For members of the Nashville literary community, Margaret Renkl is something of a hometown hero: beloved naturalist writer and memoirist; New York Times opinion writer on Southern issues and the natural world; and the founding editor of Chapter 16, Humanities Tennessee’s online literary journal. Humanities Tennessee also hosts the Southern Festival of Books, which Renkl will attend as an author for the first time with her astounding memoir, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.

What’s it like to be part of the Southern Festival of Books as an author after so many years from the other side?
I haven’t found the words yet to describe what it will mean to me to wear a nametag at the Southern Festival of Books that says “Author” under my name. I’ve been in Nashville for 32 years, almost exactly the same number of years the festival has existed, so this event always feels like a family reunion to me, but this year will be so special. More like a homecoming, a family reunion and a wedding dance all at the same time.

What is the mark of a really great book event?
One thing I’ve learned this year is just how many different kinds of great book events there are, but the one thing they all seem to have in common is community. A great book event links all the parts of the literary ecosystem together under one roof (or one tent). It’s a gift to everybody involved when all the people who love books—readers and writers and publishing people and booksellers and teachers and librarians—can meet each other in real life and not just online.

What have you most enjoyed about interacting with the readership of Late Migrations?
It’s been wonderful to hear readers tell their own stories—stories of family love, stories of deep loss, stories of the natural world in their own backyards. Writing is solitary work, often isolating work, but meeting readers reminds me that we’re all in this world together, all doing the best we can. And that we have more in common than we ever truly understand.

“Writing is solitary work, often isolating work, but meeting readers reminds me that we’re all in this world together, all doing the best we can.”

If you could sit in the audience for an event with any author, living or dead, who would you like to see read from and discuss their book?
I would give almost anything to be in the audience at the Globe Theater, watching Shakespeare’s words brought to life by his own acting company. If I get to choose the play, too, it’s King Lear.

What have you learned about your book through your interactions with its readers that you didn’t know before it was published?
There are all kinds of deliberate connections in this book—ways I tried to knit ideas and worlds together, ways I hoped certain words or images would echo across the book—but I’ve been surprised by how many connections other people have found that weren’t deliberate at all. Maybe they’re happy accidents, or maybe I created the connections unconsciously, but either way it’s been a delight to have readers point them out to me.

And of course, we need some Alabama content! Roll Tide or War Eagle?
I’m a proud graduate of Auburn University, Class of 1984. War damn eagle, as they say in the loveliest village!

White sauce or BBQ sauce?
White sauce is barbecue sauce where I come from. And it’s the best of all the barbecue sauces.

Harper Lee or Truman Capote?
Wait, these are getting harder. I don’t have a favorite child, and I don’t have a favorite home-state writer. I love them both.

The Louvin Brothers or Hank Williams?
Give me “the Hillbilly Shakespeare” any day. Hank Williams was a poet.

Yellowhammers or eastern tiger swallowtails?
See the Lee-Capote question above. I truly can’t possibly choose between birds and butterflies.

Pecans or pawpaws?
Pecans. I spent half my childhood playing in my grandparents’ pecan orchard, and the very smell of a cracked pecan brings that whole beautiful world right back to me in an instant.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Late Migrations.

Author photo by Heidi Ross

Cassie Chambers grew up helping her grandparents sharecrop on a tobacco farm in Owsley County, Kentucky, one of the poorest counties in America. She went on to graduate from Yale College and Harvard Law School, eventually returning to Kentucky to work with domestic violence survivors in rural communities. Her memoir, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, celebrates the amazingly resilient women in her family and the beloved mountain culture that helped shape her.

What discoveries surprised you most as you wrote this book, in regards to both your family’s past and your thoughts about the places where you grew up?
When I first started writing this book, I thought I was going to come out of it with a lot of answers about the challenges facing Appalachia. But I was surprised by how few answers I had at the end of writing. The more I delved into the issues facing Appalachia, the more complicated they seemed. There are so many competing concerns that we need to balance, and there aren’t easy solutions to a lot of these problems. But I think acknowledging this complexity is important, and it’s only when you understand how multifaceted a lot of these issues are that you can really begin the process of solving them.

How wonderfully you write about the women in your family, especially your strong Granny, your steadfast Aunt Ruth and your amazing mother. Did your mother get a chance to read your manuscript?
She did. I am so grateful that she was able to read a draft of the book shortly before she died. I still have the copy I gave her to read with her handwritten comments in the margins. She told me that she felt like a “proud hill woman” after reading it. So much of the book is her story, and I’m glad that she felt pride in the way I portrayed her amazing life.

What thoughts go through your head when you visit the now-vacant farmhouse in Cow Creek where you once helped your family? In the book you write, “Over time I’ve come to feel more like a grateful visitor than a true resident.”
It always amazes me how little changes over time. The house still looks very much the way I remember it—only a bit more worn around the edges—even though it has now sat vacant for years. I think that’s part of why that visual image brings back such strong memories for me. There’s something special about returning to that place where I—and so many women in my family—made so many memories.

You said that despite the fact that Yale was progressive, it felt “like a place where men belonged more than women, where male voices mattered a bit more than female ones.” Do you think that’s still the case?
I haven’t spent time on campus recently to know whether I would still feel that way. But I do think it’s true that powerful institutions in general are still places where male voices are often heard more than female voices. But I think women are increasingly pushing back on that status quo and claiming a space for female voices. I think that’s a good thing.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Hill Women.

