Christa and Cara Parravani were identical twins, inseparable images of one another. They stare out from the cover of Her, Christa Parravani’s haunting new memoir, Cara looking down and Christa looking grimly into the camera. Cara died in 2006, not long after the photo was taken, a brutal rape having driven her to depression and a spiraling drug addiction.

Her is about Cara’s unraveling, but it is also a recollection of their complicated, intertwined life from birth: their unhappy parents, artistic talents, bad choices in men. Their parents broke up when they were very young, and on visits with their father, he would have them chant, “Mom is a witch. Mom should die. Mom is an evil bitch.”

Cara was a promising writer, and Christa a photographer. Their art tethered them as they went out into the world, rooming together as freshmen at Bard College, where they mixed their favorite children’s books in with textbooks on their dorm room shelf. They both got married too young, and struggled to share their twin with someone else. “His marriage to me was all she’d said it would be,” Parravani writes. “She called whenever she liked. She showed up whenever she liked. She still had me, like he never could.”

Then came the rape—although it was Cara who was assaulted, the event was a turning point in both their lives. Cara began using heroin and attempting suicide, checking in and out of rehab centers and mental hospitals. Her husband, unable to cope, let their home disintegrate. On a flight to one rehab stint, Cara used wine to wash down a drug for panic attacks, falling over in the baggage terminal and chipping a tooth.

Research shows that when a twin dies, the odds are high the other will follow shortly. Parravani writes about the numb years after her sister’s death, and how she slowly, slowly began rebuilding a life without her mirror image. She divorced and remarried, living now in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Anthony Swofford, and their young daughter.

To write the story, Parravani, an accomplished photographer, relied on her own recollections and those of her mother, as well as journals Cara left behind. “One weekend at my mother’s house, I was trying to write the rape scene. I was failing miserably because I didn’t have the adequate words,” Parravani recalls. “I was looking through Cara’s closet for clothes to take home, and found a Tupperware container under her bed.”

“This book offers proof of my love, which she was constantly questioning.”

Inside was a notebook in which Cara recalled her rape on a warm October afternoon in a park, where she was walking her dog. When she came home from the attack, she told her husband not to touch her. “I’m evidence,” she said.

“I put my own loving care into it,” Parravani says of writing about the rape. “One of the things she wanted was for me to understand what happened to her that day. I did that for her by editing that piece.”

It was one episode in a harrowing writing process.

“It was incredibly difficult,” Parravani says. “I felt that, in order to write the best book I could, I needed to go into the hardest moments. Because it’s my first book, I was learning to write and I had to throw it away and relive it again and again. The magical thing was when I thought I couldn’t go on, Cara would have something to say [in her journals].”

Although Cara was the writer in the family, Parravani found solace in writing Her. Her husband, author of the Gulf War memoir Jarhead, encouraged her to write her story.

Being married to another writer is “truly, truly wonderful,” Parravani says. “It’s not necessarily that we’re ‘a writing team.’ It’s not the fantasy I had in high school. It’s just very nice for me to have Tony with me in my life at this time. He’s been a real partner to me in the truest sense of the word and prepared me for this.”

And what would her twin think of Her?

“I think at first Cara would be very jealous,” Parravani says with a laugh. “Aside from that petty, sisterly competition, I think she’d be surprised I was able to reflect on her that way. This book offers proof of my love, which she was constantly questioning. She hated herself. It was that simple. Her rape had eroded her self-confidence. She didn’t like the way she looked—physically and otherwise. It was a constant battle to convince Cara she was worthy.”

Parravani’s self-assured, unflinching writing belies her status as novice author. She writes candidly about life before and after her twin’s death.

“Her feet were bare, hidden beneath the closed lid of the coffin,” Parravani writes. “Her skin was taut and her rose rouge wouldn’t blend. Blush sat on the tops of her cheeks in powdery circles. The worry line on her forehead had been erased by the magic plumping effect of embalming fluid. She would have been pleased to know that death had made her younger.”

“I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to talk about this,” Parravani says. “Now that I’ve finished the book, in some ways I feel my active relationship with her has ended. I’m actually excited. I want people to know who my sister was. I want people to know my sister had a truly beautiful spirit. She was the kindest person I’ve ever known.”

Parravani has a photo of Cara hanging in her dining room, and talks about her often with her 16-month-old, Josephine. “I don’t want my daughter to be haunted by the idea of her mother’s sister,” she explains. “I happily point to Aunt Cara.”

At the age of 84, Maya Angelou doesn’t have to write anymore. She has global fame as a poet, author and performer, as well as a professorship in American Studies at Wake Forest University. She has won three Grammys and a Presidential Medal of Arts, published two cookbooks, directed movies and appeared on “Sesame Street.”

She wrote her latest memoir, Mom & Me & Mom, not because she has to, but because she feels an obligation to share what she knows.

“Every adult owes to every young person the truth,” Angelou says in an interview with BookPage from her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Not the facts—you can get the facts from various sources. The truth is how human beings feel—how a particular action makes a human being sad or happy—so that when young people encounter that particular feeling, they can say, oh, I know this feeling because someone else has been here before.”

In straightforward style, Mom & Me & Mom dives deeply into Angelou’s complicated relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter Johnson, who owned gambling businesses and boarding houses in California and Nome, Alaska. Anyone who has read Angelou’s previous memoirs, including the searing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, knows that Angelou and her brother, Bailey, were sent as very young children to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas.

