They heard Bill speak and he mentioned his interest in the handicapped. Shortly thereafter they contacted us to see if we would be interested in writing about our experiences raising an autistic child. Bill’s first reaction was, “No, let’s not. That sounds like a lot of work.”

WC: To write a few sharp anecdotes or to sketch out something—that wouldn’t be so hard, but to sit down and have a book that really we could say, “this is what it was like,” that seemed formidable. But we soon discovered these letters that Barbara had written. They allow things to be in the book that really couldn’t have been written into the book. The letters can say things that we couldn’t even begin to say—not just because of the fact that the letters brought back forgotten things, but they also say things that we might find very awkward to put down, even if we could remember them.

RB: From a reader’s standpoint, I felt that the letters added a lot because you get some sense of your family life—other things that are going on.

WC: That’s the kind of thing we never would’ve been able to write in. Also the interesting thing is that the letters express feelings that we were having at the time, which in retrospect we—it was sometimes hard to believe we had those feelings.

BC: One of those things that struck often when we started working on the book and going through all our diaries (they’re not real diaries, they’re calendars) and going through the letters was the fact that we were so busy. We were constantly doing things, and while Ned was a big focus in our life, he wasn’t the only thing.

RB: Although the book should be helpful to so many people—parents certainly—all kinds of parents, it would seem to me the writing of the book and the reliving of these experiences would have been somewhat difficult. Was that true or did you have another reaction to that experience?

BC: I think I was both things, but certainly there were moments when—especially when I would uncover a letter I had completely forgotten about. One that comes to mind is the letter I wrote to the institutes when we were writing to see whether Ned would be a candidate for their program, and I outlined all the things we’d been through, and I remember reading that letter and just falling apart and thinking “how awful.” But at the same timeI think there was a kind of interest in looking at our own life this closely quite apart from problems or dealing with autism or Bill’s career. Just taking your own life, looking at it hard over a 20 year period and trying to organize it to make it intelligible to someone else was a very interesting process. 

WC: There were a few things that we found in the book that were painful to relive. I was thinking of some of the negative experiences like when Ned first went away and he lived in a group home and the experience was not good. We kind of had to hold back—we didn’t want to make a tirade.

BC: We didn’t feel we were out to settle scores.

RB: Well, the book certainly reflects, what I think we could generally call—maybe you would choose another term—an emotional roller coaster as you try one approach, then you try another approach, and you talk with professionals in the field who are apparently giving you their very best judgement on these things and often they’re wrong. But it does seem to me that you’re very generous with the way that you do treat the different people regardless of how they work out.

BC: Well, you know people don’t go into this field unless they really want to help, and the professionals we encountered weren’t alone in not having the answers. 

WC: I think one thing that is true—some might be critical of professionals in that there is some attitude that they feel they ought to have answers, and if they don’t, sometimes they kind of invent or fake it a little bit to make the parents feel this professional does know what they’re talking about instead of coming out and saying, “I don’t think I know either.”

BC: Of course we didn’t want to hear that. The last thing we wanted to hear was, “Well, I don’t know anymore than you do.”

RB: One of the parts that I so much enjoyed was a happy family experience when you went to England and you visited the Jane Austen places. You quote from her: “It is well to have as many holds on happiness as possible.” I was contrasting that with the Washington trip that you described later on which didn’t work out nearly as well.

 BC: No. That really was a very low point. And of course the abuse of medication is a serious problem with children like Ned, and children with various skinds of mental handicaps, because it seems to be such an easy solution, and it’s almost always the double edge. 

WC: What you end up with these kids is the unpredictability. With kids like Ned or kids in special education, the professionals and the parents learn that they have to make allowances for these very big swings. Especially autistic people who have days or cycles almost of months where they operate very well, and then they will operate not nearly so well, and you can’t despair saying, “Oh, what’s happening? Is his brain deteriorating?” In autism you learn to begin to expect these swings and if you’re using medication, it’s just that much more complicated because you don’t know what you’re going to get.

