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NonfictionMemoirHistoryFamily & Relationships

Leta McCullough Seletzky: author, mother and daughter of a spy

Interview by Alice Cary

Although Leta McCollough Seletzky wasn’t born until eight years after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she has always been haunted by the photo of that tragic night—one of the most recognizable images of the 20th century. And no wonder, since in it, her then 23-year-old father, Marrell “Mac” McCullough, can be seen kneeling beside Dr. King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, holding a towel over the civil rights leader’s wounded face, trying to staunch the bleeding. Several other people stand nearby, pointing toward a spot in the distance.

“In my mind,” Seletzky says, “those were accusatory fingers. I felt a sense of blame, that on some level, those fingers were pointing at me or [at my father].” The lawyer-turned-memoirist and California resident spoke by phone about her fascinating debut, The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This “black-and-white image of horror” was something Seletzky’s family rarely discussed, despite her father’s presence in it. His work had always been shrouded in secrecy and silence, and in many ways, the fact that he eventually opened up about it is nothing short of a miracle.

Read our starred review of ‘The Kneeling Man’ by Leta McCollough Seletzky.

Seletzky’s parents separated when she was 3 and later divorced. In high school, she learned from a newspaper article that her father, who by then lived elsewhere and worked for the CIA, had been an undercover officer for the Memphis Police Department at the time of King’s assassination, tasked with infiltrating and keeping tabs on a group of young Black activists called the Invaders. “The revelation felt like a body blow,” she writes. Had her dad’s work spying on the Invaders been similar to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s tactics for harassing and controlling the Black Panthers, she wondered? Despite her curiosity and concern, Seletzky didn’t inquire about Mac’s role until 2010, after the birth of her second son. “One of the main reasons I thought it was so important to tell this story,” she says, “was so [my sons] would not be left wondering or feeling that sense of silence and dread.”

When Seletzky eventually asked her father about that night, he responded with a 17-page document. However, Seletzky was so saddened by his description of growing up in poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi that she stopped reading after three pages, putting his account away for five years. Finally, in 2015, she read to the end of the letter. After that, she plunged into years of writing, research, Freedom of Information Act requests, interviews and, most importantly, collaboration with her father. The resulting book provides an account not only of the amazing trajectory of her father’s life but also of her own reconciliation with his mysterious past as a Black man spying on a Black Power activist group for the police.

“One of the main reasons I thought it was so important to tell this story was so [my sons] would not be left wondering or feeling that sense of silence and dread.”

Book jacket image for The Kneeling Man by Leta McCollough Seletzky

While writing The Keeling Man, Seletzky and her father visited King’s assassination site together, and she also facilitated a 2017 meeting between her father and Andrew Young, an early leader in the civil rights movement who was also present the night King was murdered. “It felt like walking into history,” Seletzky says. “I mean, not only were we meeting with Andrew Young, but we were at his house. It was something I’ll never forget.” One of the most endearing moments of their encounter was Young’s recollection of Dr. King playfully swatting him with one of the Lorraine Motel’s pillows just hours before his assassination. “He was a hero, but he was a human being,” Seletzky says. “I feel like sometimes this gets lost when we lionize people.”

Seletzky also interviewed numerous members of the Invaders, the activist group her father was spying on, and was surprised by their warm welcome. “They were not upset,” she says. “They were not angry.” In fact, she’s come to think of one of the group’s leaders “as family.”

On the night of King’s assassination, Mac and several Invaders had just returned from a shopping trip with one of Dr. King’s aides, who invited them to dinner. As they walked from Mac’s car toward the motel, shots rang out, and Mac, who had been in the Army, sprinted up the stairs to the balcony. “He was trying to save Dr. King’s life, and he ran into the zone of danger to try to do that,” Seletzky says. Although federal investigators never raised concerns about Mac’s presence that night, he was eventually questioned and called to testify at a Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. He was even warned that the attorney of James Earl Ray, the convicted killer, might stand up and accuse Mac of assassinating King. “Sometimes I think about what it would feel like if you had tried to save someone’s life and instead you were painted as having been a wrongdoer,” Seletzky says.

“When Seletzky let her mom read the final draft, she told her daughter, ‘Leta, I didn’t know 75% of what is in this book.’”

