The former co-host of “What Not to Wear” delivers candid and comical observations on growing up gay and other topics in an entertaining new memoir, I Hate Everyone, Except You.

My favorite line from the book is addressed to your fans: “Start focusing on you . . . your power, your value, the stuff that goes way deeper than designer jeans and the perfect shade of lipstick. But also on the perfect shade of lipstick if that makes you happy. Because you deserve to be happy.” What do you think needs to change for women to stop equating their appearance with their value?
A cultural revolution, I suppose. Men and women have tied a woman’s value to her looks for a very long time. That kind of thinking doesn’t magically cease overnight, but we could begin by praising our daughters, granddaughters, nieces for qualities in addition to their beauty, like their intelligence, strength, creativity, talent. And we could start teaching boys at an earlier age not to behave like pigs.

You write about how hurtful it was to you and your husband when Ted Cruz called the ruling on marriage equality one of our nation’s darkest days. You briefly considered moving to Sweden but write, “even if he, or someone just as horrible, becomes president, it’s not worth jumping ship.” How are you feeling post-election?
Well, I’ve been experiencing a wide range of emotions. I want to be clear, I would never leave the United States just because I don’t like a president. I love this country very much and believe the vast majority of Americans are good human beings. But if the Supreme Court reverses its marriage equality ruling, I’ll have a big problem with that, as I’m sure you can understand.

In the hilarious chapter “Clinton for President!” you eat a marijuana gummy bear and then talk about how when you’re president, you will make American fabulous again. So, Clinton Kelly 2020?
I’m not gonna lie: Part of me thinks I could do a freakin’ awesome job as president, but another—much larger—part of me doesn’t want to work that hard at anything. Taking all those meetings would be torture for me. If I’m on a conference call that lasts for more than 10 minutes, I want to commit hara-kiri.

You have a funny fake sitcom script in one chapter. Do you think you’ll ever try writing an actual TV pilot?
So glad you liked it! I have a drawer full of sitcom scripts I’ve written. Writing them and subsequently squirreling them away is a weird habit of mine. I never show them to anyone because I assume people will think they’re stupid. But then again, a lot of really stupid stuff makes its way to television.

Your afterword is addressed to your grandma, saying you didn’t share any stories about her because she’s all yours. Come on, tell us one thing about your grandma!
Aw, she’s just a dream. She’s 97 and originally from New Zealand. When I was a kid, she’d make me a proper cup of tea—she would never use a tea bag!—with lots of milk and sugar, then read my tea leaves, like a fortune teller. She always saw all these wonderful things happening in my future. . . . And this is why I didn’t include any stories of ours. I’m totally crying. Thanks a lot, Amy!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of I Hate Everyone, Except You.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

While working a dead-end job in my mid-20s, I spent several hours setting up an Excel spreadsheet in which I listed every book I could think of that I’d ever read, starting with The Wind in the Willows. I devotedly logged each subsequent book into that spreadsheet until sometime around age 28, when I lost track of it in the shuffle of changing jobs.

I’ve since moved on to an app that allows me to continue my obsessive book tracking, but I still think wistfully of that spreadsheet and the books it contained. So My Life with Bob, the new memoir by New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul, resonated deeply with me.

It would be a ridiculous understatement to call Paul an avid reader. Whether highbrow Russian literature or V.C. Andrews’ incest-laced Flowers in the Attic, she reads with gusto. And she records it all in Bob, her “Book of Books,” a well-worn journal in which she’s listed every book she’s read for 28 years.

Paul first wrote about Bob in a 2012 Times essay; turning that essay into a book was not an easy decision.

“There was a huge amount of trepidation and fear,” she admits, speaking by phone from New York City. “I didn’t actually think of it as a memoir, and it was only when I read something that said, ‘Pamela Paul to write a memoir,’ that I thought, oh my God, I’m writing a memoir.

“It’s so personal. I’m usually very cautious writing about myself. I have a great amount of admiration for those who say, damn it all, I’ll write what I want. It’s very brave, but the journalism I’ve always done is feature writing, where people I interview are voluntarily participating; they’re in it of their own volition. It felt odd to me to be writing not only about myself but the people in my life.”

Paul’s previous books—By the Book; Parenting, Inc.; Pornified; and The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony—are investigative looks at different aspects of social and consumer behavior. In My Life with Bob, in contrast, she is her own subject. Her chapters focus on key books in her life, from The Grapes of Wrath to The Secret History, and her reflections on what those books mean to her and what they say about her.

“The first outline was 64 chapters!” Paul remembers. “It was really sad to cut out books; each book I cut out was like cutting out a chapter of my life in a way. It was hard to think about what books captured my intellectual life and my internal life and my social life, where I was in my life at a given moment.”

My Life with Bob catalogues Paul’s journeys—both literal and metaphorical—including her time teaching English in Thailand and her early years in the New York publishing world.

In one of the most poignant chapters, Paul writes about reading with children, and that sudden jolt of realization when your children no longer want to read whatever you hand them.

“The ability to choose one’s own books becomes slightly less satisfying when you realize your own children have that power, too, and they insist on reading about rainbow fairies or killer cats,” she writes.

In the Paul household, books play a pivotal role.

“I’m obsessed with the idea of what makes a reader,” she says. “Part of it with our kids was total deprivation of any other type of entertainment. We’re horrible, terrible parents. No TV, no video games; we barely have computers for the kids. The idea of entering into a narrative in which you are actively constructing and contributing to that narrative is something that you have to learn to do. I get it—I love TV and movies, too, and in a way it’s a lot easier on the brain because you’re not conjuring up images in your brain of what characters look like.

“So I joke about deprivation, but it’s really enormous abundance. My kids have a lot of books. We regularly have to go through and purge.”

Even with the lure of technology, Paul believes books will remain central to our culture and that it’s up to parents to help imbue that interest in young readers.

“If you have fresh fruit but you also have candy, the kids might eat the fruit, but they’re gonna eat a lot of candy,” she said. “One thing I find very comforting is that for young people especially, real books—paper books—continue to be more popular than eBooks. For young children, it’s about having that tactile experience and being in the lap of a parent looking at something together.”

She may be the editor of the New York Times Book Review, but Paul is anything but a book snob. She reads widely and deeply, admitting in My Life with Bob that she hated The Catcher in the Rye (she thought Holden Caulfield was a jerk) and loved Nancy Drew.

Sometimes, she writes, we choose books as voyeurs of others’ misery. She recalls reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich during the summer after her freshman year of college, drawn to Holocaust reading “like many other morbid kids with Jewish ancestry.” And sometimes we choose books based on a recommendation. Which, by the way, Paul resists when possible, as she describes in another thought-provoking chapter.

My Life with Bob is a love story about books, and it will be irresistible to bookworms who recognize that what you read reflects who you are. Paul’s writing is warm, revealing and elegant, and at times, quite funny, such as when she’s too engrossed in The Hunger Games to realize that her newborn son isn’t latching on properly while nursing.

“Once I put the book down, I returned to my resting emotional state of maternal guilt,” she writes. “My lunatic years of turbo lactivism, nursing my children until they were weaned, were tainted not by formula but by the competing desire to read while they fed.”

My only quibble—and it’s a tiny one—is that Paul includes just one tantalizing photo of one page of Bob in her book. Did she ever consider reprinting Bob in full as an appendix?

“Oh no,” she says with a laugh. “That would be like hanging out my laundry.”

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

This BookPage Icebreaker is sponsored by Henry Holt

Heather Harpham’s compelling new memoir, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After, reads almost like a suspenseful novel at times, with the unexpected turns readers expect to find in fiction, but rarely encounter in a true story. Just when you think you have a handle on what's happening—this is the story of a jilted woman, raising a child alone—another twist occurs and the narrative heads in a new direction.

