The author of Fair and Tender Ladies and many other beloved novels reflects on her Virginia childhood and her beginnings as a writer in the new memoir, Dimestore.

At what point did you decide to collect these essays as a memoir? Was that something you had in mind from the start?
I can tell you exactly the moment I decided to publish Dimestore: the day when my childhood home—the house my parents built and lived in for over 60 years—was demolished as part of a massive flood control project. The only thing I have left is the brass doorknocker with the curly “S” on it, for Smith, which a kind neighbor salvaged and put in a homemade box frame for me to keep. My father’s dimestore had already been blown up along with about 60 other stores lining the main street of Grundy, Virginia.

Even though I’d known for a long time that all this was coming, I was devastated. Place has always been paramount to me as a fiction writer—especially this place, this little town, these mountains. Immediately I found myself writing sketches, like word photographs, of all the people and places that were gone. I kept it up. Eventually I had the long title essay “Dimestore,” and then I decided to write some more, also adding and expanding some other occasional pieces and talks I had written over the years.

Is it harder for you to write about yourself than to write fiction?
Yes! It’s much harder! I have always believed that I could tell the truth much better in fiction than in nonfiction: You can juggle the chronology, switch the facts around to make your points, emphasize some elements and ignore others, write a novel from several different points of view in order to present everybody’s motivations. With nonfiction, you’re stuck with the little old boring stick-in-the-mud piddly SELF (though I should add that many of these Dimestore essays are actually more about other people who have made a big impression on me and on my writing along the way.)

Did you ever feel as though your parents might be watching over your shoulder as you wrote?
No, I’ve never really felt that way. Since I was an only child born to them late in life—a big surprise since they’d been told they could not have children—they were unconditionally OK with whatever I did. If I’d told them, for instance, that I wanted to be an ax murderer, they would have gone out and bought me the ax.

Tell us about your "writing house" that your father built on the edge of the Levisa River.
My writing house kept changing because the river kept flooding—every time, my father would build it back or make me a new one, mostly little prefab storage sheds with a table and a chair and an old wooden box to keep my books and treasures in, perched on the side of the riverbank.

Do you have any memorabilia from your father's dimestore? Or something you wish you had?
I really wish I still had my own little typewriter which Daddy kept right there in his upstairs office on the long desk where I could observe the entire floor of the dimestore—all the aisles—through the one-way glass window, reveling in my own power—nobody can see me, but I can see everybody! I witnessed not only shoplifting, but fights and embraces as well. Once I saw a woman put a big old Philco radio between her legs, under her coat, and waddle right out of the store!

I have lived in North Carolina for many years now, so Grundy is no longer my literal “home,” yet psychologically—and speaking as a writer, now—it still is. I think we are forever formed by what we first see and the way we first hear language, in my case that rugged ring of mountains and the unique mountain dialect, the soft Appalachian speech of all those older family members telling stories on the porch while I was going to sleep in somebody’s lap. So, even today, stories still come to me in a human voice, and I just write them down. I’m not so much a writer as a listener and a storyteller.

If you could time travel, how would you spend a perfect childhood day?
It would be summertime and I would get up early and eat some of Mama’s biscuits and drink some coffee with a lot of milk in it and then run out the door and go sit under my "dogbushes" as I called them (a big clump of forsythia bushes). It was like a secret room under there—where a whole town of my imaginary friends lived. So I’d check in with them, find out what was going on with everybody. My best friend was Vienna, named for those little flat cans of Vienna sausages which I always took under there and shared with my dog Missy—Vienna herself had red hair and a very dramatic life, but my friend Sylvia could FLY! Then after a while I’d go get my best real friend, Martha Sue, and some of the other kids who all lived along the river there in Cowtown, too, and we’d head for the hills, literally, climbing up into the mountains across the road where we’d run like wild Indians all day long playing cowboys and Indians, forming club after club, climbing cliffs and outcroppings, building forts, swinging on grapevines, exploring caves, and enjoying a degree of freedom seldom found in childhood today. The only kind of twitter we knew about was birdsong. We’d stay there until somebody rang the big bell to call us home.