But the toughest part of Seletzky’s writing process was writing about herself. “It was difficult to weave my story through the magnitude of his,” she says. “I felt that it really should just be all Mac, but at the same time, I feel this story is more than that.” Three memoirs were particularly helpful as she figured out how to walk that line: James McBride’s The Color of Water, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House and Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family.

Ultimately, Seletzky is thrilled that writing this book brought her closer to her father. “I am in awe of him,” she says, “and the way he allowed his experiences to mold him into who he is.” She was also pleased by her mother’s response to The Kneeling Man. Her mother was a reporter in Memphis for many years, and when Seletzky let her mom read the final draft, she told her daughter, “Leta, I didn’t know 75% of what is in this book.” “I was shocked,” Seletzky says, “because she was born and raised in Memphis, and she was married to my dad for several years.”

When Seletzky asked her father what he wanted people to understand about his life and choices, he responded, “What I want them to understand is exactly what you wrote in that book.” That, Seletzky says, was perhaps her proudest moment. “At that point, I said to myself, ‘OK, well, the book is a success no matter what.’”

Author headshot of Leta McCollough Seletzky by Gretchen Adams

It took nearly 35 years for the debut author to ask her father why he was present on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The Kneeling Man now reveals the full story.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Writing a memoir required Daniel Wallace to become a different writer

Behind the Book by Daniel Wallace

The books I’ve written so far began almost accidentally. Not the day-to-day, year-to-year accumulation of words—no accidents there. But the inciting moment or the controlling idea that ended up as the buttress for the whole contraption was unplanned, and usually came from me just playing around with words. With Big Fish, I was passing the time taking care of my baby son and writing brief modern myths while he napped, and after a couple of years, I discovered I had enough of them to make a book. The Kings and Queens of Roam, a long and complicated story about two sisters, two men, blindness and revenge, began as a couple of pages about an abandoned town in the middle of nowhere. Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician was drawn from a character in a discarded screenplay.

This Isn’t Going to End Well, my first nonfiction book, followed this same script but in a different way. The accident didn’t come in the form of an unforeseen inspiration but in the accidental discovery of my brother-in-law’s journals, 10 years after he died. They were hidden in the back of a closet beneath the stairs of my sister Holly’s home, covered in dust and protected by a herd of camel crickets. My brother-in-law, the writer and artist William Nealy, died in 2001 by what the death certificate described as an “intra-oral gunshot wound.” Then in 2011, his wife, my sister Holly, died herself of what seemed like a dozen different things, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and grief. My remaining two sisters, my wife and I were cleaning out her house when I found the journals. There were about 15 of them, and they dated from 1977, when William was 25 years old. I put them all in a glass-doored bookcase in the hallway outside of my office and finished the novel I’d been working on, Extraordinary Adventures.

Read our starred review of ‘This Isn’t Going to End Well’ by Daniel Wallace.

Two years passed before I took them out of the bookcase. It took me that long to parse through all the incumbent taboos, the ethical considerations and my own desires. Were they mine to read? Did I even want to read his journals, and if I did, why? What did I think I’d get out of that? William’s suicide was, like all suicides, the kind of tragedy that changes the course of many lives; even after 13 years, it felt fresh. And though he’d left three long suicide notes, two to Holly and one to his mother, they somehow felt insufficient to explain what at the time I saw as the ultimate betrayal of my sister, of me, of everyone who loved or knew him. I was mad at him for killing himself and stayed that way for a long time. But eventually I dove in, was mesmerized from the very first page and knew almost immediately that I would be writing about this, about him—that William’s story would become a book. To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to a person with a word processor, everything is a story.

But this was a bit of a leap. I’d never written a book of nonfiction before, had never wanted to, had no idea how to go about it. Even so, I thought, all writing is hard; how much harder could it be?

As I discovered over the next five years, very hard. Very. Very. Very hard.

Each book presents its own challenges, its own problems to solve. You would think that with practice a writer could skate from book to book without breaking a sweat. But nothing about writing has gotten easier for me, and each book has taken longer than the last to finish. So I was ready for a learning curve. But writing nonfiction asked me not just to write differently but to become a different kind of writer.