Those readers might also have been left with the impression that Vivian Baxter Johnson was not mother material. In her new book, Angelou paints a more complete picture of the woman she called “Lady,” fleshing out in her wholly singular voice the story of what happened when their grandmother decided in the early 1940s that it was time they rejoined their mother in California. The move was mainly for her 14-year-old brother’s sake. It was, Angelou wrote, “a dangerous age for a black boy in the segregated South.”

Angelou was a gangly teenager when she was sent to California to live with her pretty, petite mother.

They traveled by train to San Francisco, settling in with Lady and her husband, “a wondrous, very pleasant-looking man” named Clidell Jackson. Angelou was a gangly teenager, six feet tall with a deep voice, and at first she felt ill at ease around her pretty, petite mother, who favored “red lips and high heels.”

Over time, their relationship warmed, and despite her illicit business interests and occasional arrests, Lady had strong opinions about maintaining the family’s reputation. “You will learn that we do not lie, and we do not cheat, and we do laugh a lot,” she tells Maya and Bailey shortly after their arrival.

While still in high school, Angelou decided she wanted a job as a conductorette on a San Francisco streetcar. With headstrong determination, she planted herself in the company office for two weeks until a supervisor finally accepted her application. When she was hired, the newspapers hailed her as “the first American Negro to work on the railway.” Her mother drove her to the streetcar barn each day to start her 4 a.m. shift, and drove behind the streetcar until daylight, a pistol on the car seat next to her.

When Angelou became pregnant while still in high school, she was terrified to tell her mother. But Lady was accepting of her daughter’s pregnancy, telling her, “We—you and I—and this family are going to have a wonderful baby. That’s all there is to that.”

Angelou gave birth right after graduating and worked two jobs to support herself and her young son, Guy. Trying hard to forge her own path, she moved into a boarding house, and would not accept money or even a ride from her mother, but did let Lady take Guy twice a week. Angelou raised him with humor and a firm desire that he be a strong, self-reliant man who was always true to himself.

“We got on so wonderfully well. I’m grateful for that,” Angelou says. “I’ve always loved him but I was never in love with him. When he was 8 or 9, I told him there was a place inside him which had to remain inviolate. No mother, no father, no boyfriend, no girlfriend could go there. It was the place he would go when he met his maker.”

Angelou longed to do more than work as a fry cook and a clerk in a record shop—just as her mother knew she would, long before Angelou knew it herself. In the book, Angelou recalls the time her mother stopped her while they walked toward the streetcar. “Baby,” her mother told her, “I’ve been thinking and now I am sure. You are the greatest woman I’ve ever met.”

“I got onto the streetcar,” Angelou says. “I can even remember the time of day—the sun shone onto the seats. I thought, suppose she’s right. Because she was very intelligent and always said she was too mean to lie.”

Angelou began dancing and singing, eventually traveling to Europe as part of an African-American production of Porgy and Bess. Guilt-ridden at leaving Guy behind for several months, Angelou suffered a breakdown and sought the advice of her vocal coach, who sat her down with a pad of paper and a pencil, and told her to write her blessings. It was in that moment that she found her written voice.

At 84, Angelou shows few signs of slowing down, although her famously powerful voice trembles a bit.

She keeps up with pop culture. “I did watch the Grammys,” she says. “I liked it all. I must admit I fell asleep.”

She cooks. “Whatever I cook is the best I know how to cook,” she says. “I’m not a chef but I’m a very serious cook. I respect the ingredients and I respect the people who eat them. My mother used to say a cook’s greatest tools are hands and nose and ears.”

She still hosts an annual Black History Month radio show aired around the nation. This year, she featured interviews with Kofi Annan, Oprah Winfrey and Alicia Keys, among others.

“There are so many reasons young black men in particular—and young black women—don’t value themselves. One of the reasons is they don’t know enough about who they are and whose they are,” she says. “I try to pack the hour [of radio] I have. This year I’m using more contemporary people. I want to continue to talk about the achievements, wherever they came from.”

And she’s a loving grandmother. She speaks proudly of her grandson’s recent graduation from George Washington University with a master’s degree in international finance, and her desire to “be to my grandson what my grandmother was to me. And I am! He thinks I’m the bee’s knees.”

As for what her own mother—her biggest champion—would think of Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou is certain. “I think she’d love it,” she says. “It tells some of her truth. She deserved to have a real fine daughter.”

At a moment of profound loss—the death of her mother, depression, divorce and even a dangerous flirtation with heroin—25-year-old Cheryl Strayed set out to hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail through California and Oregon. Strayed captured both the physical toll and the hard-won healing process of her long-distance hike in her honest and affecting memoir Wild. 

Wild was one of BookPage’s Best Books of 2012, as well as a Readers’ Choice Best Book of 2012, and our reviewer Catherine Hollis called it "one of the best American memoirs to emerge in years." Wild, Strayed's second book following her debut novel Torch, is out this week in paperback.

The editors of BookPage caught up with Strayed to discuss the success of her memoir, readers’ responses to the book and more.

First things first: Wild was an incredible, well-reviewed, best-selling success. How has the response to Wild changed your life? How has it changed your approach to writing?

The response to Wild has been tremendously exciting, but it hasn’t changed my approach to writing. It’s still just me and the page, the way it’s always been. I’m still terrified and delighted by the act of writing, still uncertain of what’s ahead. The success [of] Wild has been thrilling, but it’s oddly outside of me. It’s what the world has made of my book, not what I did in the act of writing it, which would be unchanged, no matter how others responded to it. I will always be stunned by Wild’s reach—not just in the U.S., but all around the world. I’m grateful and amazed. The experience has made me feel more connected to more people from every walk of life because so many of them opened up to me and shared their stories with me after they read mine.