What was it like being a go-go dancer with Annie Dillard in your all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs, at Hollins College?
It was wonderful. Hollins not only had an excellent creative writing program—long before most colleges—but encouraged (or at least tolerated) all kinds of creativity. We first performed at a Hollins literary festival, then went on the road to UVA, Washington and Lee, etc. We all had go-go names—mine was Candy Love. I wore a glitter top and white boots and a cowboy hat.

Is there a piece of advice you'd like to be able to give your 20- or 30-year-old self?
SLOW DOWN. (Which is exactly what Jerry Lee Lewis said to my good friend, the rock and roller Marshall Chapman, which she did not, and which I did not either.) As a young woman, I was just drunk on literature, on fire with novels and poetry and writing, I’d write all night long. Now I’d say, slow down, honey. Read. Just because you like to write doesn’t mean you’ve got something to say. Know what you’re talking about. Learn about history and psychology and science and everything else in this big world. It’s not all novels. And don’t throw yourself into everything so much, don’t fall in love all the time, don’t get married so fast . . . slow down. Life is long.

How did you manage to achieve the delicate balance of writing about both great joys and deep sorrow, such as the death of your son?
Thanks but I don’t think I’ve achieved “that delicate balance,” though I’m always trying, and I believe that the writing itself keeps me up on the tightrope. Writing is inherently therapeutic. It can be a source of nourishment and strength for us all. Simply to line up words one after another upon a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of our lives.

Writing is an addiction, you say, and early in a project you feel a "dangerous, exhilarating sense that anything can happen." What's been the most surprising thing to happen during your writing?
So many surprising things have happened during my writing that I don’t know where to start. Thing is, if a character really does “come to life” on the page as you write, she’s liable to do anything. Anything! Mine are always having religious fits or running off with men.

During the writing of Dimestore, the wonderful surprise has been that the more I wrote, the more I remembered—and at my age, memory is the best gift of all.

What's on your reading list these days?
Well, right now these books are not only on my reading list but actually on my bedside table: wildly different one from another, I just realized. But all fascinating. OK, here we go:

• American Housewife, stories by Helen Ellis, which I just finished—wild, hilarious, dark and subversive stories satirizing young American domesticity.
• The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All by the extraordinary poet C.D. (Carolyn) Wright, who recently died much too soon.
• Binocular Vision, stories by Edith Pearlman, just knocking me out. I have never read her before.
• The novel Stoner, by John Williams, kind of a cult book which people swear by and I haven’t read yet.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dimestore.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 2007, Elisha Cooper experienced one of those life-changing moments that every parent prays they never face. He had taken his nearly 5-year-old daughter to a Chicago Cubs game on a beautiful summer day when he happened to reach his arm around her torso and feel an unusual bump under her ribs.

Cooper wasn’t initially alarmed, but ensuing doctor’s appointments revealed that Zoë had a rare kidney cancer known as Wilms’ tumor. Happily, Zoë got better and is now a healthy, vibrant 13-year-old. But during the aftermath of that fateful day—surgery, chemotherapy and years of appointments to ensure that the cancer didn’t recur—Cooper says he “fell apart.” He chronicles his memories of that difficult time in his spare and heartfelt memoir, Falling: A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back.

Before that discovery, life had seemed idyllic. Cooper wrote and illustrated children’s and adult books while helping care for Zoë and her younger sister, Mia. The paperback version of his book about Zoë’s first year was being released: Crawling: A Father’s First Year. The family was scheduled to move to New York City in just two weeks, where Cooper’s wife, Elise Cappella, would start teaching psychology at New York University.

Suddenly, however, a shadow loomed over their busy life. In a phone conversation from his home in New York City, Cooper gives an admiring nod to Zoë’s unfaltering courage: “Here’s this girl who’s 5 and 6 and 7 years old and going through this thing, and she’s being tough. And meanwhile, I’m falling apart, because it was devastating to have that kind of worry. So I was always smiling, but I was not smiling inside.”