At its core, Happiness is the story of a family dealing with a child’s life-threatening illness, but it’s also much more. It’s a sensitive portrayal of Harpham’s sometimes painfully fraught relationship with the child’s father, Brian; a tender look at female friendship; and a stirring chronicle of a mother’s devotion. The book captures the unique world of a pediatric bone marrow marrow transplant unit, where death hovers just around the corner. And the child at the center of the story, Gracie, will win your heart and have you yearning for a happy outcome to her harrowing medical ordeal.

We spoke to Harpham, an award-winning playwright and performer, from her home in New York’s Hudson Valley about her moving and beautifully written memoir. 

Why did you choose the title Happiness? It seems at first like a strange choice for a book about a child’s illness.
I’m so delighted to be asked that question! I chose Happiness because I felt it created a kind of instant tension which mimicked the kind of tension we actually lived in when Gracie was sick. What are the first two things you usually ask about a book: What’s it called? And what’s it about? If the answer to the first question is “happiness” and the [answer] to the next question is a sick child, there’s a tension between those two things.

What I’ve found is that happiness is embedded in all these nooks and crannies, even in a terrible time. I feel like moments of real stress, or even terror, also contain the possibility for very heightened awareness. You’re really paying attention because the stakes are high. And when you’re really paying attention, part of what you get to experience are the little joys, the little moments of grace that appear—your baby is sick and in an incubator but they’re gurgling at you, or they grasp your finger for the first time.

For me, the title Happiness encapsulates growth and contentment and also the sense that life is precious, but it’s fragile, not guaranteed. I don’t know if one word can do all that, but that’s what I was aiming for. And that’s also why we chose the subtitle: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After . . . You never know exactly where you’re going.

“You could have all those things checked off and still not have happiness if you’re not at rights with yourself and able to appreciate the daily pleasures, the little moments of true affection.”

How did your ideas about happiness change after you became the mother of a very sick child?
Radically and almost instantly, in that it never once occurred to me [during pregnancy] that I would have a sick child. Never, not once! And when I shared that with Brian, he said he never once thought about it without worrying about what could go wrong! We were diametrically opposed. So I think what I learned about happiness is that it doesn’t arrive gift-wrapped in a particular package. You’re not happy because you can check all these items off the list: Yes, I have the right job. Yes, I have the right partner. Yes, I have the right house. Yes, my kid is perfect. You could have all those things checked off and still not have happiness if you’re not at rights with yourself and able to appreciate the daily pleasures, the little moments of true affection, interaction, humor. 

When Gracie was born, it made me realize that happiness is more a product of internal awareness and willingness to appreciate what’s before you than it is the product of external circumstance.

How did you manage to reconstruct this story in such vivid detail several years after it happened?
Well, it was hard. What I had were two sets of writing. When I was pregnant with Gracie and alone, and honestly very unhappy and mystified to be in such a different circumstance than I had imagined, I began writing letters to her. . . . Even though [my pregnancy] didn’t look like what I wanted it to, I was welcoming her. I wrote all these letters, and I would start them all, “Hello baby.” So I had this series of “hello baby” letters, and the most intense experiences are things I had captured there. And then I also had a Caring Bridge page, the writing I did when she was quite sick, in Durham.

And, you know, we’re a couple of writers, Brian and I! We write down the things the kids say that tickle us. It’s kind of what we do—if something happens, you write about it. We’re the kind of people who make notes along the way. Between my notes and his notes, I had a lot of original documents.

Your comments in the book about your relationship with Brian were raw and honest, and often very painful. How did you summon the courage to write about your relationship in such an open way?
With help! I summoned the courage with the help and encouragement of a writing group I was part of that gave me the very useful advice to “write everything.” They said, “Just write it. You can go back and soften it or pull things out later, but write it.” And I did write it, and I did craft it, I did shape it. So as raw as it feels, it is the result of a process that Brian and I went through together of reading my portrayal of our relationship—his decisions, my feelings, his feelings—and talking it through. It was extremely important to me that Brian feel comfortable with everything I had to say, especially because the kids will read this book as adults.  And because as the narrator, you have this unique power. You’re the one telling the story. I wanted that the power to be balanced with Brian’s point of view and his consent to how I was I describing our relationship. 

We read it together very carefully. Sometimes we had to stop and talk things through. “I remember it this way. Well, I remember it that way.” Or he would say, “I was actually thinking or feeling something different from what you have here,” and we would adjust as needed. I was very clear that this was my book and I’m telling it through my point of view. But nevertheless it’s a permanent record that will be there for our kids to see, and it needed to feel right. 

Ultimately I think it was quite meaningful and valuable for the two of us. It only brought us closer, going back through that time. Also, the act of writing actually did widen my perspective. I saw things from his point of view that I had never been able to see before. And I think that’s one of the great values of writing—that it asks you to look deeper or look wider. We have our habitual ways of thinking about things or our habitual ways of seeing things and when you write, you’re saying very consciously: No, I want to see more. Let me see more deeply into that cloudy water. 

What was the lowest point for you as a mother in this whole long ordeal?
When Gracie was very sick, I called my own mother and asked her to come from California to Durham. There was still a part of my mind that simply disallowed the possibility that Gracie would not survive. I could only believe that she would survive, no matter what. And yet, I was on a [hospital] unit with 16 rooms, and the other parents felt that way too, I assume. I know that they loved their children, each in their own way, just as fiercely as I loved Gracie, and some of those children didn’t survive. It’s hard to make sense of that kind of loss. It’s so wrong, it’s so profoundly wrong. It’s time moving in the wrong direction. Your child is not ever supposed to predecease you. And there’s no real sense to be made of a loss on that scale, except to take joy in who they were and the gift that they lived. 

There were several children we were very close to who did not survive, and I would say that watching their parents suffer was both terrifying and anguishing and probably the hardest moment. I would tell you that it was because of my fear for Gracie’s life, but I just didn’t allow myself that luxury at the time. I simply did not believe that she wouldn’t survive, even when she was so sick that the doctors were giving us these numbers, that if you played them out were super scary. Like, she has a 50 percent chance of developing VOD [veno-occlusive disease] and if she gets VOD, she has a 50 percent chance of living. Two flips of the coin. That’s when I called my mom to say, please come. That’s when I was the most frightened for Gracie. But even then, I couldn’t let my mind go there. After it was over, I could see that we were unbelievably lucky and of course anything could have happened because none of us is immune or given any ultimate protection. We’re each fragile and subject to the same set of possibilities. But at the time, the very hardest thing was watching other parents suffer the wound that you can’t really recover from.

Speaking of your mother, why did you choose to dedicate the book to her?
Because I love her so much and she’s so fantastic! My mom has the most enormous heart, and she’s somebody who’s trying to figure out how to be as present and giving and warm with anyone she’s with as she can at any moment. She’s a very, very, very generous soul. In particular, I felt that she gave us her undivided and total love and an infrastructure of support through this experience. She did it for me when I was on my own and came back to California, pregnant and unsure of what was going to happen. And she did it for Brian and me, and Gabriel and Gracie, when we were in Durham and Gracie was receiving treatment at Duke. She was just there. If you called her, she came. You know, the trope of maternal love is easy to valorize. It is. With my mom, I feel like that stereotype is real. I wanted her to know how much her gift of time and love meant to us and carried us through. Dedicating the book to her was one way to do that.

Can you talk about friendship and what your friends meant to you during this process?
Everything. They meant the difference between tremendous, painful hardship being bearable or unbearable. Being able to come back from a terrifying doctor’s appointment and spew it all back out again and have a friend sit there with you and go through, point by point, trying to understand, trying to parse it, trying to make decisions. Or just being able to go for a walk with a friend and talk about something else, that’s equally meaningful.  