RB: We don’t have time of course to go into all the different schools and approaches, but I was particularly fascinated by the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia. This program demanded a lot of Ned, but also required an incredible amount of your time and effort. Would you talk just a little bit about that?

BC: It is hard to talk jut a little bit about the Institutes. It was a very all encompassing program which kept us busy from the early morning until late at night, and to many people it seems overwhelming, but the thing that is really hard to do with a child like that is nothing. Ned doesn’t do “nothing” very well. A normal child finds all kinds of things to get interested in and starts to develop friends an d alife of his own. In the years before we were doing the Institutes’ program, it was driving Ned to school and driving him from therapy to therapy. I was busy all the time and I didn’t have a sense of success. So when we began the Institutes’ program, we were so inspired by these wonderful people in Philadelphia and we saw immediate progress—so we were working terribly hard but it was terribly interesting. It was the most interesting time in my life, and Bill at the same time was working on “M*A*S*H” and coming home and helping with the program. It was very exciting. 

I don’t think we could have done it forever—it was too intense for that. They don’t have the answers necessarily for all the problems, but they have an approach that works for many children to help them—not cure them, but help them. We gained a lot of confidence in ourselves through working in such a direct partnership with professionals.

RB: For those who know you, Mr. Christopher, as Father Mulcahy from the “M*A*S*H” program, have enjoyed that through the years. In the book you get some sense of your work on that program, but was the experience with Ned such that it affected your portrayal of Father Mulcahy in the program or not? 

WC: I really felt totally free of anything like my home as I worked. One thing I think an actor does, I’m sure, is if you’re working and your life seems to be making sense around you, it may send you off to the studio in high spirits, and you may attack your work with  vigor and all. I always felt we had a pretty positive way of working with Ned. And if anything, I think the fact that Barbara and I were such a wonderful partnership all through our marriage has sort of reinforced my ability to give myself to my work. We developed a clear path—way of living with Ned and brining him along—if anything it made me clearer in my mind to devote myself to my work. I didn’t feel that I was at the studio sitting there wringing my hands about what was going on and unhappiness at home—that just wasn’t part of it. So I didn’t feel I had to write about that.

She may be 20 years sober and a Catholic convert, but don’t get the wrong impression—Mary Karr is no “candy-ass” (her word). She’s still the tough, scrappy outlaw that readers were introduced to in her first memoir, The Liars’ Club.

When it was published in 1995, The Liars’ Club offered a searing portrait of Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that raised the art of the memoir to a new level and brought about a revival of the genre. In her follow-up, Cherry, she recalled the wild ride of her adolescence and her sexual coming-of-age. Her third memoir, Lit, more than 10 years in the making, details how Karr ultimately emerged from her troubled upbringing triumphant, but not before a descent into alcoholism and near-madness.

A recent call to her New York home confirms that Karr indeed hasn’t lost her edge. The conversation—briefly interrupted by a call from the dean of Syracuse University, where she teaches English, and the arrival of her “heroic” assistant, without whom, she says, she would be “like an overfilled Macy’s balloon”—proves lively and candid.

“I’ll tell you,” she says with only the faintest trace of a Texas drawl, “this is the first book I’ve been excited to promote. This is what my life’s about now . . . how I became a mother, my relationships, my spiritual practice, my nervous breakthrough. Those things are so much closer to who I am now. This is what I talk to people about. Even if people think I’m an idiot, I’m interested in having the conversation with readers.” And readers, whether familiar with Karr’s previous work or not, will be riveted.

Never shying away from self-scrutiny, she explores the dissolution of her marriage, the joy and pain of motherhood, her father’s stroke and death, her fraught relationship with her own mother and her professional setbacks and successes in equal measure. This account of the latter part of her life is as unsparing and unsentimental as her first two memoirs and, like the others, by turns hilarious and gut-wrenching. She again brings to the task her acerbic wit and a poet’s eye for lyrical detail.