Right around the time that Wild was published, you also announced that you were the writer of the Dear Sugar column on The Rumpus. Did writing those columns inform your work on Wild in any way?

I’d written the first draft of Wild by the time I began writing the Dear Sugar column, and I was revising Wild when I was writing a bulk of the Dear Sugar columns that appear in my book Tiny Beautiful Things, so they come from the same place—the writer I am at this moment in my life—though I don’t think they directly inform each other. Having said that, some of the advice I give as Sugar is certainly rooted in things I learned on my long hike.

At the time of your hike, you took along books by William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Adrienne Rich, rather than leaving the extra weight behind. Are those writers still important to you today? Which other writers have joined their pantheon?

"My greatest intention as a writer is to illuminate the human condition. You can’t do that while hiding behind the safety of your own cloak. So I write fearlessly, even when I’m afraid to do so."

Books were my saving grace out there. Reading offered me a much-needed escape from the monotony and solitude of the hike. Those books were worth the weight for sure. Plus, I didn’t carry them all the whole way. I carried the Adrienne Rich book with me the whole time, but I burned the Faulkner after reading it and I traded away the O’Connor book. Those writers are still important to me, alongside writers like Mary Gaitskill, Raymond Carver and Alice Munro, among others.

Wild is a deeply personal story. Did you have any qualms about revealing yourself in this way?

Yes, of course. Before Wild was published I was afraid of being condemned, misunderstood, disliked, mocked. Those things have all happened! But only by a handful of haters on the Internet. Far more often I’ve received understanding, kindness and love from readers. It’s tremendous, the number of people who say to me, “YES, I RELATE!” That's the power of telling your truth. You find that other people have that truth, too, even if they conceal it most of the time. I can’t imagine not revealing myself in my writing. The entire point of literature is revelation. My greatest intention as a writer is to illuminate the human condition. You can’t do that while hiding behind the safety of your own cloak. So I write fearlessly, even when I’m afraid to do so. It’s only brought me good things.

Many readers found your lack of planning for your hike infuriating. What would you like to tell those readers? 

I would tell them to lighten up. Wouldn’t life be miserable if we never learned anything the hard way? Were none of these infuriated readers ever young? But also, I’d say “lack of planning” isn’t an accurate criticism. I planned quite a lot. I bought all the gear (even though I carried too much of it), I prepared and organized and boxed all the food I’d eat for the entire summer and all the supplies I’d need. I figured out where and when to have those boxes mailed to me along a wilderness trail I’d never set foot on. I accurately calculated the amount of ground I could cover in a given time over three months. That’s quite an organizational feat, wouldn't you say?

So there were many things I planned well and did right. I think that gets overlooked by people who get worked up over my alleged lack of preparation. I took too much stuff. I didn’t train before I went on my hike. I didn’t know how to do certain things until I had to do them. I didn’t understand all the challenges before I faced them firsthand. But that’s pretty much it.

Most backpackers make these same mistakes when they begin. I don’t think there's anything wrong with that. I think the world would be a rather sad place if we only did things we were entirely prepared for. All the best things I’ve ever done were things I learned how to do along the way. Becoming a parent is a prime example. Most parents have very little idea about what to do with a baby before the baby’s in hand. You learn fast.

At what point on the hike did you feel your strongest? Your weakest?

The final day of my hike was profound. I felt strong, humble, grateful, fully alive. It’s one of the most unforgettable days in all of my life. I felt my weakest in those moments of total despair, when I wanted to give up because my feet hurt or when everything was miserable. I remember those moments and laugh now. That’s the best thing about that kind of suffering—the kind you have on a long-distance trail—it’s always funny later.??

Would you ever attempt to hike the PCT again?

Yes. Without hesitation.??

Do you see yourself having another adventure to compare with the one chronicled in Wild? (We’re not asking you to go deep-sea diving without a tank, just FYI.)

I do. I would love to. I have two young children, ages 7 and 8. I’m just waiting for them to be old enough so we can all go off on a grand adventure together.

You're still touring for Wild (we're looking forward to your Nashville stop!). How do you like having the chance to interact with readers face-to-face? 

It’s been the most gratifying aspect of this past year. Every event I do I meet people who tell me exactly how and why they felt moved by Wild or one of my other books. Sometimes they say what I wrote changed their lives. It feels like a gift every time.??

Any especially surprising or moving encounters with readers?

So many I cannot even count them anymore. I wish I had a camera strapped to my head at each book signing just so I could share that beauty with the world. It’s unbelievable and yet I totally believe it, too, because I know the power of a book. I know how it feels to be changed by words on a page. I’m honored that my words have done that for others.??

What's next for you?

Another book! A novel, I believe.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read our review of Wild.
Read about Wild in our April 2013 Book Clubs column.

With his powerful 6'7" frame and a severe case of Tourette’s syndrome, Hanagarne defies the stereotype of the timid librarian, turning his love of books into a rewarding career.

A librarian with Tourette’s sounds like an oxymoron. How did you choose your career?

Like a lot of librarians I know, I’m just not well-suited to do anything else. I chose this career because it combines all of the things I love about life into one vague job description. Also because I knew it would test me as far as the Tourette’s.

You are a hugely avid reader, thanks in large part to your mom. What did she do to turn you into such a bookworm?