Cooper didn’t begin to write about the ordeal until after Zoë’s four- and five-year checkups came back clear. “It was then that I could almost take a breath,” he says, adding, “And, this is a ‘good’ cancer. That’s something I’m still very aware of. Most kids are OK with this cancer and survive it, although 40 years ago, that wasn’t the case. But we were in a clinic where there were kids who were not surviving, and I’m always very aware of those parents who went through that heartache. I can’t even imagine that.”

Cooper began to process his own emotions as he wrote Falling, mostly at a table in New York City’s Stumptown Café in the Ace Hotel. “The good thing about this space,” he explains, “is that it’s very dark. I would go there and cry really. Not cry—I would go and write and get weepy. This was a book-length attempt to use words to try to make sense of something.”

Even now, years later, it can still be difficult for Cooper to discuss an experience so close to his heart. As he and I chat on the phone, I read out loud one of the many fine passages in his book: “The words ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ work for some; the words that worked for me were ‘laughter’ and ‘thanks.’ I like ‘beauty’ and ‘hope’ too, as they speak to the best in us.”

When I finish, there’s a long pause on his end of the phone.

“Thank you. It’s kind of amazing to hear those words. . . . I got weepy a lot writing this, as you can imagine. Probably around sentences like that. Sorry.”

After another pause, he elaborates, “As much as I like fighting and battling it out in sports, I had to kind of submit to something here, at least to find some type of patience, which I really don’t normally in my life. And I was kind of thinking about how words are saving—words from people whom I loved or finding words within myself that made me feel better.”

“Consider having a day that asks the question, Will your child live?” 

After Zoë’s surgery and chemotherapy, years of watchful waiting were necessary, involving periodic scans to make sure that the cancer hadn’t returned. “Consider having a day that asks the question, Will your child live?” he writes. “Then repeat that day every three months.”

Cooper hated those appointments, which intensified his worries and made him feel “angry and protective and wild.” At times he found himself erupting in unexpected explosions, which he describes unflinchingly in Falling. One winter, when a sports car nearly hit him as he biked through Manhattan, Cooper retaliated by punching the car until he broke its side mirror. He groans when I bring up the incident.

“That was one of the harder things to write,” Cooper admits. “That was just crazy. Why did I do that? I’m still incredibly embarrassed. I think it was a moment after that when I realized I can’t go on being this upset. But was it all because of Zoë and her cancer? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

His anger has subsided, and life now brims with cheerful details, like making pasta sauce for dinner, getting Zoë to soccer practice or taking Mia to lessons at the American School of Ballet. And Cooper can’t wait to present copies of his new book to the nurses and doctors who treated Zoë, most especially to oncologist Dr. Alice Lee at New York Presbyterian.

“I have so much appreciation for her,” he says, “both for being a scientist, and whip smart, and for doing all the things that she did, but also for being incredibly caring. Everybody there at the oncology department was.”

Cooper carefully anticipates the readings he’ll be giving from his new book. “I’m going to be talking to people who have undergone or are undergoing some worry or pain in their lives,” he notes. “And I just want to be present for people who read this book.”

Before ending our conversation, I mention one of Cooper’s children’s books, Homer, which he wrote and illustrated during Zoë’s illness and recovery. Cooper describes Homer as being about an old dog who “sits on the porch and worries about his family.”

“Later,” he says, “I realized, yeah, that old dog was me.”

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

"Oh hi,” Clay Byars says, answering the phone at his home in what he calls “horse and cow country” in Shelby, Alabama, about an hour south of Birmingham. “How are you?”

The fact that 43-year-old Byars is giving a phone interview is nothing short of a miracle, given that he nearly died not once, but twice—in a pair of events that he chronicles in the intensely powerful memoir Will & I. Not much has been easy since, he writes: “Actions as simple as brushing my teeth, shaving and showering all begin with the question ‘How am I going to do this?’ ” 

Writing remained one of the few things he could still accomplish without struggle and quickly became “a healing obsession.” Telling his story, however, proved to be anything but easy. 

“I figure that with all the different drafts,” Byars says, “I’ve probably been working on it for about 15 years. So it’s been a while.”

In 1992, during his sophomore year at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, Byars was riding in a car with friends when an oncoming car veered into their lane. Byars likely would have died at the scene had not a passing motorist removed a piece of broken jaw from his airway. Additional injuries included nerve damage to his right shoulder that left him unable to bend his elbow.