“To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to a person with a word processor, everything is a story.”

I was drawn to becoming a fiction writer in the first place because of the freedom of that form. In a novel I’m constrained by logic and time and character, but I’m in charge of the constraints; I make up the rules I am then expected to follow. In writing a so-called true story, you enter a world that’s already been created, telling a story that has already happened and maybe already been told. A novel is a story only one person (the novelist) has access to; a story about an actual person is a story dozens, maybe hundreds of people know at least a small part of. If you knew my brother-in-law, or my sister, or me, you are in some tangential way a part of the story; you have feelings about it, about him. This meant that in order to write the book, I actually had to leave my office and talk to people. I had to interview them. I recorded conversations and quoted from them or used them as “background.” Suddenly it was as if I were collaborating with a small village.

This turned out to be more fun than I thought it would be. I was able to see old friends and meet new ones, and as a reporter, I got to ask them questions a civilian could never get away with.

On a craft level, I didn’t know how to create a scene from my own life that’s as compelling as one I could make up, with all the bells and whistles of inventive possibility. Is imagination possible in this ready-made world I was writing about?

Yes—kind of. It’s not really imagination, though. Writing nonfiction is closer to reimagination, where you’re calling forth a memory and giving it life on the page. Memories half a century old are dim, fragile and fleeting. You have to pin them down the best you can and take a long look at them, editing them for meaning and clarity and supplying supporting details (what the room looked like, what the weather was like that day, what you were wearing) that might be, at best, stabs in the dark.

“Writing nonfiction asked me not just to write differently but to become a different kind of writer.”

But the hardest part of this project was writing a book about people I knew and loved. There was so much I wanted to say about them! So many stories. The first few drafts of this book were twice as long as the final version ended up being, which is not unique for early drafts. But each time I had to cut a scene, I felt like I was cutting out a part of their lives, and I believed (and still believe) that without all these stories the reader wouldn’t get to know them for who they were. The story, for instance, of William hunting down the man who stole the motor off my mother’s pool filter, or how he tried to save a man’s life at the drugstore. And what about the time Edgar (William’s best friend who died in 1993) was robbed and tied to a chair in a hotel room, left there until he was discovered by the staff eight hours later? The time Holly wrote a song about our father and rented a recording studio to record it? And so many other cool things. I could write another book about them, I think. And maybe I will.

This Isn't Going to End Well audiobook cover
Read our starred review of the audiobook, narrated by Michael Crouch.

This Isn’t Going to End Well isn’t “drawn from life,” the way my novels are; it’s full of people who actually existed, same as you and me. In this book I’m not trying to create or imagine a life, I’m trying to reconstruct one. I think I’m also trying to resurrect my sister, my brother-in-law, their best friend—a risky enterprise (see: “The Monkey’s Paw”). In this book I share details from their lives that would embarrass them, were they here, and, in some cases, get them into a lot of trouble. But they’re not embarrassed or in trouble because that’s one of the pluses of not being alive. Which is the real difference between this book and all the others I’ve written, and the most stubborn of facts I can’t deny or get around: Their deaths are what made it possible.

Headshot of Daniel Wallace by Mallory Cash

The acclaimed novelist wondered how hard writing a memoir could really be. As it turned out: very, very, very hard.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

A Living Remedy

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The epigraph at the beginning of Nicole Chung’s vivid memoir A Living Remedy includes a line from Marie Howe’s poem “For Three Days”: “ . . . because even grief provides a living remedy.” As Chung immerses readers in her experience of grief, her powerful words compel us to follow her on a beautiful but difficult journey of loss.

Chung was born prematurely to Korean parents who felt they could not care for such a fragile baby. She wrote about her adoption by a white couple, and her subsequent search for her birth family as she became a mother herself, in her bestselling 2018 memoir, All You Can Ever Know. Now Chung continues her story, returning to the Oregon mountains of her childhood at the moment her beloved adoptive parents’ health began to fail.