Everybody has a different set of legs on their stool. For me, the three legs on my stool of support, when I was on my own with Gracie, were my dearest friend from college, Suzi, and my dearest friend from childhood, Cassie, and my mom. And then later, when Brian and I moved back to Brooklyn, we encountered Kathy and her husband, Steve. I do think that there’s something uniquely valuable, at least in this culture, in female friendship and in the bond of solidarity that comes from a kind of sisterhood that says, I know what you’re going through, I can’t do it for you, but I’m going to hold your hand and walk beside you while you go through it. You’re the one on the hot coals, but I’m walking next to you. Go ahead, squeeze my hand. That doesn’t always come in the form of somebody going, oh, that’s so hard. It can be somebody who’s willing to laugh with you, even making grim jokes at the end of the day.

I felt so carried by my female friends in particular, and I just wanted to record that in the book how meaningful it was.

You definitely achieved that. I felt like I knew each one of them. 
You mentioned that Gracie is 16 now. I wondered how she feels about being the focus of a book. Is this something you’ve talked over with her? Has she read the book? What was her reaction to it?
I think she has a lot of complex and conflicting feelings. She has an almost feminist pride in the fact that her mom has published a book. She knows that her dad is a published writer, so I think she feels kind of like, hey, girl power—go, mom! It was really nice to feel like it was a model for her.

I also think that for her, like any 16 year old, less of her parents’ visibility in the world is better. She feels like having a public portrait of her parents is as embarrassing as standing next to her parents in Target. At 16, you don’t want the world to see them.

I think she feels quite separate from the Gracie who’s described in the book, not because she feels it’s inaccurate, but because she feels it’s so far away. She doesn’t remember much of her transplant experience, much less her infancy, of course. So I think to read about a younger self, who’s going through tremendous suffering at times, is difficult. At the same time, I think she appreciates the kind of pluck I tried to portray in her, that was real. And she still has that kind of plucky spirit, that courageous spirit. I know that’s a kind of stereotype of the sick child as brave, but I don’t know if she was so much brave as resourceful. She really looked for ways to make a bad experience as good as it could possibly be—Iike naming the IV pole and making him her sidekick.

And on discharge day when Bobbie the nurse finally unhooks the IV, she pauses at the door with the pole and says, “Gracie, do you have any last words for your friend?” And Gracie, who was only 3 years old, replies, “Be good to the next girl.” She was in some ways so mature for her age.
I think that’s one of the gifts that suffering offers us: compassion. We know that. And it’s no less true for her than for an adult who goes through suffering. She really got that other kids were going through hard things, and she wished the best for them. And she still has that—a very deep well of compassion that has arisen from her own set of experiences. 

There are so many cliches about suffering that we’ve all heard—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that. When you look back now, can you see any positives for your family in having gone through this?
I don’t know if I can think of it in exactly those terms. I see it as having been an intrinsic part of who we are at this moment and I wouldn’t change who we are. I feel incredibly grateful to be here. But I think it’s very easy, because we’re human, to go, “This turned out the way it should have.” And I don’t believe that because I saw so many children die. And though you make the best sense of it that you can, it’s still permanent. It’s not that this state we’re living in was meant to be, but it is what we’re given—it’s this moment and you try to embrace the potential, the beauty, the messiness even of the present moment as fully as possible because you don’t know what’s coming around the bend. None of us do. 

I think one thing these experiences have given us is a deep appreciation moment by moment for the gift of life, the gift of togetherness. 

Near the end of the book, you write: “Parents of perilously sick kids never stop being afraid…. The other shoe is always above our heads, just out of reach, poised to drop.” Do you still feel that way?
Yes, and I always will. But I do my very best to shield Gracie from those anxieties. Those are my anxieties and Brian’s anxieties to cope with. Gracie, I hope, I believe, experiences herself as a very strong, powerful young woman. And I hope that sense of herself only grows over time. For us, we will always have one ear cocked for any kind of trouble. Gracie is living in the present; she doesn’t have to live in the past. And that’s part of the beauty of her not remembering a lot of that time. We can learn from her, more and more, how to appreciate her true good health.

What do you hope readers will gain from reading your story? 
I should have an easy answer to that question, but I don’t. I hope readers take whatever is valuable for them, whatever resonates for them personally.  I hope it might open a small door to a part of their personal experience that they choose to reflect on in a deeper way or a new way. But most of all, I hope they take whatever they wish to take. 

One hope I have for the book is that it ends up in some book groups. I think that whether you like the book or relate to the story or not, it’s the kind of book that might ignite conversation and sharing of personal stories. I think people feel closer to each other when they’re able to share on a deeper level. If that happens for this book inside book groups, I would be so happy.

What else you would like readers to know about the book?
The only thing we haven’t touched on is what I tried to write in the book but found quite difficult: how this experience impacted my faith and my spiritual beliefs. Spirituality is never easy to capture in language because, inherently, you’re trying to express the inexpressible, the ineffable. I went into this experience as a believer in an organizing force of coherence and beauty, of a creative force underlying this incredible universe we find ourselves in. And as painful, as excruciating as it was, to live with the reality that our beautiful, coherent, intelligent world could contain what feels like senseless loss—and probably is senseless in the only way we can apprehend it—it nevertheless is a part of this whole. 

I still believe, even after being battered by those questions of why do innocents suffer, and how can this be allowed, it just is. I’m not sure those questions have answers, but I know that the ways in which people respond to each other in their suffering or pain can be very profound, very meaningful and that the renewed appreciation for the value in each individual life is what stays with me. When I think about the children who died, it feels like enough to me that they lived—that unique, beautiful, complex person existed. That’s miraculous.

"Get out of my face, China woman.” That’s just one of the greetings Harvard graduate Michelle Kuo received during her two years in the Teach for America program. She was working in Helena, Arkansas, an impoverished town in the Mississippi Delta, where most of her students had never seen a person of Asian ethnicity.

“Students will say anything to see if they can get under your skin,” Kuo says. She is calling me from Berlin, Germany, where her historian husband is doing research (both now teach at the American University of Paris). “They called a teacher next to me fat,” she remembers. “They called the teacher across from me a cracker. But teachers know that once you let students know it bothers you, you’re done for, so I had to pretend it didn’t bother me.”

Kuo had arrived in Arkansas in 2004 with lofty goals, eager to share readings she cherished from Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Ralph Ellison at an alternative school for kids who had been expelled from other schools. She was particularly fond of Patrick Browning, a quiet, reflective young man giving eighth grade a third try. He ended up completing the year with the “Most Improved” award. Kuo tells his story in her moving chronicle, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship.

Despite the challenges of teaching in Helena, the rewards were great, and when Kuo left to attend Harvard Law School, she felt seriously conflicted, wanting to stay longer. Not only did she and her students grow fond of each other, the adult townspeople welcomed her with open arms.

Little did she know she’d be back two years later, after being notified that high school dropout Patrick was in jail, charged with murder two days before his 19th birthday. She visited him while she was in law school, and again a year later, after her graduation in 2009. Patrick was still in jail awaiting trial. This time she made a bold decision: to put her life on hold for seven months, postponing a fellowship in California. As she writes: “Your sense of responsibility to your students never leaves you. . . . You wonder if you failed them.”

Kuo visited Patrick in jail every day, resuming their reading and writing lessons, and also taught Spanish part-time at a charter school (her old school had closed). “I initially just went to visit him and see how his case was going,” she recalls. “And then I realized he felt alone. I was devastated to see him like that. The last time I’d seen him was the last day of school, and he had been so excited about going to high school. So the news was a shock.”

There have been any number of books about teaching challenging students (think Pat Conroy’s The Water Is Wide), and numerous others about reading with prisoners (including Mikita Brottman’s 2016 book, The Maximum Security Book Club). Few, however, share Kuo’s unique vantage point of having taught someone both before and during incarceration. It’s this singular relationship, combined with Kuo’s heartfelt, introspective prose, that makes Reading with Patrick so memorable.