Meanwhile, his identical twin brother, Will, was hours away, back at home in Birmingham, studying for a test and unaware of the accident. Just before midnight, though, Will was suddenly awakened by a throbbing pain in his jaw. 

“We’ve had incidents like that throughout our lives,” Byars says. “People used to ask us what it’s like to be a twin. My response was always, what’s it like to not be a twin? So I didn’t think much of Will’s jaw pain at the time of my wreck.”

Tragically, things went from bad to worse. About nine months later, a New Orleans neurosurgeon nicked Byars’ vertebral artery while attempting to repair the nerve damage, causing him to have a massive stroke. For several weeks, he experienced Locked-In Syndrome, leaving his brain unable to communicate with his body. 

“It was a weird feeling,” Byars remembers, “and it’s sometimes hard to think about that now. The best way to describe it is having one dream inside of another and waking up, but not being fully awake yet from the first dream.”

Byars says the neurosurgeon continued to practice, eventually retiring. When Byars’ parents tried to sue, the surgeon was so respected that other doctors weren’t willing to testify against him. He never apologized, but Byar says, “I kind of understand why he didn’t. He didn’t want to make himself liable.”

The initial prognosis was dire, with the best-case scenario that he would remain paralyzed from his eyes down. Will recognized that his brother was “conscious and trapped,” which was unbearable to witness, so he said nothing and left. To others, Will’s reactions might have seemed abrupt, but Byars understood, writing, “Every stage of life we’d gone through not just together but as a unit, as a unity.”

Ever so slowly, Byars began to regain movement, first in his right leg and right thumb. While others rejoiced, hoping that Byars would recover fully, Will held no such illusions, and once again, quickly left his brother’s hospital room. “He didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t speak,” Byars writes.

After months of physical and occupational therapy and workouts at a nearby gym and on his home elliptical, Byars never did fully recover, but today, he walks, drives and lives independently. His vocal cords were left extremely weak, and he’s been taking singing lessons for a number of years, trying to strengthen his “head-injury voice.”

As he explains in his memoir: “I like being able to do things I’m not supposed to do. . . . According to my MRI, I should have been more or less a vegetable.”

The “Will” in Will & I refers not only to his twin brother, but to Byars’ own incredible will, something that he understood anew while still in the hospital, in what he describes as a “liberating flash of vision.” Both of these “wills,” it turns out, have remained essential to his survival.

Undeterred by his vocal problems, Byars is an engaging communicator. In addition to our phone conversation, he answers follow-up questions by email and shares a letter he wrote to Will about his hospital vision, which he later understood to have been the Zen experience of satori, or enlightened consciousness. “It wasn’t a near-death experience,” he wrote. “On the contrary; it was the greatest affirmation of life I’ve ever felt.” 

Byars eventually finished college, and he now writes short stories and serves as an assistant editor for Narrative magazine. Will ended up marrying Byars’ high school girlfriend, and Byars eats dinner with the couple and their three daughters each week. “In many ways, our relationship hasn’t changed since the wreck,” Byars explains in his book. “We are no longer physically equal, but we are more open with each other than we used to be.”

When asked if he ever feels jealous of Will, Byars responds, “Sometimes I’m envious of the ease with which he can do things that take me hours, if I can do them at all, but on the whole, no.”

Byars’ first attempt to write his story took the form of fiction, but he deemed the storytelling ineffective and too linear. He kept at it, though, eventually attending the Sewanee School of Letters to work with writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, who suggested that he weave his voice lessons into the tale and who also helped him pare down his manuscript. “We went over it line by line, working for about three months,” Byars remembers.

The result is compact, substantial and thoroughly compelling—reminiscent of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s posthumous bestseller, When Breath Becomes Air. While Kalanithi addressed the prospect of his impending death from cancer, Byars tackles the question of facing an immensely compromised life. 

When I suggest that Byars read Kalanithi’s book, he does, later emailing to tell me how much he admires it, and adding, “I wish he’d been my neurosurgeon.”

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

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.