Chung’s struggle to be present for her parents as a daughter, while also being a wife and a mother in another city three thousand miles away, will be familiar to many readers. When her father’s health began its slow downward spiral, he was still young enough to seek a better job with better health resources but was stymied by his limited education—and proud enough to resist the government assistance Chung begged him to request. When he finally did, he was denied, falling through the cracks of a broken health care system. By that time, his illness had taken an irreversible toll. Chung’s grief and frustration over his death were fanned by the costly miles between them, but she resolved to do better by her widowed mother. However, Chung’s time with her mother eventually ran out as well, as the gathering storm of the COVID-19 pandemic spread its own brand of pain and panic.

A Living Remedy makes this era of collective grief more personal, as Chung honestly explores her childhood and the lives and deaths of her parents. She gives these hard times a purpose, absorbing them with both fury and compassion, making them part of her own legacy to pass along to her daughters. For her, this is indeed a living remedy.

In Nicole Chung’s memoir about the deaths of her parents, she absorbs hard times with fury and compassion, making the universal experience of grief vividly personal.
NonfictionReligion & SpiritualityMemoirFamily & Relationships

All of Us Together in the End

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

The lights started shortly after Matthew Vollmer’s mother died. It was the fall of 2019, and Vollmer’s father now lived alone, sleeping in the same bed where his wife of decades had released her final breath. He had spent 10 years caring for her as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases slowly took their toll. Now Vollmer, his sister, their respective families and their father were learning to live without their mother’s buoyant laughter. 

So it was understandable when friends and acquaintances offered a quick explanation for the appearance of mysterious lights near the elder Mr. Vollmer’s rural North Carolina property. They must be Mrs. Vollmer, of course, signaling to her husband from beyond the grave.

This easy answer didn’t sit well with Vollmer, who had long wrestled with matters of faith after leaving the Seventh-day Adventist Church in college. The other members of his family were still Adventists, and this well-meaning explanation didn’t align with their beliefs either. Adventists believe that once you die, you’re dead until Christ returns and resurrects the dead. Vollmer’s father even suggested to a few people that the lights might not have been from his late wife but from a demonic source instead.

Vollmer explores these possibilities with open-minded curiosity in All of Us Together in the End. An English professor at Virginia Tech who has previously authored short story and essay collections, Vollmer brings a fiction writer’s knack for narrative to this account of his life, vividly recounting family gatherings during the COVID-19 lockdown and other tender moments. Likewise, Vollmer’s analytic prowess shines in his research into possible causes for the lights. He turned to an author of a ghost lights book and a shaman, among other sources, attempting to make sense of not only this phenomenon but also the hole Vollmer’s mother left in the family.

Throughout this journey, Vollmer invites readers into his world via detailed renderings of the places he’s called home. He recalls his childhood house with exquisite detail and recounts searching for the lights outside his father’s window so powerfully that readers can place themselves in the scene. And as he searches, Vollmer evokes a painfully universal experience: the process of moving forward with a life that doesn’t make sense after a loved one’s death.

Matthew Vollmer brings a fiction writer’s knack for narrative to his first memoir, an account of the mysterious lights that appeared near his father’s home after his mother’s death.
NonfictionMemoir

Go Back and Get It

Review by Vanessa Willoughby

As she approached the age of 40, Dionne Ford, co-editor of the 2019 anthology Slavery’s Descendants, wondered how she had become “an invisible woman.” Who was she behind the mask she’d created to survive white supremacy and evade her struggles with mental illness? In Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, Ford, a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellow, skillfully blends illuminating research and moving prose to describe her path to self-liberation.

Ford’s quest began when she discovered an early 1890s photo of her great-great-grandmother Temple “Tempy” Burton; Tempy’s enslaver, Colonel W.R. Stuart; and the colonel’s wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s family were North Carolina plantation owners who bequeathed Tempy to the couple as a wedding gift. Tempy’s six children with Stuart included Ford’s great-grandmother Josephine, who was born a decade after emancipation. Although an internet search had uncovered this ancestral information, there were still considerable gaps in Ford’s family history.

Driven by the need to understand and contextualize Tempy’s life, Ford mined genealogy records, newspaper articles, county archives, ancestry message boards and the murky memories of relatives. Ultimately, Ford didn’t unearth clean-cut answers. The reasons Tempy stayed with her enslavers well after slavery had been abolished remained opaque, as did the interpersonal dynamics of Tempy’s relationships with the couple. But the intergenerational project cracked open the darkness of Ford’s trauma, which manifested as PTSD and alcoholism. Through efforts that often challenged her comfort, Ford restored the silenced voices of her ancestors, connected with distant cousins who were propelled by the same mission, and learned how to heal from childhood sexual abuse inflicted by a male relative.