In search of the stable home she lacked as a child, Karr married a handsome, patrician poet and with him has an adored son, Dev. But over time, she drank herself into the disease that nearly destroyed her mother. Her path included, among other detours, a stint in “The Mental Marriott,” a famous asylum, where she found wisdom in unlikely places.

Asked how writing this book was discernibly different from writing the other two, Karr laughs, “Well, for one, I’m clearly the asshole. I think that’s the big thing.” She adds, “The hardest thing for me about writing these books is how to handle the emotional and moral questions, and this one obviously posed a lot of moral questions. You know, how do you write about your child? How do you write about someone you’re divorced from?” She says that, toward the end of the process, she ending up throwing away 525 finished pages of work.

She’d been working on the book for seven years, and her editor was pressuring her to turn in a finished manuscript. “I said, look, y’all could publish this, and it’s technically true, in that I didn’t make up the events, but it didn’t feel true. I mean, the other thing was when I wrote about the religious stuff I had a very hard time not sounding like one of those evangelists saying send me a dollar.”

Writing about religion, she concedes, is tricky business. “It’s very hard to write about. It’s like doing card tricks on the radio, I think—writing about prayer and spiritual experience to people who mostly think you’re an idiot. On the other hand it was an important part of my story, and I felt obligated to represent it, not in any evangelical way. . . . I know this sounds insane, but I believe that God wanted me to write this book. That doesn’t mean that God wants the book to succeed by any measure.”

She’s unapologetic about her faith, and anticipates a backlash from critics and “professional atheists” alike. “Believe it or not . . . I’m an extremely private person. You really wouldn’t know that, even though I’m pretty open and honest about things that other people would not be open about, but the degree to which I care about my reputation is pretty limited. I really gave that up long before I published anything anybody read. I think you have to [do that] as a writer or else you’ll go insane. My fear [in writing about faith] wasn’t so much that people would look at me and think I was a candy-ass, as that I wouldn’t represent it truly—I wouldn’t be able to recreate an experience in the reader that matched and mirrored my experience. I wouldn’t be able to create an emotional experience for a secular audience. That’s what I was most scared about.”

Karr manages to write about spirituality without ever coming across as didactic or preachy—no small feat. “Well, on two earlier drafts I did,” she confesses. “Hopefully I corrected that.”

In one passage, she eloquently describes her first stirrings of faith, a brush with the numinous: “I feel some fleet movement travel through my chest—a twinge, a hint. This faint yearning was not belief itself, but wanting to believe.”

She says her transformation would never have been possible without her mother’s recovery from alcoholism. “I honestly think if my mother had not gotten sober, there’s no way. . . . She gave the whole family a great gift.”

“I was so scared and so mean all the time,” she says of her pre-sobriety days. “I do feel like my life has been transformed and is better than I could ever have imagined. I’m so much more in it. I have more life now in a day than I used to have in a year.”

Karr’s entire body of work attests to this simple truth: that the past, until you reckon with it, will remain in hot pursuit. In other words, what you don’t bring into the light will destroy you. Lit brings this process full circle. That pleasingly monosyllabic title encapsulates this writer’s entire journey thus far—one that is about drinking and the illuminating revelations of sobriety, about the redemptive power of literature and how the act of writing can save a soul. 

Katherine Wyrick is a writer in Little Rock.

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Excerpt from Lit:

Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.

No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around.

Wasn't that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted robert Frost:

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in
And thought of doing something to the shore
Water had never done to land before . . .

Pretty, Doonie said.

Quinn spat in the sand and said, She's always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she's fine.

He zipped up his outsize wet suit with force. The crotch of it hung down so low that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger.

My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison.

That's me, I said. Miss California.

Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, from Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr (2009).

More from Mary Karr:
On religion: “The Catholic Church didn’t designate me a spokesperson. I’m sure the Catholic Church, many people, wouldn’t approve wholeheartedly of my particular brand of Catholicism. I mean, I have sex outside of wedlock . . . I do things the Catholic Church frowns on to say the least.”
On alcohol: “We have no business drinkin’, our people.” Describing a moment on her wedding day, she writes, “Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes.”