She led by example. My mom loved books and reading, so her kids did as well. I never had a chance to be anything but a ­bookworm.

Can you briefly describe growing up with Tourette’s?

Twitching, tears, timidity and a few triumphs.

How did Tourette’s shape your 20s?

I let it steal most of my 20s. I let it take much of my self-worth, my ambition and my confidence from me. But there’s nothing that makes me sadder than the lost time. Which is one of the reasons why I’m pathologically productive at this point.

You write candidly about uncomfortable situations in the library. What is the public’s greatest misperception about libraries?

Probably that libraries are just buildings full of books.

Why are physical libraries so important to communities?

To answer that question, I’d ask you to go to your local library and watch everything that happens there for a couple of hours. Look at the schedule of activities. Watch children looking at picture books with their parents. Then picture everything that would be lost if the library were suddenly gone. That makes the case for me better than anything I could say.

You obviously love your job, even though it entails “attending community council meetings, monitoring the mentally ill, surrogate parenting, gang and drug activity tracking” and more. What makes working in a library so great?

There’s nothing I love as much as I love stories, and working in the library is one huge, unpredictable story. I’ve learned more about the highs and lows of humanity here than I have anywhere else, from both the books and the people. I think it would be a great location for an anthropology dissertation.

Strength training and breathing exercises enable you to anticipate and manage tics. What’s your coolest strength-training trick?

“Trick” would imply something anyone could do, if they just knew the secret. The “trick” is to get strong enough to do this stuff! I think that the coolest thing I can currently do is to pick up a 300-lb. stone and put it on my shoulder.

What message would you like to send to young people struggling with Tourette’s or other significant limitations?

Any time you spend thinking “I can’t believe this is happening” is ultimately wasted time. It’s easier said than done, but I believe real hope comes from moving from “I can’t believe this is happening” to “this is happening.” Because once you can accept that it’s happening, the logical next question is, “So what now?” If you can ask, you can improve your situation.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read our review of The World's Strongest Librarian.

Long before Augusten Burroughs was running with scissors, a big-hearted Southern whirlwind of a writer named Pat Conroy served as America’s unofficial poster boy for family dysfunction.

The eldest of seven siblings raised under the violent iron fist of a cele­brated Marine Corps fighter pilot, Conroy sought refuge and revenge by channeling his nightmarish upbringing and its aftereffects into such gut-wrenching, cinema-ready novels as The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. The success of his prose on page and screen didn’t prevent the real-life marriage meltdowns and numerous personal breakdowns that come with having the devil himself as your muse.

More than a decade in the writing, his new memoir The Death of Santini marks Conroy’s coming to terms with his “Chicago Irish” father, Don (nicknamed the Great Santini, after the trapeze artist, for his aerial prowess); his indefatigable Southern belle mother, Peg; his unsinkable grandmother, Stanny; sister Carol, the prickly family poet; and brother Tom, whose suicide plunge at 34 from a 14-story building came to manifest the malignant memories that haunt his siblings.

Conroy was inspired to undertake his memoir in 1998 after writing the eulogy for his father, which he uses to close this book, both literally and figuratively.

“I needed some kind of summing-up, a wrap-up for the direction that my career has taken me,” Conroy says. “I’ve been so family-obsessed that I wanted to try to figure out what it all means and come to some conclusions.”

Despite the book’s dark subject matter, readers may be surprised to find The Death of Santini uplifting, and at times downright funny, as the author casts off punch lines and personal demons with every page. Conroy approves but takes no credit for this reader-friendly chiaroscuro.

"I've been so family-obsessed that I wanted to try to figure out what it all means."

“When you say it goes from light to darkness, that sounds like it should be, but I’m never very good at that,” he admits. “I had good editing, good people reading the book from the very beginning and arranging it.”

One of those clever souls was Conroy’s wife, the novelist Cassandra King (Moonrise), who helped steel the author through his father’s final days. The couple married a week after Don Conroy’s death.

“My father adored her,” Conroy says. “Dad used to say, ‘What does Sandra see in you, son?’ And now, poor Cassandra has been marinated in the Conroy family madness.”

Fiction provided a means for Conroy to process the constant belittling, badgering and physical and mental abuse the family suffered at the hands of his larger-and-scarier-than-life father. But when the budding author dared to expose the family secrets in the guise of the Bull Meecham brood in his 1976 debut novel, The Great Santini, the family was horrified.

“One of the things my brothers and sisters have had to ask ourselves is, did this all happen? What was the result of it happening to us? How do we relate it to our children or our wives or husbands?” Conroy says. “We’re all screwed up, coming through Mom and Dad. That was a difficult country to travel in, but we traveled it, we made it through, and somehow we survived it.”

That fragile illusion would be destroyed years later when Tom, who’d had a minor role in the film version of The Great Santini, ended his life in Columbia, South Carolina.

“But Tom did not survive it,” Conroy continues, choking up. “Tom can bring us to our knees. We all feel we failed him, left him behind. We were not watchful or vigilant enough with Tom to help him survive.”

Conroy’s mother, who tirelessly encouraged him to pursue a writing career, was in her glory when the film premiered in her hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina, where it was filmed. She would later submit the novel into evidence in her divorce from Don.

As for Don, the best-selling novel and the film that followed sparked a love affair that knew no bounds.