Go Back and Get It is as deeply empathetic as it is introspective. With this striking work, Ford magnifies the interconnectedness of pain and forgiveness, cruelty and reconciliation. In order to regain autonomy—to feel at home in her body and to fully own her Blackness—she had to confront the dead rather than erase them. “Remember and recover,” Ford writes. “Re-member. Put yourself back together again and again.”

Dionne Ford learned that in order to feel at home in her body and fully own her Blackness, she had to confront her ancestors and her trauma rather than erase them.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

The Best Strangers in the World

Review by Sarojini Seupersad

Throughout his broadcasting career, journalist and host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” Ari Shapiro has made connections with people from all walks of life. In his sparkling memoir, The Best Strangers in the World: Stories From a Life Spent Listening, Shapiro intimately invites readers into his childhood and beyond to show them how his youthful curiosity and desire to learn have helped shape him into the person he is today.

Shapiro was born in Fargo, North Dakota, but when he was still a child, his family relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he embraced public speaking. As a teenager in Portland, he came out as gay and joined the city’s queer underground to nurture his sense of identity and community. Throughout the book, Shapiro explores his gay and Jewish identities and the surprising ways they have both affected and not affected his life. 

After recounting the unusual and almost magical story of his path to becoming a host on “All Things Considered,” Shapiro delves into his most fascinating experiences as a reporter, including an international incident in Ireland, a surprise interview with President Barack Obama aboard Air Force One and a chance to report on the war in Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Along with these stories, he supplies some very entertaining vignettes about his side gig as a singer for the band Pink Martini.

However, Shapiro is at his best when he’s discussing the most poignant and personal moments in his life. “Happy Endings,” which describes his whirlwind 2004 wedding to his husband, Mike, and “The Other Man I Married,” about his best friend and former producer, Rich, are two of the strongest and most moving pieces in the collection. Full of emotion and wit, these essays remind readers how funny and heartbreaking, often in equal measure, life can be. They also emphasize that anyone can have impostor syndrome or feel scared to be authentic, even when they’re someone who has interviewed the president of the United States.

NPR listeners will especially appreciate this book as a trusty companion to “All Things Considered,” but you needn’t be an NPR listener to enjoy these essays. Personal and contemplative, but also funny and at times devastating, The Best Strangers in the World will instill a newfound appreciation for the hard work journalists do and a sense of awe for the scope of history they get to observe up close.

With his sparkling memoir, “All Things Considered” host Ari Shapiro gives readers insight into the hard work journalists do and the incredible scope of history they get to observe up close.
NonfictionMemoirHistoryFamily & Relationships

The Kneeling Man

Review by Alice Cary

The photograph taken after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the Lorraine Motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, is one of the most recognizable of the 20th century. As the civil rights leader lay dying, people nearby pointed to something out of frame while one man knelt at King’s side. The photo captures a tragic moment in history, but for Leta McCollough Seletzky, the image is particularly haunting—because her father was the one trying to administer first aid. As she writes in her absorbing memoir, The Kneeling Man, “For my family, the assassination was a lifelong wound, something we didn’t touch for fear of aggravating it.”

Leta McCollough Seletzky reveals that it took her nearly 35 years to ask her father why he was present on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Seletzky wasn’t born until eight years after King’s death, and her parents split up when she was 3. Her father, Marrell “Mac” McCollough, took a job with the CIA, moved to Washington, D.C., and didn’t see much of his daughter. As an adult, however, Seletzky began questioning him about his life, especially about his time working for the Memphis Police Department before she was born. In 2015, she began an intensive interviewing, research and writing project that resulted in this account, which not only chronicles her father’s life but also reckons with his role in history.