During the three years since the publication of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, more than six million readers around the world have found resonance in her chronicle of personal discovery. This intensely driven writer learned to live in the moment in Italy (Eat), explored her spiritual self in India (Pray) and found her soul mate in Felipe, a Brazilian living in Bali (Love). The two planned to spend the rest of their lives together, but previous bad marriages made them determined to skip actual matrimony. Fate is capricious, however, and it intervened in 2006; because Felipe’s visits to the U.S. had been too frequent, he was banned from entering the country. If Felipe was ever to return, it could only be as Gilbert’s husband. This unexpected turn of events was the impetus for Gilbert’s new memoir, Committed.

“I was working on a novel about the Amazons,” says Gilbert, who was shocked by the sudden urgency of marriage. “I was well into its research and didn’t have any intention of writing another memoir. But when this came up, my spirits were so viral. I did not want to enter this union feeling about [marriage] the way I felt about it. I loved this guy way too much to enter into something so serious with such a profound sense of dread. Really, the most efficient way that I know to work through something is to write about it. And then, pretty quickly, as soon as the idea came to me, I realized this is a very interesting topic.”

“I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival.”

Which is why Committed is not only a memoir, it’s also a history of marriage through the ages and a social commentary on the institution. Gilbert even harks back to Plato’s Symposium and its discussion of soul mates: “Once upon a time . . . we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms—a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. . . . Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy.”

But in our happiness we neglected the gods, so Zeus punished mankind by tearing us apart, forcing us to spend the rest of our lives looking for the vanished half, our other soul. “This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one,” Gilbert writes.

Speaking from the home she and Felipe now share in Frenchtown, New Jersey (dishes clattering in the sink and her dog barking occasionally), Gilbert elaborates on Plato’s concept.

“It is the most beautifully put metaphor. That along with Schopenhauer’s porcupine tells you pretty much all you need to know about intimacy. You just put those two things together, the urge to merge combined with the reality of how prickly it almost always is, negotiating your space versus somebody else’s space.”

Gilbert muses on the reasons people marry, many of which in this country, she believes, have nothing to do with true commitment.

It’s important that “we know the difference between the desire to get married and the desire to have a really great party,” she says with a laugh. “Especially when we are young, those two things can blur and you spend a great deal more time planning the party than you do planning the marriage.”

She contrasts this with a couple she knew growing up, the Websters, who married because he, as a farmer, needed a wife and she, as a woman, needed a provider. Love, passionate or otherwise, had nothing to do with the decision. For years they worked their farm, raised their family, shared good times and bad. When her health declined, Mr. Webster took over care of his wife, bathing her, feeding her, seeing to her needs until her death—not the actions of a person devoid of love for his spouse.

“We, having elevated the idea of romance and infatuation to such a high state, feel like the happiest day of your life should be the day you get married. That in itself should be the pinnacle. What the Websters probably knew, even to such an extent that they certainly never defined it, never even had to say it, because they just knew it, was that where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as where it ends up. You can begin from a place of great pragmatism and then over the years grow into a very deep, wordless affection and loyalty, which I found very moving to remember.”

Thinking about the Websters, Gilbert adds, “Felipe has this very specific word called bate pape that means ‘chit chat.’ It’s his favorite word for what the whole purpose of intimacy is. He said when he was a kid, his favorite memories of childhood were lying in bed, listening to his parents chit chat, make bate pape. And that’s where their intimacy was based. It wasn’t necessarily in high-flung sexual passion, although it might have been at one time. It was just about having someone to sit with at the breakfast table and have a cup of coffee with and talk about nothing and everything. And that’s a stubborn, consistent human need.”