“Those seven months changed my life,” Kuo freely admits. “They were so extraordinary. When do we feel most loved? It’s when people show up. I guess Patrick changed me in that way: my belief in that kind of love as being so important.”

“When do we feel most loved? It's when people show up.”

In the county jail, Patrick’s first words to his teacher were, “Mrs. Kuo, I didn’t mean to.” His 16-year-old special needs sister had been returning home from a date with a 25-year-old man whom Patrick judged to be drunk and high. The man refused to leave when asked, so Patrick picked up a knife left on the porch from a stroller repair. Patrick claims he simply intended to scare the man, but they ended up fighting, and tragically, his sister’s date ended up dead.

Patrick was charged with first-degree murder. Had he been a white male in the suburbs, Kuo surmises, the charge might have been manslaughter due to mitigating factors such as the “castle doctrine,” giving people a right to defend their homes.

During Kuo’s hours with Patrick in jail, they read poetry and the works of Frederick Douglass, C.S. Lewis, Marilynne Robinson, W.S. Merwin and more. Patrick wrote heartbreakingly lyrical poems, as well as letters to the mother of his victim, his own family and the young daughter he had fathered. “He had come so far,” Kuo writes, “. . . and it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.”

Patrick agreed to a plea deal, which saddened Kuo, who notes that “so little investigation was done into what happened during that evening that traumatized so many.” While in prison, he went on to proudly earn his GED—with notably high scores in reading and writing—and was released on parole after two and a half years for good behavior.

After her months with Patrick, Kuo returned to her Oakland, California, fellowship, working as an immigrants’ rights lawyer and later as a law clerk. Patrick, meanwhile, worked various part-time jobs in Helena, including laying tombstones at cemeteries. More recently, he left for Texas in search of better opportunities. “I hope he’ll have a better shot at finding permanent work there,” Kuo says.

Kuo wishes she were a clone so that she could still be “pushing [Patrick], encouraging him, lecturing him and sometimes haranguing him.” She continues to cherish their friendship and treasure his letters.

“Every time I hear about somebody getting arrested,” Kuo adds, “or a felon getting out of jail, I think about how they were all once students in a classroom.”

(Author photo © Kathy Huang.)

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Armistead Maupin finished writing his bold memoir, Logical Family, months ago. He couldn’t have foreseen just how relevant his searing reflections on growing up in the deeply conservative, racially divided South would be.

In Logical Family, Maupin, a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate and the author of the groundbreaking series Tales of the City, lays bare his own struggles with self-acceptance and making peace with his past. BookPage spoke with Maupin by phone the day after the violence in Charlottesville that stemmed from protests surrounding Confederate statues.

“It was horrifying to see that much hate made visible,” Maupin, 73, says from his home in San Francisco. “When I was a boy, I got into a fight with my best friend, Eddie, because Eddie was a Yankee. He disapproved of the statues. He said, ‘You lost the war and you were fighting for slavery—why should you have a monument?’ It’s taken 50 years for this to come back up again. Stop tormenting our African-American citizens this way and stop celebrating what should be a public shame.”

Just as he is in conversation, Maupin is unflinchingly outspoken in Logical Family. The book title is based on a term he coined 10 years ago in his novel Michael Tolliver Lives. “[Logical family] is the family that makes sense to you; the family that supports you and loves you unconditionally,” he says. “How many people gripe about having to go home for Christmas and sit with some Trumpy old aunt—yes, I said Trumpy—and bite your tongue? I’ve stopped trying to win the approval of my family. Gay people have spent way too long being good little boys and girls and not relying on the strength of their real families.”

Logical Family opens with Maupin as a young boy in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father was an unapologetic racist who proudly displayed furniture made by “slaves in our family,” and his mother was a Southern belle. In this environment, Maupin developed strong conservative beliefs, at one point even working for notorious segregationist Jesse Helms. “I was trying to please my father,” Maupin says. “Even though he was teaching me some terrible things that I had to unlearn, on the other hand he had a ribald sense of humor and loved to tell stories.”

Given his upbringing, Maupin was deeply conflicted about his homosexuality and remained a virgin until his mid-20s. “Thank God that sex came along and saved me,” he says. “You can’t roll around in the dark in the bathhouse and not bump into somebody who’s nothing like you, but very much the same because tenderness and sweetness and passion are all the same.”

Maupin speaks matter-of-factly about his relationship with his biological family, without a trace of bitterness or regret. Regret, it turns out, is not something he has much use for. “I’m sorry that I was a virgin for so long. That’s my real regret!” he laughs. “I missed the opportunity for youthful lust. The real honest answer is we have to go through what we have to go through. I’m just glad we got through to the other side.”

A generous portion of Maupin’s memoir is devoted to his time serving in the Navy, stationed in Saigon during the Vietnam War. “I found whole stacks of letters from me to my mom during that time,” he tells me. “It was fascinating to reread and research my own history. To be perfectly honest, writing is never a whole lot of fun. To be done writing is fun. Writing is a process of slow, tedious self-doubt.”

“The thing I feared was the thing that ultimately brought me the most joy in my life.”

Maupin also recounts writing the Tales of the City column in the 1970s for the San Francisco Chronicle, which became the basis for his pioneering book and TV series featuring a transgender character. The column was a sensation in a city that was at the heart of the gay rights movement.

But Maupin is modest about his role in helping move our society toward acceptance of people who are gay, bisexual and transgender. “I’m very proud of my role in changing people minds, but there are others who have done much more in changing laws,” he says. “The best thing I’ve done in my life is help gay people change their minds about themselves. To find their own dignity and their own voice, to grow impatient with their own oppression. It just started out as fun, telling stories about my own self-discovery. But you dig as deep as you can in your own heart, and you come up with something others will get. For years I lived in terror of expressing anything in regards to myself being gay. The thing I feared was the thing that ultimately brought me the most joy in my life.”

To complement the memoir, a documentary, The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, directed by Jennifer M. Kroot, came out this spring. Maupin had previously admired Kroot’s work on a 2014 documentary about George Takei. “Any illusion you’ve ever had about your personal beauty is shattered when you see yourself on screen,” Maupin says with a laugh. “But I trusted her. I could open up to her in a way I might not have with other people. I said yes on the spot.”

Maupin has found his own family, and he has delivered a generous, deeply satisfying memoir. “I made an effort at poignancy and humor and honesty,” he says. “I always like to take people on a roller-coaster ride. Make them cry one minute and belly laugh the next. That’s the most satisfying thing in the world. Humor is healing.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Logical Family.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Christopher Turner.

Endurance proves a fitting title for the eye-opening autobiography of astronaut Scott Kelly, who in 2014-15 spent a record-breaking year in space aboard the International Space Station as a prelude to one day placing space boots on Mars.

While conducting scientific experiments in orbit, Kelly’s body became one of the key NASA test cases for the effects of prolonged space flight on humans. He was subjected to 30 times the radiation of those of us below, or the equivalent of about 10 chest X-rays each day.

But if Kelly’s prologue (in which his excruciating return to gravity after a year in space prompts him to plead, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done.”) could serve as the ultimate NASA buzzkill, Kelly’s colorful look back on how a New Jersey underachiever wound up putting the “rock” in rocket man is anything but. Honest, funny and frequently hair-raising, Kelly’s flight notes and family struggles, including his painful isolation in space during the assassination attempt on his astronaut twin brother’s wife, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, really bring this space tale down to earth.

We spoke with Kelly as he drove with his wife, Amiko, through the hills outside Houston, where they live.

Endurance is an unusually candid behind-the-scenes look at the life of an astronaut.
That was my intent, to be honest about it. Hopefully by doing that, it would let people feel like they were part of the experience.