Mac was the ninth of 12 children born to parents who rented 40 acres of Mississippi farmland from a white man who lived in Memphis. Growing up, his focus was on getting his high school diploma and then his college degree, goals that were not easily achieved. At the time of King’s assassination, Mac was 23 years old and beginning to take part-time college classes while working as an undercover cop to infiltrate a group of Black activists called the Invaders. Seletzky’s detailed yet fluid prose shapes her father’s story into a compelling narrative arc—beginning with his birth in Mississippi and ending with his 1999 retirement from the CIA—while holding space for her to grapple with Mac’s history as a Black man spying on Black Power activists for the police.

While Seletzky keeps the focus on her father’s story, his experiences and observations make intriguing contributions to the MLK assassination canon. For example, Mac observed that the bullet that killed Dr. King exploded on impact, which is the sort of technology he believed wasn’t sold in gun stores at that time. When Seletzky told civil rights activist Andrew Young that she wanted to know what really happened that night, he advised, “No, you don’t.” In a later conversation, he indicated that he wasn’t convinced that James Earl Ray, King’s convicted killer, was the one who pulled the trigger.

Near the end of her book, Seletzky admits, “I’d jumped into Dad’s story not knowing what I’d find and afraid of what I might uncover.” Thankfully she persevered, growing closer to her father in the process. The Kneeling Man will enlighten generations to come about a pivotal, disturbing moment in our nation’s history.

For Leta McCollough Seletzky, the famous photo of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is particularly haunting—because her father was the one trying to administer first aid.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

This Isn’t Going to End Well

Review by Alison Hood

How well can we ever truly know another person? The exceptional first memoir from novelist Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew, explores this question in a way that is simultaneously sharp-edged and loving, honest and painfully haunting.

Wallace’s honed prose and hypnotic pacing carry readers through a layered narrative intertwining the author’s life with those of his friend and brother-in-law William Nealy, his sister Holly and, tangentially, William’s best friend, Edgar. The result is a complicated story of love and loathing and, ultimately, Wallace’s complex deconstruction of his friendship with William after he died by suicide.

Daniel Wallace shares more about his discovery that writing a memoir is “very, very, very hard.”

A talented cartoonist, illustrator, whitewater adventurer and writer, William was a lodestar for Wallace. Their first encounter was during a pool party at Wallace’s childhood home. William was Holly’s 18-year-old boyfriend at the time, and he was perched on their roof, calculating the distance to the swimming pool below. Eventually he jumped through the air, landed in the water, made a huge splash and climbed back onto the roof to do it again. From that moment, the 12-year-old Wallace was “spellbound” by William’s “wildness, the derring-do, his willingness to take flight—literally—into the unknown. . . . He flew, and I, who couldn’t, just watched.”

Over time, Wallace’s relationship with William took root and grew—as a role model, friend, brother-in-law and creative inspiration. “He showed me how it was done: experience, imagine, then create,” Wallace writes. There were road trips across state borders toting illegal drugs, fishing expeditions, raucous rock concerts and other chaotic adventures. Though he was outwardly charismatic, inventive and Clint Eastwood-style macho, William was also Holly’s sensitive and devoted husband, becoming her caretaker as her rheumatoid arthritis worsened.

“But there were two Williams,” Wallace writes. “One was . . . the William we all knew. There was another we didn’t know . . . the William who lived in his own secret room, the narrow confines of an interior life with space for only one, and a much darker space than I’d ever imagined it would be.” It was not until well after William’s tragic death by suicide at age 48 that Wallace discovered a fuller picture of what both drove and tormented William. As Wallace moved through his anger at discovering a version of William he’d never known while William was alive, he gradually realized that even if you cannot fully know another human being, there is at least the possibility that you can, through kindness and self-compassion, know a measure of yourself.

The exceptional first memoir from Big Fish author Daniel Wallace is loving, honest and haunting as it deconstructs his friendship with his late brother-in-law.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Review by Kelly Blewett

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself” reads the epigraph to poet Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Fans of Keep Moving, Smith’s bestselling self-help book based on tweets she wrote during the period following her separation and eventual divorce from her partner of 19 years, will be eager to hear about her search for and ultimate reclamation of herself.