Gilbert’s venture into the historical and social implications of marriage in Committed, especially as it pertains to women, ranges far and wide, from the 11th century, when ideas about marriage were more liberal than today, to modern Europe, where there is far less emphasis on matrimony than in America. It all makes for interesting and informative reading.

Readers who are hoping for more memoir, less research, might be disappointed in this new book. But it accomplishes what Gilbert set out to do—to bring peace to her decision to marry Felipe.

“I certainly went in with a great deal of aversion and hostility to this institution and I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival—the fact that this thing endures. Anything that lasts that long, including cockroaches and crocodiles, you have to admire. There’s something kind of remarkable about that. What could be called a kind of fusty, decrepit old institution continues to reinvent itself and re-evolve with every century, every generation,” Gilbert says.

“So instead of feeling like I’m being stamped into this form that doesn’t suit me, I can feel like I’m part of a very long story that’s always being rewritten. And now I have the rewriting of that tale.”

Rebecca Bain is a freelance writer and editor in Nashville.

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Elena Gorokhova’s transformative moment as a writer came in 2004 when she enrolled in Frank McCourt’s memoir class at the Southampton Writers Conference. For the previous 10 or 15 years she had occasionally written—and published—fictionalized bits and pieces about her childhood and youth in Leningrad during the Brezhnev era. Writing was a pleasure, even a necessity, but more tangible concerns—her teaching responsibilities, raising a child, cooking dinner—kept her from taking it seriously.

Then came Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes. “He was a brilliant storyteller, but also just as brilliant a teacher,” Gorokhova remembers during a call to her home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where she lives with her second husband, their daughter and her 95-year-old mother, a figure who looms large in Gorokhova’s enthralling memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs.

McCourt’s classroom included 11 other students and two celebrities who were auditing the class—actors Alan Alda and Anne Bancroft. “The synergy of these three enormously talented people provided this incredible, electric atmosphere. Magic happened every day in that classroom!” Gorokhova says. “From that moment, from that seminar, A Mountain of Crumbs all came together.”

One thing Gorokhova learned from McCourt was to focus on the “hot spots,” those defining moments in life when something significant changes. “He compared it to walking on the beach. ‘You can just look at the surface of things,’ he said, ‘or you can go with a metal detector and go for the gold that’s deep inside.’ ”

Gorokhova has clearly gone for the gold. The 20 episodes in A Mountain of Crumbs are extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail and offer an engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Beginning with Gorokhova’s mother’s brutal experiences after the Russian Revolution and in World War II as a doctor, the narrative follows Gorokhova through interactions with her friends and family members, her early education—in school and in the Soviet system—her intellectual and sexual awakenings and her growing disillusionment with the Communist government, until in 1980, at age 24, she meets and marries a brilliant American physics student and leaves Russia for good. Along the way, the wryly ironic Gorokhova illuminates the ludicrous tensions that existed between public and private life in the Soviet Union and tweaks the noses of authorities, including her mother.

“The United States is a different country and has different tensions and different kinds of stresses,” says Gorokhova, a linguist who has taught English as a second language since 1981. “What it doesn’t have is the kind of schizophrenic slicing of your soul in half that we had in the Soviet Union. There were things that I could say and that I could show to my family and friends. Then I would go outside, like everyone else, and I knew I couldn’t say or show that to people I went to school with or worked with, and especially not to any officials. It was the post-Stalin era, so they were not going to throw us into Siberia for a joke [during Stalin’s rule, Gorokhova’s uncle had disappeared in the Gulag after telling a joke to a foreigner]. But we had to be careful, we had to pretend everything was all right. The essence was that the government lied to us and we knew they were lying. They knew we knew they were lying. But they kept lying anyway. And we kept pretending to believe them. It was this duality, this divide, that ruled life there.”