“With my father, it wasn’t a flirtation with Hollywood, it was a marriage,” Conroy recalls. “When he finally realized that I had killed him in the movie, he was furious for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t figure out why until he said, ‘You f__ked up the sequel!’ He did take that role utterly seriously. There were license plates of the Great Santini, hats of the Great Santini. Going to Dad’s apartment was like going to the county fair, only the county fair was based entirely on him and all the rides were Santini rides and all the clowns were Santini clowns. He could not get enough of it.”

The family uproar over The Great Santini and his subsequent novels continues to this day. When his siblings got wind that big brother had a memoir in the works, Conroy couldn’t help having a little fun at their expense.

“They always said, ‘You won’t be able to write this, Pat, because no one will believe it.’ My brothers and sisters are terrified of this book,” he says. “Of course, I was telling my brothers that I was giving them sex-change operations and my sisters that I was going to have them marry monsters and their children were going to be the devil’s spawn. But now that it’s coming out, I’m worried about their judgment.”

Having exorcised his demons, Conroy is working on a new novel and his first young adult book, neither of which involves family ghosts.

“I’m going to try to leave the family in peace,” he vows. “There are other things to write about. Of course, I’m ashamed that I didn’t think of this until I was 90 years old!” (Conroy is slightly inflating his age: He turns 68 just before his memoir’s October 29 publication.)

But his dark journey did lead him to a surprising conclusion about the family that fueled much of his career.

“Being born into this family was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “It just took me a long time to realize it and 40 years to write about it.”

Though he’s a highly regarded journalist, Scott Stossel has long endured an affliction that was hidden from many of his closest associates: near-crippling anxiety. In My Age of Anxiety, a narrative that’s both deeply personal and wide-ranging, he examines the history and treatment of this common disorder.

It took much courage for you to write this personal account of your inner life: What do you hope your book will accomplish?

I hope this book will provide readers with a deeper understanding of the condition, and of both the scientific and cultural contexts in which it exists. Especially for people struggling with anxiety, I hope the book can provide a modicum of solace—the recognition that they are not alone. I also hope people find it entertaining and possibly somewhat hopeful, despite my trawling through some dark places.

By all outside appearances, you’re the capable and confident editor of The Atlantic. Do you think many of your colleagues will be surprised to read about your struggles with anxiety?

Some of them already definitely have been. (As advance copies of the book circulate around the office, I’ve had a parade of colleagues in my office telling me they’d like to give me a hug. Which is nice and also a little uncomfortable.) And I suspect I will continue to be greeted with surprised reactions from professional acquaintances.

The book’s section on drugs is sure to be controversial. What are your thoughts about Big Pharma’s response?

I don’t yet have any sense of how Big Pharma will respond. But I’m definitely not anti-drug. (How could I be when I take medications myself!) In fact, I’d say I’m guardedly pro-pharma—drugs are the best or only solution for many people. I just think we need to be cognizant of the medical risks and societal risks. We should view drugs with both skepticism and hope.

You make many references to the caring and support of your spouse, Susanna. How are you able to maintain relationships with family and friends given your admittedly narcissistic focus on yourself and your condition?

In some ways, my inward focus on my anxiety makes me a worse husband/father/son/friend than I otherwise would be. Susanna has sometimes had to carry an unfairly heavy load. But I would like to think my anxiety has also enlarged my capacity for empathy and made me more conscientious and effective in some areas of my life (even as it has clearly made me less effective in others).

How would you describe the fiscal impact of anxiety—on families, workers and businesses, as well as the healthcare system?

By some measures the impact is huge. Missed days of work due to anxiety disorders (and depression) cost the U.S. economy upward of $50 billion annually. And anxiety is a leading cause of visits to doctors’ offices (which may actually help the economy, but is still not a good thing). Clinical anxiety can place a large fiscal burden on families—it can contribute to unemployment, alcoholism and drug addiction, as well as general distress.

You state that your lifelong struggle with anxiety might be a “source of strength” and a “bestower of certain blessings.” Can you explain how so?

Anxiety, when it’s not debilitating, can bring with it certain gifts: a heightened awareness of your environment; more sensitive social antennae; a general prudence about risk-taking; a spur toward achievement. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard believed that the greater the anxiety, the greater the opportunity for growth. I think there’s definitely something to that—though when my anxiety is at its worst I’d trade away the opportunity for growth in exchange for the anxiety dissipating.

After writing three critically acclaimed novels, Gary Steyngart turned to memoir. Little Failure, published this month, is an unsparing, often funny, account of Steyngart’s anxiety-ridden life from his early childhood in Russia, through his family’s immigration to Queens, New York, and ending with the publication of his first novel. Our reading of the memoir raised some additional questions, which Shteyngart answered via email.

You've written three successful novels. Why a memoir now, earlyish in your career?
Earlyish? I'm 41. That's 76 in Russian years.

You dedicate Little Failure to your parents and to your analyst. Readers will discover why. What does your analyst have to say about you honoring him this way?
He seemed pretty happy, although he doesn't really say much of anything. It's old-fashioned Freudian-like therapy where I just blather on and he keeps mostly quiet.

You describe a father frustrated by his failure to achieve his dreams who was abusive to you. Does he still believe the adage you quote in the book that "Not to hit is not to love"?
I don't think so. Now it's all about love without hitting.

Ok it was a mistake. But your father took you to see the film Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman? How old were you?
Old enough to know I was watching the best film ever made, young enough not to know what to do about it.

Like many Russian Jews who left the Soviet Union, your father idolized Ronald Reagan. Early on you did too. You describe your then self as a "ten-year-old Republican." While your father is still a conservative, you are not. What happened?
Oberlin College, that's what happened. Plus a general softening towards people. On my part.