Written as a series of prose vignettes, You Could Make This Place Beautiful recounts the narrative of Smith’s divorce, beginning on the evening that Smith found a postcard in her husband’s work satchel that revealed romantic intimacy with a stranger. This prompted a whirlwind of couples therapy, arguments and reflection on how the relationship had soured prior to the betrayal. She compares their marriage to a fruit whose pit of love is pure but surrounded by rotting flesh. As the images and metaphors for loss gather momentum, the book simultaneously doubles back on itself, asking unanswerable questions: How to heal? How to carry this trauma forward? How to set it down? How to forgive? How to grieve?

As these queries show, this memoir is both the story of the dissolution of Smith’s marriage and also an inquiry into the act of telling that story—how to determine the beginning and the end, how to locate the center, how to represent the brokenness and beauty, and even how to find moments of solace. Music plays an important role throughout this book, and I loved listening to the songs Smith referenced as I was reading. (As it turns out, Smith’s story inspired the song “Picture of My Dress” by the Mountain Goats, which began as a Twitter exchange between Smith and songwriter John Darnielle.) In Keep Moving, Smith addressed the role that art and artists have played in her search for herself, and in You Could Make This Place Beautiful, she offers readers a personal playlist. 

Smith’s memoir is a beautiful example of how metaphor and imagery can capture the essence of experiences that are difficult to explain, and it will lead readers to think more deeply about the relationships in their own lives.

Fans of Maggie Smith’s poetry and other writings will be eager to read this tender memoir of reclaiming herself after her divorce.
NonfictionAudioMemoir

All the Beauty in the World

Review by Deborah Mason

When his beloved older brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Patrick Bringley sought a refuge—and found it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he took a job as a security guard. He worked there for 10 years, watching both people and art, and all the while noticing fine details that others were too busy or preoccupied to see. His memoir of his career at the Met, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me (6 hours), is a moving reflection on not only art but also all the messy, mundane, tragic, glorious and moving aspects of our lives.

Bringley’s reading of his book is sensitive and gentle. His soft-spoken narration reflects the profundity that comes from years of humbly observing and interacting with this magnificent museum, the works it houses, the people who serve it and the visitors who explore it. The accompanying PDF contains lovely sketches of the works Bringley reflects on, adding extra layers of enjoyment to this extraordinary audiobook.

Also in BookPage: Read our review of the print edition.

Patrick Bringley’s soft-spoken narration reflects his years of humbly observing and interacting with the Met, the works it houses, the people who serve it and the visitors who explore it.
NonfictionMusicMemoir

Arrangements in Blue

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

“When I love a song, there is almost always a moment that sounds like how I imagine truth to sound,” writes poet Amy Key in Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone. “It’s the moment in the song that touches the bruise you didn’t know you had, the aching, denied part of you. You are found out by it.”

Every track of Joni Mitchell’s Blue uncovers a bruise for Key. The 1971 album has been dear to her for three decades, since she borrowed the cassette tape from her older sister when she was 14. From the moment Mitchell sang, “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, travelling, travelling, travelling, looking for something, what can it be?” Key experienced a sense of longing. At first it was a longing to consume every note of the album. But as she’s moved through the decades of her life, Key has come to associate Blue with her desire for romantic love. She yearns for a partner, but she also yearns for a sense of self that isn’t defined by her singleness.

In Arrangements in Blue, Key uses Mitchell’s seminal work as a magnifying glass for her emotions and experiences as a single woman. These 10 essays parallel the tracks of Blue, but intimacy with the album isn’t required to understand and appreciate Key’s insights. She recounts solo meals and solo travels, and reflects on how people have looked at her during those moments. She confesses all the ways she’s held out her heart and body to men who were happy to receive but unwilling to open themselves in return. By embracing a vulnerability that matches Mitchell’s, Key reveals the full spectrum of human feeling with words honed as carefully as poetry.

Key offers analysis of Mitchell’s work throughout, but Arrangements in Blue isn’t exactly about Blue. It’s a window into the way one woman has moved through a world that’s quick to define women by their relationships. It’s also an ode to the ways music can give voice to our emotions, sometimes shape-shifting over years to remain as relevant as the first time we hit play.