As a wayward teen, you were inspired by reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff to reach for the stars. How crazy did that seem then?
I was headed to apply to NASA, but I would never say that I felt like I even had a chance [laughs]. That was what I wanted to do, but also, if that didn’t work out, my plan was to stay in the Navy and hopefully be the commander of an aircraft carrier someday.

What were the best and worst surprises your first time in space?
I would say the good surprise is the view. The bad surprise is how zero gravity makes almost everything harder to do, with the exception of moving stuff that is heavy or getting into odd positions or orientations—like floating upside down to hook up the cable to the back of your entertainment center.

Were you aware going in that your body would become an ongoing NASA scientific experiment for the rest of your life?
Not when I became an astronaut. I knew that the science experiments were a part of the shuttle program, but I joined NASA to be a space shuttle pilot and commander; the science was more a secondary responsibility. I never thought going in that, on the back end of my career, I would be such a large part of a human research study like that.

You describe the headache-­causing, underperforming carbon dioxide removal assembly (CDRA) in the ISS as the bane of your existence. How did you muster the nerve to confront NASA about it?
I think everyone has similar reactions to the CO2 issue, but when you’re discussing stuff like your physical reaction to things, NASA kind of keeps that . . . There are privacy issues involved. I thought that since I was spending the longest time up there at one time of any other American, I had an obligation, not only to NASA but to the public, to let them know the physical and psychological effects of that.

You open several chapters with excerpts from your dream journal. How did that come about, and do you dream differently in space?
When I flew my previous long flight of 159 days, I knew I had dreams in space, and when I got back, the psychologists would ask, “Were they Earth dreams or space dreams?” And I really couldn’t remember. So this time, I made an effort to write them down, and it was interesting. In the beginning, they were more like Earth dreams, but as I was up there longer, they became more like space dreams, like I was in space. And as I got closer to coming home, they were more like Earth-centered dreams, which I think was kind of just looking forward to being back on Earth.

Did the ISS come to feel like home?
Oh, absolutely. At some point, it felt like I lived my whole life up there. You kind of forget what Earth is like.

For most earthlings, the one cringe-worthy fact of space flight is the urine-to-drinking water system. How did you adapt?
It’s actually pretty funny because I was involved in it when they were designing and making the system in Huntsville, Alabama, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I went out there to look at the system, and they were making water out of the urine of the workers in the lab, and I drank some and it tasted fine. So I took a bottle of it home and had my ex-wife, Leslie, and daughter Samantha drink it, and they were like, ‘Oh, this tastes perfectly fine.’ But then I told them it was water made out of urine and they got really mad at me, even though technically it was cleaner than what came out of the tap.

You describe being in orbit when Gabby Giffords was shot as a heartbreaking experience.
Yeah, you have no control over the situation, really. I was mad at the guy who shot her. He killed a bunch of people, injured others and ruined his own life.

As someone who obviously has it, what is “the right stuff”?
The way I describe this is, I’m a below-average person doing a slightly above-average job. I think if you are persistent and prepared and don’t give up and prioritize things to where you focus on the stuff that’s really important and don’t let the stuff that’s not important get under your skin, you can go a long way.

With four space flights under your belt, any interest in going to Mars?
Yeah, I’d go to Mars. I wouldn’t go on that one-way trip there’s talk of. It would take about six months to get there. They’ll do it someday. It’s not the rocket science; it’s the political science.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by NASA-Bill Ingalls.)

Reading Kelly Corrigan’s Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say is like reading a letter from a dear friend whom you can talk to about anything, who makes you laugh when you feel distinctly humorless or who can just sit quietly with you when talking feels like too great an effort.

Not surprisingly, in the 10 years since her first book, the bestselling memoir The Middle Place, Corrigan has become a voice that people really like to hear, whether in TED Talks, her podcast series “Exactly” or in her subsequent memoirs, Lift (2010) and Glitter and Glue (2014). Her latest memoir, Tell Me More, is a collection of essays about 12 phrases that she is working on saying more and have proved central to Corrigan’s life. They can be difficult things to say, like “I don’t know” and “No,” or phrases that are ostensibly easier to utter—but perhaps aren’t—like “Yes” and “I love you.” In every entry, Corrigan unpacks her life with poignancy and humor as she wrestles with relatable issues, from family blow-ups to unruly pets to debilitating grief, and muses on the things that give life levity and beauty.

But beneath every illuminating, empathetic entry in Tell Me More, there is grief and love that ebb and flow for Corrigan’s friend Liz, who recently died of cancer. Corrigan is a cancer survivor herself, and the disease marks a place in each of her books. “I’m 50, and it feels like half the people I know have had cancer,” Corrigan says during a call to her home outside San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, two daughters and their dog. “Frankly, cancer, in the ways I’m dealing with it in the book, is just my version of crisis. . . . Your version might be unemployment, financial setbacks, your parents have Alzheimer’s—you can sub in anything you want. [Tell Me More] is not so much about cancer, but about crisis.”

Cancer played a part in Corrigan’s initial decision to pursue a career in writing over a decade ago. “I’ve always written in a journal to help make sense of my life, and I’m a huge letter-writer,” she says. But her father’s terminal illness provided a new, urgent deadline to begin writing. “Self-publishing was just becoming a thing [10 years ago], so I self-published The Middle Place. The visual of handing my dad a book was enough to motivate me to write it.” The book’s later traditional publication, she says, was the “realization of a lifetime fantasy.”

It also began a transition into a writer’s life, one that’s grounded in communicating stories and learning about others’ lives. That’s a dream setup for Corrigan. “I ask a lot of questions. I’ve definitely been teased by friends for wanting a conversation to go deeper or further.” After all, she says, “That’s why readers are readers: We have some unanswered questions. Every friend I have, I’m asking them hard questions all the time. I want to know how everyone’s doing everything, [about] their relationship with their parents, their biggest fight with their spouse, who they despise at work and why. I want to know! I think that’s more interesting than almost anything.”

Corrigan’s burning curiosity isn’t one-sided, though, and in Tell Me More, she turns that gaze on herself with great skill and insight. During the writing of the book, Corrigan says she “needed and wanted something to hold onto. . . . My father and friend died, and I’m not a much better person for it—I’m still getting sucked into trivial, quotidian bulls**t. I’m still feeling sorry for myself.”

“It’s the ultimate compliment you could give me, that I helped you understand your life better.”

The result is a mix of workaday aggravation and philosophical beauty. For example, the chapter titled “It’s Like This” is about a hectic weekday morning gone maddeningly wrong, but it’s also a meditation on grief, impatience, her daughters’ quirks and the ways she and her husband handle stress. It’s also an excellent representation of how our initial reactions to events might be influenced by something else entirely. As the author writes, “Hidden in the morning’s frustrations, like a rattlesnake in the woodpile, is something else. I close my eyes so I can listen for the other thing—the further-away, much worse thing—in the quiet of my own head.”

When asked why she thinks people respond so well to her, both on the page and in person, she says, “Articulating emotions and notions is something I’ve done before you hear it coming out of my mouth. . . . I think that’s why people say, ‘I wish I could put my finger on it the way you do.’ I say, right, because I’m trying hard to, that’s my job, that’s my profession. I’m very happy to do that for all of us. It’s a total thrill for me, that I’m being useful in this way. It’s the ultimate compliment you could give me, that I helped you understand your life better or put words to something you couldn’t articulate.”

Tell Me More will be perhaps even more overtly useful than Corrigan’s earlier books. Its phrasal chapter headings like “I Was Wrong” and “Good Enough” make it easy for readers to turn to sections that speak to them. “To me, Tell Me More is all the more useful [because of] the way it’s laid out,” Corrigan says. “I could be more subtle about it. . . . But again, a huge impetus for me is to be useful—to make myself useful. I needed to boil it down to something memorable for my own sake.”