You write that from your mother you inherited, among other things, "fanatic attention to detail." What traits did you inherit from your father?
Dark humor, love of nature.

You were severely asthmatic as a child growing up in Leningrad. Soon after you arrived in NYC at age 7 your symptoms seem to have disappeared. What's the explanation for that?
I think the asthma went away when I hit puberty, which I believe happens to many children.

You didn't entirely lose your Russian accent until you were 14. How much of a conscious effort did you make to speak American English like a native?
I practiced in the mirror like crazy. When I got a TV, I got a Texan accent (“Dallas” was on).

"Soviet vacationing was a rough, exhausting business," you write of your childhood trips to the Crimea in the 1970s. Where do you travel for fun these days?
To the Crimea of America. It's called Miami Beach.

You graduated summa cum laude from Oberlin College—despite the recreational excesses that earned you the nickname Scary Gary. Who coined the phrase and what episode inspired the coinage?
I can't fully recall who coined it. I think at some drunken party someone said, "Oh, look, even Scary Gary is here." A nickname was born.

Really? You never, ever had writer's block?
Sorry. I have many other problems, though.

What's your favorite photograph in the book? Why?
Maybe the one on the cover. Most boys would grab the steering wheel of the toy car, but I was scared out of my mind. I knew what the insurance rates in Leningrad were like.

Little Failure essentially recounts your life until the publication of your first novel. But in passing, jumping ahead, you several times mention your wife. You're married? Do tell.
I am married! To a woman! She's very nice!

As a veteran editor of Harlequin romance novels, Patience Bloom has had the enviable job of facilitating fairy-tale love stories between heroric hunks and whip-smart heroines for 16 years. When it came to her own affairs of the heart, though, Bloom's dating life was far from picture-perfect. In her 40s and after many short-term relationships that ended in disappointment, she nearly gave up on love—until reconnecting with a high school acquaintance offered a shot at her very own happily-ever-after. Romance Is My Day Job is Bloom's charming, utterly relatable account of navigating the ups and downs of dating and finding love when and where you least expect it. We asked Bloom a few questions about the book. 

How did the idea for the book come about?
I started writing Romance Is My Day Job as a stress-reliever six weeks before my wedding. Two years went by, and an agent—who became my agent—convinced me to polish the book and try to sell it. Why not? Sam and I have an extraordinary story. A reclusive 40-something romance editor unexpectedly reunites with the wild class clown of her high school years. That’s a pretty good romance. 

What was the first romance novel that you ever read? How old were you and what did you think of it?
My first official romance novel was Phantom Marriage by Penny Jordan, followed immediately by Desire’s Captive. I didn’t realize there were books like this—just for me! I was 14 and reading romances when I should have been studying for exams. I remember Desire’s Captive more because the hero’s name was Nico, and after being such a grumpus through the entire book, he finally admits his love to the heroine. I gasped and then melted.

How did you become a romance book editor? Was it something you always wanted to do?  
I liked to read romance novels, but I read a lot of other books, too: nonfiction, thrillers, literary fiction and commercial women’s fiction. Publishing was my calling, and by some happy accident, my first job was at Harlequin. So I turned my guilty-pleasure reading into a full-time job.

What was the weirdest reaction a guy ever had when you first told him about your job?
The weirdest reaction came on a fourth date with a guy, who’d just told me he’d gotten back with his ex. I didn’t know why he wanted to keep seeing me until he handed me his unpublished book. He knew all along that I was an editor, and this was the only reason why he wanted to date me. Most guys were enlightened, asked a lot of questions and thought it sounded like a fun job.

Is there a romance hero archetype that you didn’t encounter in real life? Which archetype do you feel would be the worst kind of guy to date in real life, why?
I never dated the law enforcement guy, though I appreciated their rescuing my cats during an apartment fire, giving me directions, and reassuring me during some crises in the city. Dating a NYC cop would have been too scary for me since I worry too much, but I’d have made an exception for Elliott Stabler [from the TV show “Law & Order: SVU”]. In my experience, the worst guy to date is the alpha male. He’s just a jerk. Alphas are loveable in romance novels because you know that some goodness lies behind the intensity. In real life, the alphas I’ve encountered have been sadistic as boyfriends, but fun as just friends (as long as we do what he wants to do).

What’s your favorite genre of romance?
I like moody historical romances, romantic suspense and sexy, glitzy romances (I’m not sure that’s a genre). A nice, cozy small-town romance can also be deeply satisfying. Paranormal or Western-themed romances are not as much of a draw for me, but I have read some great ones.

How did your “uninspired” dating life affect how you felt about your job?
No matter how awful my date was, the romances I read the next day were mood-boosters. If love couldn’t happen to me, these heroines felt like my sisters, also in search of someone. I rooted for the characters to find love instead. It didn’t depress me to come to work after a lame night with Mr. Not Right at All.

Why do you think romance novels are so popular with readers?
These are happy stories about love. They leave the reader with hope of some kind, not necessarily that Mr. Perfect will land in their laps, but that love exists. Romance novels are fun decadence, fantasy and dream-food for romantics.

What was it about your husband that signaled to you that he was “the one”?
I knew he was “the one” when we first spoke on the phone—within a week of our connecting on Facebook. He has this reassuring voice, and I wanted to keep listening to him. Something clicked. This felt different, so we just kept talking on the phone. Because I had two feet on the ground, I also understood that he might not recognize me as “the one” for him. I was ready for anything—even nothing.