For much of the narrative, Gorokhova associates that duality with her overprotective mother and an equally overprotective motherland. A somewhat more forgiving Gorokhova now says, “My mother was born three years before the Revolution. She went through famine and through two wars. She was a surgeon in World War II at the front. Her first two husbands didn’t last long and my father died when I was 10. She was very strong, obviously, and very controlling. Of course she loved us and was very protective of us but she didn’t show the warm side. She stifled. It occurred to me she was just like the country. What was the intention of the Soviet state? To have a just and equal society, to take care of the people. In the Soviet Union no one starved. No one was out of work. We all got our miserable wages for sitting at a desk for eight hours and doing crossword puzzles. The money was little, the food was scarce, but we were all in the same situation. There was this control and smothering on one side and this protective quality on the other.”

Gorokhova’s path away from the stifling system toward independence opened when a grade school friend played a recording of a basic English lesson. “It was so mesmerizing,” Gorokhova says, “an English male voice speaking English. It was captivating.”  Gorokhova begged her mother to pay for English lessons, and her mother finally agreed. Her knowledge of English afforded Gorokhova the opportunity to encounter Western visitors in Leningrad and to catch glimpses of a different sort of life in English-language books and movies. “It was putting these little bits and pieces together that told me that all this about capitalism rotting and crumbling and socialism succeeding and thriving was nonsense,” she says.

“And when I came here, I started writing in English,” Gorokhova continues. “I never tried to write anything in Russian when I lived in Russia. But when I came to this country, I felt the necessity and I allowed myself to write—in English. It took me a few years to learn the English rhetoric. Then in 2004 I saw that the legendary Frank McCourt was teaching his memoir class. I thought, this is ridiculous. Who is going to accept me into Frank McCourt’s class? But then I thought, why not? I submitted an application, and I got accepted. I was stunned. I was stunned.”

And from this beginning, an American writer was born.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

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A few weeks ago, author Dani Shapiro, her atheist husband and their young son went to hear a children’s choir perform on a village green near their New England home. They listened to hymns and Christmas carols interspersed with readings by Persian poet Rumi and Catholic author Thomas Merton. Then the family went home and lit Hanukkah candles.

“I thought, this is my idea of what it should be like,” Shapiro laughs during a call to her home in Connecticut. “If I hadn’t done the journey, though, all these contradictions would have felt wrong. I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

“I was looking not so much for religion . . . but a way of life that would allow for greater meaning.”

“The journey,” as Shapiro calls it, is her search to discover a deeper truth about life, which she details in her lovely mosaic of a memoir, Devotion. Courageous, authentic and funny, Devotion is Shapiro’s exploration of her own relationship with faith.

In her mid-40s, Shapiro found herself unsettled and out of balance. What did she truly believe? What kinds of values did she want to instill in her young son? Raised in a deeply religious family with strict rituals, Shapiro was drawn more to the spirituality of yoga and meditation, yet also attended monthly Torah studies. In Devotion, she asks: Is it all right to take a hodge-podge approach to spirituality, or does dabbling in different faiths signal a wishy-washiness, an unwillingness to choose a doctrine and stick with it? And how did her family history feed into her confusion about faith?

“I had reached the middle of my life and knew less than I ever had before,” she writes. “Michael, Jacob and I lived on top of a hill, surrounded by old trees, a vegetable garden, stone walls. From the outside things looked pretty good. But deep inside myself, I had begun to quietly fall apart. Nights, I quivered in the darkness like a wounded animal. Something was very wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.”

Shapiro got serious about meditating (“It’s a struggle for my kinetic, type-A, busy-minded self,” she admits). She went on silent retreats and practiced yoga. She read about spirituality. She talked with friends and relatives, devout and not. She pieced together fragments of her life, both harrowing and beautiful, that shaped who she is.

Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household with a father prone to panic attacks and a supremely difficult mother, Shapiro found her childhood fraught with confusion. By her 30s, she was a recovering drinker, had lost her father to a car accident (which she wrote about in her gritty first memoir, Slow Motion) and had a newborn with a potentially life-threatening seizure disorder. After hearing the planes hit the World Trade Center, Shapiro and her husband, screenwriter Michael Maren, sold their Brooklyn brownstone and headed for Connecticut.