During her 20-city book tour for Tell Me More, Corrigan is looking forward to hearing which of the 12 phrases most resonate with readers: “One thing I’m really psyched to hear is what other sentences people are clinging to.” Plus, she says with a laugh, “I’m so grateful anyone wants to talk about my writing.”

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Mellie T. Williams

Elements of Maggie O’Farrell’s life have inspired her writing, but it is only now—after publishing seven novels and birthing three children—that she has found the courage to tell the full story.

Provocative and profound, O’Farrell’s memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, is a meditation on the many miraculous moments in her life when she stared down death and lived to tell the tale. From almost drowning off the coast of England (and then again in Africa) to escaping the clutches of a serial strangler, the book—and O’Farrell’s life—is chockablock with scenes highlighting the fragility and tenuousness of life. It is her most personal book to date, and yet it is also a book she never intended to write.

“I never, ever thought I would write a memoir,” the Northern Irish author confides during a call to her home in Edinburgh, Scotland. “It felt sort of an impossibility to me. . . . I used to always kind of joke that I was about as likely to write a memoir as I was to become an acrobat. Of course, if you’ve read the book, you realize how impossible it would be for me to be an acrobat!”

O’Farrell is referring to the collateral damage from what is perhaps her most serious near-death experience: As a child, she contracted encephalitis, which confined her to bed for nearly two years. Doctors offered grave predictions, including life confined to a wheelchair and even death.

Instead, O’Farrell defied all odds, not only pulling through but also regaining the ability to walk unassisted and to hold a pen. Decades later, although she still retains physical limitations that place a career in acrobatics well out of reach, she has largely perfected the art of hiding the remnants of her illness.

She began practicing this at the age of 13, when her family moved from Wales to Scotland. She recalls thinking at the time, “I can reinvent myself, I can be somebody else. I don’t have to be the girl who was disabled in a wheelchair. I can just become a girl who’s a bit rubbish at sport, who falls over a bit and drops stuff. A bit of a klutz.”

And so her past became secret, even from close friends. Therefore, a memoir in which she reflects on her most vulnerable moments seems a paradoxical choice. She agrees, admitting that she has “much more ambivalence about the book because of how exposing it is.” However, she says, “I have always felt that you don’t necessarily choose the books; the books choose you.”

With a laugh, she recalls how her unintentional memoir crept into being: “I’ve always kept diaries . . . and in the back I write longer pieces. And this book—the memoir—just sort of rose up out of these notebooks. I had written a third of it before I really admitted to myself that I was actually writing a book!”

She was so stunned by this revelation that when O’Farrell finally told her agent what she was working on and they drew up her contract, she initially refused all monetary advances on the manuscript in case she changed her mind and decided not to publish it. In order for the contract to be made legal, she agreed to accept £1, but says, “Even up until a week before publication, I was waking up at night thinking, ‘Should I just say it’s all off?’ ”

“I was about as likely to write a memoir as I was to become an acrobat.”

Despite her reservations, a force greater than fear kept pushing O’Farrell to write: Her middle child, Astrid, was born with chronic eczema and experiences episodes of anaphylactic crisis that take her to the emergency room with frightening frequency. Though far from the traditional bedtime tales, O’Farrell’s stories have proven helpful to her daughter in coming to terms with her own struggles.

“One of the jobs of being a parent is you have to metabolize what they’re going through and hand it back to them in a form that they can understand,” O’Farrell says. “I found myself very challenged as a mother, trying to explain to a 3- or a 4-year-old why it is they were in so much pain, why it is they were in an ambulance or an ICU. The only thing I found that really helped her in those situations was telling her stories.”

Just like her mother did as a girl, Astrid “lives with a lot of restrictions,” O’Farrell explains. “But it’s really, really important to me to impart the message to her that even though she has parameters which she needs to live within . . . she has to live the biggest and the best life that she possibly can. Always and every day. So I will be the first mum to shout, ‘Yeah, climb that tree! Go higher! Jump in that cold water! Just do it, do it!’ And she is.”

It is for this reason that O’Farrell ultimately views I Am, I Am, I Am as life-affirming. “I think there is something very universal about the near-death experience. I think we’ve all had them, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. And I think those moments change us. I think we come back from them different—altered—and it makes us newly conscious about why we want to come back, why we want to carry on living and also what we stand to lose had we lost that fight. . . . For me the book is about life. The life lived around those moments.”

As we wrap up our conversation, O’Farrell is interrupted by a stampede of footsteps, swiftly followed by a chorus of giggles. Her children have arrived home from school and are clamoring for her attention. We end our call because, after all, there are trees to be climbed and cold water to be jumped into, and no one knows better than O’Farrell and her family how lucky they are to be able to do just that.

“I definitely think of myself as incredibly lucky, not unlucky at all,” O’Farrell says. “What I hope people will take away from the book is just the fact that I nearly died, but actually, I didn’t. We didn’t. We’re all still here.”

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Murdo Macleod.

Describing her childhood as the youngest of seven children growing up without schooling in the shadow of Buck Peak, Idaho, Tara Westover says, “It all seemed very normal to me.”

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Westover, 31, describes her life’s improbable trajectory that led to her startling memoir, Educated. It was so unusual, in fact, that a bidding war erupted over the sale of her book, which is now being published in more than 20 countries and has inspired comparisons to Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club.

When her survivalist father recounted the story of the 11-day siege of Randy Weaver in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, its vivid details became young Westover’s strongest memory. It was as though the Feds had invaded her own house with deadly gunfire. Striving to become fully independent and off the grid, the Westovers stockpiled food, gasoline, guns and a bullet-making machine in preparation for the End of Days.

“I was kind of looking forward to it in a lot of ways,” she recalls. “We were totally prepared. It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty because we were going to have food and gasoline―all the things that people needed.”

The younger children in Westover’s family didn’t have birth certificates or exact birthdates. She wasn’t allowed to go to school, and there was little homeschooling. “By the time I was 10, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it,” she writes. Doctors and hospitals were forbidden as well; the family relied on her mother’s herbs and essential oils, even after car accidents, concussions and severe burns. An older brother taught Westover to read, using Little Bear Goes to the Moon as her primer. A few books lay around the house, but lessons and tests were nonexistent.

She grew up studying the Book of Mormon, the Bible and essays by 19th-century Mormon prophets. Westover emphasizes that her story is not about Mormonism. She believes that mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, led to her father’s extremism.

“There is a caricature of Mormonism that people have,” she explains. “I don’t want to contribute to that. These aren’t Mormon attributes. Mormons send their kids to school.”

Nor does Westover want her father to come across as a caricature. “Sure, his views are interesting,” she notes. “What’s also interesting is the fact that he sincerely believes them and that he is trying to look after his kids.”

Educated is the remarkable story of Westover’s education. She taught herself math so she could take the ACT, and at age 17 she first set foot in a classroom after enrolling in Brigham Young University. Fellow students laughed at her for having never heard of the Holocaust. Despite failing her first exam and fearing she would flunk out, she graduated in 2008 and later earned a Ph.D. in history at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Despite the gaping holes in their early education, three of the seven Westover children ended up earning Ph.D.s. “We seriously overcompensated.”

In many ways, Westover says, she had a positive childhood. “I grew up on a beautiful mountain that was like an amazing cathedral. The scrap yard at times was kind of like an exotic playground. And those are real parts of my childhood.”

“It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty.”

However, a giant cloud overshadowed everything. Her father’s actions often endangered his children, and her childhood was complicated by years of physical and emotional abuse by an older brother. Her brother and parents deny this assertion, which has resulted in her estrangement from them and certain siblings.

Westover says leaving home and becoming educated “made me see my brother’s violence for what it was. . . . Suddenly, I could not accept it. And so once I started writing, I realized it’s really not possible for me to tell the story of my education in any kind of meaningful way without telling the family story.”