In Arrangements in Blue, Amy Key uses Joni Mitchell’s seminal work as a magnifying glass for her emotions and experiences as a single woman.
NonfictionMemoir

Biting the Hand

Review by Alice Cary

When Korean American author Julia Lee was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 2000s, her instructor cracked a joke about a dog who was taken to the back of a Korean restaurant and eaten. As her classmates laughed, she turned “hot with anger and shame.” Instead of confronting her teacher, the next day Lee wore a bright red “Angry Little Asian Girl” T-shirt to class. “In retrospect,” Lee writes, “putting on the T-shirt was a dumb way to protest, but it was the only way I could tell my teacher ‘fuck you.’”

Lee is now an associate professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, focusing on African American and Caribbean literature—and she is no longer silent. Her memoir, Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, seamlessly blends her own experiences with piercing discussions of identity and racial stratification, serving up conclusions likely to challenge readers across the ideological spectrum. In fact, recognizing the need for constant reexamination in our white-centered society, Lee even challenges her own views. At a 2018 academic conference, for instance, she realized, “My brain had calcified. I was resistant to change. Gender pronouns puzzled me. Land acknowledgments confused me. My immediate response was to react like lots of people do—blame it on woke culture run amok or mock how cringingly earnest my colleagues were. It was always other people’s fault that I felt uncomfortable—not mine.”

In sections titled “Rage,” “Shame” and “Grace,” Lee traces her intellectual evolution through the events of her own life. She demonstrates a knack for meaningful storytelling as she recounts her father’s harrowing escape from North Korea as a child, and her enrollment at a private all-girls school in a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood while her parents struggled to make ends meet. In L.A., Lee was “a little Asian girl, thrown against what Zora Neale Hurston calls a ‘sharp white background.’” In 1992, at age 15, she witnessed firsthand the riots that occurred after a jury acquitted four police officers for physically battering Rodney King during a traffic stop. Lee writes that it was a “primal scene of racial awakening—for myself and for the Korean American community. We were not white. We were not Black. We were caught somewhere in the middle.”

Later, as a Princeton undergraduate, Lee felt herself “drowning” amid a whole system “built upon whiteness and in service of whiteness.” Along the way, she contended with depression, culturally clueless therapists, an angry mother and feelings of isolation when she became a parent. At Harvard, she got what she calls “life-saving” advice from novelist Jamaica Kincaid: “You must bite the hand that feeds you,” meaning that she must dare to critique the culture of white supremacy even when that culture expects her to be grateful just for being allowed into elite spaces.

Biting the Hand is an exceptional account of an evolving understanding of power and privilege, offering readers insightful new ways to examine their world.

Julia Lee’s piercing discussions of Asian American identity are likely to challenge readers across the ideological spectrum. In fact, she even challenges her own views.
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ+Family & Relationships

Choosing Family

Review by Brittany Sky

In a society that elevates white people and heteronormative relationships, the word family has come to suggest a white dad, a white mom and their two white children living in the suburbs. In Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance, however, DePaul University professor Francesca Royster provides a look at what family really means. It’s an expansive word that encapsulates what folks from all backgrounds have always done, especially within systems that can separate biological family members: blending both blood relatives and those chosen through adoption, marriage or simple affection. 

Royster brings readers along for her journey into motherhood as a queer woman fashioning a family. This includes not only the story of adopting a daughter with her wife, Annie, but also research about and with Black and queer chosen families. By artfully interweaving her own story with the work of scholars of African American and queer studies, Royster adds weight to her lived experience without distracting from the narrative. This approach also provides fuller context about the history of these marginalized identities for readers who do not share them.

Having a child inspires many parents to reflect on their own ancestral histories and families of origin, and this is certainly true for Royster. Throughout Choosing Family, she introduces the many mothers who came before her in her family line: her great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mother and stepmother, each of whom formed families from both blood and choice. For example, when her parents divorced, Royster’s mother created a family from deep friendships with strong, nurturing women. These relationships set the foundation for Royster to one day create the family she wanted, one that didn’t necessarily match the traditional image of family.

Parenthood is complex, and readers will feel Royster’s anticipation, joy and deep love, along with her fear. Her writing style has a smooth cadence and makes you feel like you’re with her every step of the way as she raises her daughter in a family that is Black, queer and chosen.

In her artful memoir, Francesca T. Royster brings readers along for her journey into motherhood as a queer woman fashioning a family.

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