What’s next for you?
Promoting this book is next. While I do that, I’ve started writing Cassie McBride’s Dating Adventures: How to Love Like a Romance Heroine, with a little more dating memoir thrown in. I also am generating more romance writing tips on my blog (www.romanceismydayjob.com). If that weren’t enough, I’m writing a steamy office romance (might as well).

(Author photo by Patrick Smith)

When Carol Wall hired a neighbor’s gardener to improve her long-neglected yard, she never imagined that the Kenyan immigrant would transform her outlook on life as well. In Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening, Wall reflects on what she learned from their special friendship.

What did you like best about Giles Owita?
Giles was always optimistic. He always had a smile on his face. He had a deep knowledge of all things horticultural. And I always admired and envied how he was able to fully immerse himself in the work that he loved. He always seemed to give everyone and everything his full attention. And he had a way of explaining complicated concepts with elegance and simplicity. He was a teacher at heart. He taught me to have faith.

You initially resisted some of his ideas for your lawn. How did he teach you to love flowers?
Oh, how I wish he were here to answer that question himself! When I first told Giles I didn’t want flowers, he somehow managed to answer me with an affirmative response. I now understand that since he was so stubborn, this was merely his way of acknowledging my request while at the same time not acting upon it at all. When the flowers appeared that spring, they led me to examine a lot of what I’d been keeping under layers of protective covering: my childhood, my parents, my family and my illness. This probably wasn’t Giles’ intention (though who knows, he was always smarter than all of us) but that’s what happened.

This was originally a book about breast cancer, but your son recommended that you refocus it to include your friendship with Mr. Owita. How did including the friendship change and enrich your manuscript?
I was really struggling with writing this as a memoir about surviving breast cancer. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to write in the first person, believe it or not. Introducing Giles helped me focus the narrative. His character took some of the pressure off, strangely, and made me more comfortable with sharing my experience. It’s poetic in a way—our friendship helped me embrace and accept life, and his spirit has helped me explore and accept my true feelings.

You write that he was the best professor of your life. Yet that wasn’t what you expected when you first met him. Why not?
I expected that he might simply help to improve my shabby-looking yard. I thought of him as a hard-working gardener, but assumed that we had very different life experiences. Little did I know!

What were some of the things that drew you together?
On the face of it we were as different as two people could possibly be. But it turns out we had so much in common: the unexpected similarities in our life experiences, the need to adjust to a “plan B,” the importance of faith and family, the desire to learn and to teach.

This is a book about so much—gardening, life, illness, transitions. What were some of the major life changes that you and Mr. Owita walked through together?
We both had experienced events that involved loss, fear, guilt and shame. Our friendship allowed us to share and process our experiences without fear of judgment.

What do you hope readers will take away from this story?
Giles taught me so many things that changed my life. He embraced and accepted life’s afflictions, something that took me a while to come around to. (His cane in my study reminds me of that.) In the end, I guess it’s that sometimes the loveliest secrets and treasures appear where we least expect them.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Barbara Ehrenreich and her younger sister are very close. But her sister really, really does not like the title of Ehrenreich’s new memoir, Living with a Wild God.

“She thinks I’m being too soft on theism in this book. She’s like, how can you write a book with God in the title! It was hardcore, the atheism we came from,” Ehrenreich says with a bemused laugh during a call to her home in Alexandria, Virginia, where she moved some years ago to be near her daughter and grandchildren.

Readers of Ehrenreich’s earlier books—Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch or Bright-Sided, for example—know her to be a smart, funny, opinionated progressive voice. Her fascinating new book—her most personally revealing work so far—almost inadvertently points to the sources of both her rigor and her passion.

Ehrenreich accepts a challenge from her younger self to explore the “uncanny” mystical experiences of her youth.

Ehrenreich, who has described herself as a fourth-generation atheist, was the child of parents raised in radicalized mining families of Butte, Montana. Her parents, we learn, eloped in their teens and eventually became successful and admired community members. “They were smart,” Ehrenreich says. “They were unusual in their upward mobility. They encouraged reading, inquiry, curiosity. But they had problems. My father had the drinking problem first. And my mother didn’t like me. This would make no sense in today’s child-raising discourse, because we now have these artisanal project children, where we constantly think about their feelings and challenges. My mother’s belief was do something useful or get out of the way. My parents imbued me with a firm, dogmatic atheism and rationalism.”

This is the crux of the story Ehrenreich explores in Living with a Wild God. Sometime around the age of 13, she began to have strange experiences of the ineffable. “In these episodes of disassociation as a teenager, I could not look at a chair and see a chair. I saw something else, unnamed, unaccounted for, something beyond language,” Ehrenreich says. At the same time, as a rationalist, she pondered the meaning of a life that ended in death in a cooly “solipsistic” manner.

For a decade or so, starting when she was 14, she kept an episodic—and remarkably articulate—journal of her thoughts and observations about this dilemma, which she called “The Situation.” Her seemingly mystical experiences culminated in a vividly described, ecstatic, hallucinatory morning in Lone Pine, California, after a ski trip with her brother and a friend.

For years, as she battled with her parents, went off to Reed College, earned a Ph.D. in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University, and then made a U-turn into social activism and a career as a writer, Ehrenreich explained these teenage episodes to herself as a kind of temporary insanity.