But even in that bucolic setting, even when her son was no longer sick, her anxiety grew and she knew she needed more. “I was looking not so much for a religion—I had one and had mixed feelings about it—but a way of life that would allow for greater meaning, greater depth, greater awareness,” Shapiro says. “I desperately did not want to be 80 years and saying, ‘But I was just getting my life together.’ ”

Those are the words her mother uttered on her deathbed. In Devotion, Shapiro revisits their beyond-rocky relationship.
“I grew up hearing, ‘You made this happen,’ or ‘You poisoned this person against me,’ ” she says. “With my mother, I had to ask myself, is it ever OK to give up on a person?”

The answer, at least for Shapiro, was yes. After attending several therapy sessions with her mother, Shapiro talked with the psychiatrist, who told her something he’d never said to a client in 30 years of practice: She and her mother had no hope of forging a healthy relationship.

“It was such an incredibly intense moment,” Shapiro recalls. “It will remain one of the definitive moments of my life. The feeling of somebody totally unbiased corroborating that or saying, ‘Yeah, this really is impossible.’ It was in equal and opposing measures relief and incredibly painful.”

The relationship she had with her mother hasn’t tainted her own parenting. “I’m very glad I had a boy,” she admits. “During the sonogram, I heard it was a boy and was instantly and profoundly relieved. I think it would have been very complicated for me to have a daughter, and I think I would have been a very self-conscious mother of a daughter.”

Jacob, now a healthy grade-schooler, has adapted to the slower pace of life away from the city—although it took awhile. “When we first moved, there was a sidewalk out here bisecting a huge meadow and Jacob would not step off that sidewalk,” she laughs. “He went from this urban two-and-a-half-year-old to being this total country boy.”

Someday, that boy may read one or both of her incredibly honest memoirs, which yields mixed feelings in Shapiro. “Slow Motion is a book I’m really proud of,” she says. “I’ve often wondered whether I would have written it had I already had a family myself. I dread the day Jacob picks up that book. As a mother, I wouldn’t have written it; as a writer, I’m glad I did.”
Still, she’s learned to live with that, and with other quirky aspects of being a best-selling memoirist. “Nobody ever asks me anything about myself,” Shapiro says. “People say, ‘You must feel like I know everything about you.’ Actually, I don’t! That’s a strange phenomenon. I don’t feel I’ve exposed myself. I’ve written about the part of my life I wanted to write about.”

In one chapter of Devotion, a magazine editor offers to send Shapiro to India to report on yoga and meditation. A dream assignment! But Shapiro turns her down, saying, “My life is here.” And that is the beautiful simplicity of Shapiro’s journey: She doesn’t want to go to exotic, far-flung destinations, Eat, Pray, Love-style. She just wants to look inward. Ultimately, Devotion is the best kind of memoir—although it’s about someone else’s life, it makes you shine a flashlight on your own.

Attitudes toward assisted suicide for the terminally ill are seldom lukewarm—people either believe strongly that this course of action should be sanctioned or, just as strongly, that no one has the right to end another’s life, even for medical reasons and at that person’s request. Zoe FitzGerald Carter firmly believed in an individual’s right to take this difficult step until her own mother decided it was time to die. The anguish Carter felt, her conflicting emotions and the upheaval it caused in her family are painstakingly chronicled in her first book, a memoir titled Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Life and Death.

“It really was an incredibly difficult year,” says Carter, speaking from the home in Berkeley, California, that she shares with her husband and their two daughters. “I felt like my life had been derailed, and it was death and dying 24 hours a day. I started feeling very isolated from my husband and children because I felt like the predominant emotional event in my life was not with them. It was with this maddening, endless, difficult discussion with my mother which at some point I realized was only going to end when she died.”

There was never any doubt about whether Carter’s mother was terminally ill. Twenty years earlier, she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and she was already dependent on around-the-clock assistance for the smallest of tasks. It was obvious that she would soon be unable to get out of bed at all. Her pain was increasingly resistant to drugs. So why did Carter refuse to go along with her mother’s decision?