At first, the ongoing estrangement posed a problem in searching for an ending to her story. Westover admits, “In the end, I decided that maybe not having a neat ending would be what this book was about.” Perhaps, she adds, “people would see bits of their messy lives in my messy life.”

Her unique history presents hurdles when it comes to how she relates to her family in the present. “Most of the time I am no longer angry with them,” she says, “and the reason is that I am no longer afraid of them. I am no longer under their power.”

Anger did, however, color her outlook for years. “I became someone who had no beautiful memories,” she recalls. Writing helped her reconcile the contradictory truths of her past. “I could keep all of them because they’re mine, and no one can take from me the good, but also no one can obscure for me the bad.”

To prepare to write a book-length narrative, Westover read widely. And then, someone mentioned something called the short story. “I’d never heard of that before.” After listening to favorite episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast 40 to 50 times, she modeled each chapter like a short story. The strategy makes her memoir particularly readable and compelling. “For me it was the greatest curriculum,” she says.

Westover concludes, “You only get the life that you get. I’m glad that I was pushed in that way because now I know what I’m able to do. . . . But I wouldn’t go back and go through that again. Not for anything.”

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Paul Stuart.

It takes a talented writer to seamlessly blend memoir, biography, literary criticism, psychology and sociology into a meaningful whole. Add in the writer’s own battle with alcoholism, and the accomplishment becomes even more impressive.

That’s what Leslie Jamison, author of the highly regarded 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams, has done in her deeply felt new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. In a recent telephone call to her home in Brooklyn, she was eager to discuss the legendary, often romanticized connection between addiction and creativity.

“I knew from the very beginning that I didn’t want to write a straight memoir,” she explains. “I wanted to write about recovery. . . . Part of what’s always felt so central to the experience of recovery to me is the idea of opening outward and connecting to the lives of other people and finding resonance. . . . The idea of putting my life into a much larger chorus is part of what recovery felt like.”

The genesis of The Recovering was in fragments Jamison wrote in 2010, the year her current sobriety began. She continued working on the book after garnering her Ph.D. in English Literature at Yale, after which she cultivated a flourishing writing career and gave birth to her first child. Her goal in the book, she says, is to present “a complicated excavation of the messy truth that I see of the tortured alcoholic or addict artist, both honoring the difficulty of the lives that produced that art and honoring the creative possibilities of the other side of addiction, of what sort of generative possibilities lie in recovery.”

In The Recovering, Jamison offers insight into the lives of a group of writers—some well known, others less so—and their struggles with addiction and recovery. In sympathetic profiles of authors like Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson, which are gracefully woven into her own narrative, Jamison provides “models who found sobriety and recovery incredibly generative.” Many of the creatives that Jamison profiles experienced more nuanced addiction narratives than the one in which, as she says, “sobriety swoops in and is a creative fairy godmother and gives you a new creative life.” In writing about the tragic career of poet John Berryman, whose agonizing and embarrassingly public battle with alcoholism ended with a leap from a Minneapolis bridge in 1972, she describes a man who wrestled with an unfinished novel about recovery while trying and failing to stay sober.

But as Jamison explains, in shaping the book from a journalist’s perspective, it was also important to avoid confining her attention only to creatives. In addition to deep archival research into the lives of her artist subjects, she spent more than a year interviewing former patients at a rehabilitation facility known as Seneca House, which was established in the early 1970s near the Potomac River in Maryland.

“I wanted there to be stories of recovery in the book that weren’t about famous people, people for whom recovery had been transformative,” she says. These revelatory accounts introduce ordinary people who “had turned both their addicted lives and their sober lives into stories that made sense to them.”

“The idea of putting my life into a much larger chorus is part of what recovery felt like.”

For all of The Recovering’s biographical depth and literary sophistication, Jamison’s vividly rendered account of her own addiction and recovery is exceptionally engaging. Without solipsism or self-pity, she spares few details of her behavior, which features staggering quantities of alcohol, frequent blackouts and dangerous misadventures in places as far-flung as Nicaragua. Through each episode, the memoir has the immersive feel of compelling fiction.

The irresistible quality of that candor stems in part from what Jamison admits is nostalgia for “those early days of falling in love with the drinking, when intoxication still felt intoxicating.” That attraction emerged despite the physical and emotional ravages of her drinking days and all their “demoralizing or shameful or brutal or secretive” moments. She spares little mercy for herself in describing her disastrous relapse, an abortion and persistent conflict in the life she shared with her poet boyfriend, Dave, as sober a counterpart to Jamison as one could imagine. In telling her own story so unsparingly, Jamison hopes to “humanize the process that’s at the core of addiction,” one that can “look so inscrutable and deeply frustrating from the outside, and show what it looks like to crave something that’s destroying you.”

Also central to Jamison’s recovery story was Alcoholics Anonymous. In one of the book’s lighter scenes, she recalls the jarring moment when a meeting participant bellowed, “This is boring!” as she shared the tale of her alcoholism for the first time. That incident and others reveal the theme of storytelling at the heart the book: “I think it’s hard to stay mired in self-pity or obsessive attention to your own life when you’re just literally sitting in a room listening to other people talk about what they’re going through.”

It’s in that spirit of shared storytelling that Jamison prepares to embark on a 14-city, coast-to-coast book tour this spring. Among other things, she’s hopeful that The Recovering can be part of the urgently needed conversation about the problem of opioid addiction in the United States. “People are hungry for ways of talking about the addiction crisis that aren’t just policy talk, that are story-based,” she says. “There’s something about personal narrative that gives us a way into those questions.”

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo credit Beowulf Sheehan.

In her memoir Old in Art School, Nell Painter surprises everyone by returning to college in her 60s to earn degrees in one of her passions: painting.

How did you make your decision to leave a chaired professorship at Princeton to go to art school?
My decision to retire from Princeton a little early came in several steps, beginning with my mother’s turn to book writing when she retired back in the 1980s. I was always close to my mother, close to both my parents, actually, feeling my family as a bulwark against a basically hostile—well, if not hostile, at least not trustworthy—society. It took her 10 years to write and publish her first book and 10 years for the second. She was just that disciplined over the long haul, with discipline and persistence her gifts to me. My mother showed me you could change vocations, even though the payoff might not come immediately. The point was to do what you wanted to do. Looking at her, I figured, hell, I could do that, too. It just so happened that what I left was a chaired professorship at Princeton.

My friends were amazed, even dazzled by the possibility of walking away. Looking back, I realize I didn’t see things this way at the time: It might have seemed to some of them that an Ivy League chaired professorship was life’s apogee, as though imagination stretched that far and no farther. But I didn’t identify myself that closely with my job. I heard their curiosity, as they wondered what it would be like to start something entirely new. They asked me to send back a report. Which I am now doing—in utter candor.

Your father taught you to draw, and your mother taught you the art of reinvention by starting over at age 65 and becoming an author. Your mother died during your art school years, leaving your father deeply saddened before his death. You write, "My early years as a painter . . . felt as much about family and loss as about art making." How has the loss of your parents affected your art?
The short answer is I don’t know how my parents’ deaths affected my art, as I didn’t make art about their dying. In fact, I reproached myself for not being able to draw my mother as she lay dying, even though her dying made a riveting visual spectacle. I simply could not take what felt like a step away from her to turn her into art. Art-making did not come automatically to me then.

But as I ponder your question, I think the answer, maybe even the answers, lie first in my chapter “A Bad Decision” and in my inability to dedicate myself single-mindedly, whole-heartedly, full-timedly to making art. My decision to go to graduate school before completing four years of undergraduate art study was not the right thing to do. I should have stayed at Mason Gross for another year. But I felt time pressing down on me urgently as something in short supply. Only as I was writing my memoir did I relate that feeling of time’s limitation to my mother’s impending death and my attachment to her. My time felt like her time.