But about five years ago she decided to write “a massive, sweeping history of religion, the rise of monotheism, which I do not applaud.” Ultimately that big idea didn’t work, but Ehrenreich did have the journal of her younger self wrestling with big thoughts. And, it so happens, in that journal her younger self threw down a challenge in July 1958 to her future self, writing: “What have you learned since you wrote this?”

“I think there was a little bit of a secret polemic here,” Ehrenreich says of her interest in writing about the struggles of her younger self. “Which is that I think that there is a narrative trend, certainly in mainstream American fiction, of maturing, of growing beyond whatever you were in your youth and coming to a more reflective and socially responsible state. I find that kind of repellant. I have respect for the child and the teenage persons of myself. I undertook this with the feeling that I had to return to them, that I could learn from them, that their experiences were not something to be put away. Some of it is very embarrassing, which is to say I was pretty self-involved. But I see the logical rigor that got me there.”

In the intervening years, it turns out that Ehrenreich has learned quite a bit. Researching this book, which as it develops becomes a compelling mix of memoir and metaphysical rumination, she read widely in philosophy, science and the writing of mystics and others who seemed to have had experiences similar to hers. One of her most personally satisfying scientific discoveries was that the seemingly botched results of her experiments on silicon electrodes for her college senior thesis could now “be explained by a complete paradigm shift in science. There were just phenomena that could not have been imagined in 1963.” She writes that “the reductionist core of the old science has been breached. We have had to abandon the model of the universe in which tiny hard particles interact and collide to produce, through a series of ineluctable, irreversible steps, the macroscopic world as we know it.”

"I have respect for the child and the teenage persons of myself. I undertook this with the feeling that I had to return to them, that I could learn from them, that their experiences were not something to be put away."

These previously undiscovered phenomena and the conceptual shifts in science in recent decades lead Ehrenreich to an astonishing speculation in her final chapter. She wonders if hers and similar experiences could be an attempt at contact from another kind of being—not God; Ehrenreich remains an atheist—but something like what scientists call “an emergent quality, something greater than the sum of all its parts.”

Asked about this idea, Ehrenreich says, “We don’t have the data. Let me say that scientifically. We don’t know enough about the experiences other people have. I suspect many people have uncanny, unaccountable experiences that they attribute to something conventional—God or what they’ve been told God is. Or they put it aside completely. What I’m saying in this book is, let’s not bury this anymore. Something happens often enough to enough of us that we ought to know what it is. The urgency for me is sharpened by my critique of science and its unwillingness in so many ways to acknowledge that there are other conscious agencies or could be in the universe than just ourselves.”

And does Ehrenreich now believe that she’s risen to the challenge made by her earlier self? “I do feel I’ve done my best to discharge my responsibility to her.”

In a frank and richly evocative memoir, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun recalls growing up in the Deep South.

Why did you feel now was the right time to write a memoir of your coming-of-age?
Moving from California (where I lived and worked for decades) back to the South reconnected me on many levels with the land I came from originally. Some of the connections were simple and primitive—the fecund and flowery smells, the cheerful sounds of the tree frogs, the grating drama of cicadas, the grand sunsets and the intense humidity. Maybe the sensory world where you first breathed and walked never leaves you. Feeling so at home again naturally brought up early memories. And they seemed to want to come to the light.

You write in depth about your parents’ drinking and how it painted your childhood, saying theirs was a marriage of “Southern Comfort, recriminations, and if onlys.” Was it hard to reveal this part of your life to readers?
Shame is a powerful emotion and a silencing one. I don’t feel shame but can see why I might. They were who they were. They operated under some pretty intense cultural pressures, and they burned out so early that they never had a chance to emerge into larger versions of themselves. I’m always sad for that. As parents, they were not ideal, but they did have wonderful qualities as well—gusto, humor, passion, generosity.

There are so many exquisite details in the book: the shape of your daddy’s fingernails, the hospital room where you visited your grandmother. Did you keep detailed journals as a kid, or do you have an incredible memory of certain moments?
My little red, locked diary is still on my desk. I kept notebooks always, and even a reading log. These stacks of journals are disappointing because they record events, not observations or feelings. But it’s odd—as I read them, the details come rushing back. The plain words unlock memory, and I can again feel the images and nuances.

You paint an endearing portrait of Willie Bell, who worked as a maid for your parents throughout your childhood. How influential a figure was she in your life?
As I wrote, it was not a Mammy sort of thing. She quietly offered me a perspective on the chaotic life within our house. So often she said, “When are you going to learn? Just don’t talk back.” I saw only in later years that she was revealing her own survival tactics as well as trying to keep me from getting switched! 

At one point, you write that you might have lived forever in Fitzgerald, Georgia. What do you think kept that from happening?
My mother! She wanted for me what she never achieved—a big life. An unconfined life. Even though I battled her about my local boyfriends she feared I would marry, her constant get-out-of-Dodge stance seeped in. By high school, I was planning my escape to the North, the forbidden land, the dreaded land. I only made it as far as Virginia at first!

As a child, you didn’t know the word racism. Looking back now, how racist was the time and place in which you grew up?
Oh, Lord. Give me a volume to write! It is very hard now to imagine the racism. And not only in the South. Beneath the violence and unfairness and craziness, I always sense that a deeper vein of connection binds blacks and whites in the South than ever has been explained.

How have you settled into life in North Carolina?
Love it! My husband, Ed, and I have had the great good luck to fall in with a group of writers, artists, cooks, readers, gardeners. We are having a fine time down here. We have a big creaky old house with a porch, many remodeling projects, and two gentlemen cats. I am loving roving around the South, as I did in my youth.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.