“I live in Berkeley, and there are people who’ve read this book and they say, what was your problem? Why didn’t you just help her kill herself? You should have helped her go, it was what she wanted. And I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t experienced anything like this or it’s all about politics and assisted suicide should be legal, end of story. I think it’s probably because people have this idea—oh yeah, if I get sick, take me out back and shoot me. But I think when they get down to it, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

It certainly proved complicated for Carter and her two sisters. While none of them wanted their mother to cease to be a living, breathing part of their lives, their responses to her decision to end her life were quite different. Her sister Hannah became Carter’s lifeline, the only person who shared her conflicting emotions. Katherine, the oldest sister, basically checked out of the whole scenario, saying their mother’s decision to die, her constant shifting of her “death date,” her demands that her daughters be by her side when she died, were all a shameless bid for attention—which Katherine refused to give her. It was important to Carter that this division among the sisters be chronicled in Imperfect Endings.

“I do think when a parent dies that what happens among the siblings, if there are siblings, is a really big part of the story: who shows up, who doesn’t show up, the different ways that they show up. The whole histories that we have in our families oftentimes emerge and intensify, and alliances and animosities and old regrets get reactivated and ratcheted up in these situations.”

Part of the impact of Carter’s book comes from her juxtaposition of chapters; she weaves her past into her memoir, giving the reader a more satisfying context to use as a contrast with the present. It becomes a reminder that an imperfect childhood often becomes irrelevant when a parent is dying. Musing on why this was important for her to bring out in her book, Carter says a relationship with a dying family member differs from any that has preceded it.

“When you’re with somebody who’s dying, you really do love them in this very pure way. You just love them and you’re there for them. It’s very healing. A lot of my anger and pain around my mother’s decision really dropped away at the end.”

Despite the gravity of the subject matter, there are sections of Imperfect Endings that are quite funny. The visit from the “Exit Guide” from the Hemlock Society is one such example: Carter’s snobbish mother cannot bring herself to allow this man to orchestrate her demise, not because she is bothered by “getting gassed,” but because he’s a good ol’ boy from Tulsa named Bud. This is, as Carter writes, a serious social handicap: “My mother is a solid Washington Democrat, a liberal even, but she’s also a cultural and intellectual snob, and this man is definitely not a member of the tribe.”

In the end, Carter’s mother (at the suggestion of her doctor) decides to refuse all food and water until her body ceases to function. It is this action that sways Carter to accept her mother’s choice of death and brings her to her mother’s bedside for the final time.

“I mean she didn’t eat, day after day after day. This was not a ‘dark night of the soul’ kind of moment where she took a bunch of pills and killed herself. This was something she talked about and thought about for a year and then persisted in, day after day at the end. . . . I saw her absolute commitment and unblinking strength during that fasting time.”

One cannot help but wonder, with all Carter went through, whether she would ever put her own family through such an ordeal. She says yes, but only if her daughters agreed that it was the right thing to do and were comfortable with the decision.

“I do believe assisted suicide should be legal, but you have to recognize that nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to be in a place where they feel that is the best option. It’s not easy. And there is a price you pay for it. I do feel like there’s a price my sisters and I paid emotionally and psychologically by participating in my mother’s death. I think it’s a tricky issue.”

But, as Carter says, it was a privilege to be by her mother’s side when she ended her years of pain, although it’s not a topic she brings up at cocktail parties or the school’s PTO.

“People are uncomfortable talking about death. People think it’s all just a big downer, and it’s scary and awful. I don’t think it’s all just scary and awful. I think there’s something very life-affirming about going through a death with somebody. There’s nothing like death to remind you of one of the most profound things about life, which is that it doesn’t go on forever. That sense of gratitude for being alive and awareness of the gift of life is a wonderful thing to experience.”

Rebecca Bain is a writer in Nashville.