Throughout the whole of my five years of art school, my parents stayed on my mind. They were hardly ever off my mind or out of my worries. There were daily phone calls and frequent transcontinental trips. Sometimes I could combine art with parental care, as in “Bedside Collages.” But art-time always felt distracted, though graduate school normally offers undistracted time to work flat out and full time, to experiment in depth and find the way to make art your very own way. I felt that sometimes and cherished the sensation. But often as not, my attention was divided. I still miss the opportunity to make art intensely over a relatively long period of time. What a gift that would be!

As for my parents, rather than the import of their loss, I appreciate the gifts they gave me during their lives. They assured me I was a wonderful person who could do whatever I wanted, the basis for the ego strength to take chances. They were hardly wealthy people, but, something of supreme importance, they made sure I never had to make decisions based on fear of running out of money. People don’t talk about that very much, but financial stability is crucially important when you’re making decisions about what you can or can’t do, especially regarding something as expensive and unlikely to pay off as art school. If you’re African-American, freedom from money worries is even less to be taken for granted.

Bette Davis once said that old age is no place for sissies. And neither is art school, it seems, especially when your age made you feel like “a creature from another planet.” Of course, things weren’t helped when your teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) declared that you would never be an artist. Did you ever feel you had made a mistake leaving such a successful career to go to art school?
Oh, boy, did I ever question my sanity for leaving the life I knew how to live for one I felt lost in! The hard part about art for me—one of the hard parts—was my sense of not knowing what was good and not good. Not knowing why my art was not good. One great thing about scholarship is the existence of established criteria of judgment. People don’t always respect those criteria, and there’s plenty of room for old-boy networks and the workings of privilege. Still, the rules of the game are pretty apparent. Not so with art.

I still sometimes feel like the worst painter in the world, but I don’t care anymore. There are awful painters who have their followings; there are more excellent painters in the world than can receive their due.

I love your response to that teacher: “Henry, that’s bullshit.” Although at first you enjoyed a sense of contentment and euphoria at RISD, you ultimately concluded, “this was not my place, and these were not my people.” Looking back, would you do things differently?
As for “not my place, not my people,” the fundamental problems were my age and myself, neither of which I could change. The thing I would do differently would be staying another year at Mason Gross. But that would have just made me a year older, and I’d still be myself: black, academic, female. A fundamental matter was black-in-America. Yes, yes, yes, I know nonblack people often find it difficult to feel at home or find their own people. Missing home may be a basic American or basic human condition. But on top of basic American, you have to add being black in America. Even if you don’t run into discrimination, there are the everyday interactions with nonblack Americans that are exhausting, that remind you that you seem not to belong. This is not anything I can change. And that’s not to add in the matter of working across generations.

Your professors were astounded by the progress you made during the summer between your first and second year of grad school. Did you surprise yourself as well?
During that summer, my growth pleased me enormously. I suppose I took for granted that the work I was enjoying would be good work. But I can’t say I was surprised. My progress didn’t surprise me, but I was amazed by my teachers’ surprise at the beginning of the second fall semester. I have never gotten over how little some people can expect of me.

You note that “the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it.” Are things improving?
Everybody always wants to think things are “improving,” so I’ll say they are: Yes. Things are improving. The work of women artists, old women artists, black artists, black women artists, old black women artists is being seen as never before. But basically, as my more experienced art mentors told me, the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it. The Art World is part of the U.S., which, if you read the papers you know, is still racist as hell. The improvement is that some Americans are starting to see that and to take steps to address longstanding discriminatory practices. There’s still a long way to go before I will say there’s been fundamental improvement.

When it came time to write your thesis, your first draft was full of anger about injustices in the art world. You, an award-winning historian and author, ended up going to the RISD writing center for help purging that anger. How did that go? Was the person helping you intimidated?
As you can see from my answer to the previous question, my “anger” hasn’t been purged. But I had the sense to see my shortcoming as the author of an MFA thesis and to get the instruction I needed. I don’t think Teacher Jen in the writing center was intimidated. She had seen my problem before and told me of other instances in which MFA students had had to find means of tamping down indignation and to focus on the visual aspects of their work within the context of art.

You’ve written numerous books, but none so personal as Old in Art School. How tough was that?
Writing personally was hard as hell and took several years. I had to dig out experiences and sensations that lay under my consciousness’s surface, and I had to see other people around me, fellow students especially, but also teachers, in situations where I was intensely self-centered. As I wrote through my sufferings, I came to see that maybe they weren’t as awful as I had made them out to be. I still say that earning a Ph.D. in history at Harvard was a piece of cake compared to earning an MFA at RISD. But now I’m wondering if the comparison is shaped by the decades separating the two experiences. Maybe in 33 years, RISD will seem like a piece of cake compared to—what, assisted living?

Near the end of your book you write, “Like artists the world over, my bayoneted, hand-to-hand struggle between insecurity and self-confidence never ends.” Did you have to endure such a constant battle with insecurity as a historian? Are you keeping your artistic struggle in check?
I never had to wage such an anti-insecurity battle as a historian because I loved research and writing, and I knew what I needed to do to succeed. I did it. I hit all the marks (publication, promotion, tenure, fellowships) and received sufficient honors.

I love making art—the process, I mean. And I have enough of a sense of what is my own art to feel good about that. At the same time, I know I’m the world’s uncoolest artist, and I’m OK with that. If what I make is not good enough, that’s its nature. That’s what I make and who I am: the world’s uncoolest artist.

You’ve incorporated both history and text (including pages from your own books) into your artwork, bringing your career into a glorious, unified circle. Would you say that you've found your voice? How would you summarize your artistic style and goals?
Thanks for “a glorious, unified circle,” which sounds really good! I hadn’t thought of my work in so assured a way. I saw more a long work-in-progress, a documentation of how one person’s work changes and grows over time as she starts over. I wanted to show some dumb early stuff and some pieces growing out of one another as closer and farther relations. I do feel I’ve found my manual + digital process, which you may call a “voice” or “style,” often related to history and sometimes embracing text. That sense of finding myself visually occurred with “Art History by Nell Painter,” which is why I pretty much end there. I don’t know that I have a “goal,” because I don’t feel myself going anywhere with an end or objective other than making art. Making the art that gratifies and interests me. Freedom attracted me to art making. Still does.

What are you working on now?
I just made four digital collages for the Three Hole Press publication of Daaimah Mubashshir’s plays, The Immeasurable Want of Light. Otherwise, tasks related to the publication and promotion of Old in Art School have taken up virtually all my time this year and precluded immersion on art. I have started something I call “Book Book” that will embody the experience of talking about my memoir over this year. It begins with two photos of me reading my Blackstone audiobook in a tiny studio on 9th Avenue in New York City last month.

I think about two or three artists’ books that will take time to envision and to make, as I have only fragments in mind right now. I will need to carve out time to work on them concentratedly.

How do you feel when you’re in that artistic “zone”?
I feel like I will never stop. Every image demands elaboration—into another shape or another color or another piece. This concentration, this play, makes me feel contented, even when I see I need more time to get to another place or a different image. When I have to stop, I’m usually among images I couldn’t have imagined when I started.

What advice do you have for other “old” people who might be contemplating reinventing themselves?
Advice?! As I say at the end of Old in Art School, people don’t usually want advice; they want to be listened to. So I’d say find someone who will listen to you and who knows something about what you’re thinking about doing. I’d say try it out for a little while. Take a class at your local community college. But my biggest, most important piece of advice, especially for old black women, for black women, for old women, for all women, for black people, for people young and old, for nonblack people is: Don’t see yourself through other people’s eyes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Old in Art School.

A portion of this article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by John Emerson.