An ex-boyfriend once screamed at you, “I’m something. I matter. You’re nothing but a redneck from a redneck family. You don’t even matter.” Do you still find that certain people dismiss Appalachian residents as soon as they hear their accents or learn where they’re from?
I definitely think that’s still the case. I’ve lost my Eastern Kentucky accent over the years, but I still see the way my relatives with heavy accents are treated. I think people still have strong stereotypes about people from Appalachia. I’ve had people tell me, “There’s nothing interesting that happens in the mountains.” I know that’s not true, and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book: I wanted to show folks the creativity, intelligence and grit that exists in the Appalachian mountains.

What was it like meeting the Queen of England, and how did that happen?
It was definitely a top-ten life experience! She met with some young people on scholarships while I was living in London, and I got to spend about 30 seconds talking to her as a part of a reception. I practiced my curtsey for days beforehand, but I still messed it up!

You write that when you started working at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, “I had spent the past several years pretending that I fit perfectly into the privileged environments I found myself in. Now I was curious to see what it would feel like to acknowledge the mountain roots and impoverished background I’d ignored for so long.” Do you felt like the Bureau is where you discovered your calling?
I do. I’m someone who’s motivated by being able to make a tangible, visible difference in my community. The work I did at the Bureau helped me realize that about myself. I loved being able to work with women one-on-one and provide them with the resources they needed to be able to make their lives better. It was incredibly rewarding work.

You proudly write of Appalachian women that, “when given the right tools, support, and environment, these women are capable of changing the world.” What initiatives fill you with hope, and what obstacles worry you most about women in this region?
It always amazes me to see all the varied ways that Appalachian women are making their communities better, from starting community garden initiatives, to launching small businesses, to running for office to be a part of the decision-making process. So long as these women have the right resources, they can be successful change agents in their communities. It’s just a matter of making sure that they have the resources they need.

It always amazes me to see all the varied ways that Appalachian women are making their communities better, from starting community garden initiatives, to launching small businesses, to running for office to be a part of the decision-making process.

You write, “After November 2016, I realized in a whole new way that elections mattered. It wasn’t enough to save the world one family at a time.” Any thoughts on healing the political divide in this country, especially in states like Kentucky, during the upcoming presidential election year? How are you involved?
I think a lot can be accomplished if people just take time to listen—especially to those they disagree with. It’s possible to disagree with someone and still have a civil, productive conversation about important issues. I try to practice that myself and not get caught up in the “us vs. them” mentality that is so common in politics.

And I just took a big step toward being involved in a different way—I put my name on the ballot to run for Metro Council in my community! I grew up seeing women dive in to make a difference, and I decided that this was a role that would let me follow in those footsteps. Running for office with a young child is definitely an adventure, but I’m having a great time so far and learning so much about the needs of my community.

Are some people still nervous when they discover you’re “one of those political people”?
I think a lot of people are distrustful of politics because they feel that political systems haven’t worked for them. And in a lot of communities, people feel like political decision-making is something that’s done “to” them rather than “by” them. Although some folks are still wary when I tell them about my political involvement, I find that a lot of that dissipates once we sit down and have a conversation. At the end of the day, most people just want to know that you’re a straight-shooter who will keep promises.

Your mom died the day after you finished this book, and then months later your son was born. What an overwhelming collision of accomplishment, grief and joy. Do you feel your mother’s presence as you deliver her story to the world?
I do. It’s incredibly hard not having her here to be a part of this book making its way into the world. I know that she was looking forward to its release and that she would be so excited right now. But I do feel like she’s proudly looking on. And I’m trying to live each day in a way that honors her memory and legacy. She taught me to love fiercely, advocate tirelessly and remember to stop and have some fun along the way.

Have you met Ashley York and seen her wonderful documentary Hillbilly about the area where she grew up in Kentucky? I read your book soon after seeing that film, and the two make wonderful companion pieces.
A lot of folks have told me that! I haven’t met Ashley yet (having a 5-month-old baby has kept me busy the past few months!), but I would love to. From what I hear, she and I would have a lot to chat about. The more women who are out there talking about Kentucky, the better!

Author photo © Nathan Cornetet, Fusion Photography

As Bess Kalb shares anecdotes about her beloved grandmother from her West Coast home, an odd thing happens outside the window of her East Coast interviewer’s home. A bright red cardinal appears on the branch of a nearby tree, a sudden splash of color against the snowy landscape. Some believe a cardinal’s arrival symbolizes a visit from a departed loved one—and readers of Kalb’s poignant, often hilarious tribute to her late grandmother, Nobody Will Tell You This but Me, will likely agree that if any spirit would have that sort of power, Bobby Bell’s would.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Kalb agrees. “I like to think she would come back as a fabulous bird in her perfect shade of red lipstick.”

Kalb, an Emmy-nominated comedy writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” explains that the inspiration for the book began at her grandmother’s funeral. “I was wondering what she would think about all of this,” Kalb recalls. “As a way to just make it through the grueling ordeal of a beloved family member’s funeral, I had a running commentary in my head from her as she was lying feet away from me. I was hearing her go, ‘Oh, God. Look at how much they’re shoveling.’”

“My grandma was opinionated because she had some really great opinions.”

Bobby Bell was such a beloved force of nature that when she died at age 90 in 2017, she had two funerals—one in New York, where she spent much of her life, and another in Massachusetts, where she is buried. “At both of those services,” Kalb says, “I delivered a eulogy in her voice. It was a way to bring her back right away and to let her speak for herself. I thought the most appropriate way to do it was to give her the last word.”

At one service, Kalb read the transcript of a voicemail from her grandmother, recalling how, when Kalb was an infant, Bobby would fly from Florida to New York each week to care for her while Kalb’s mother, a physician, worked. “It was actually two voicemails because she was interrupted halfway through by a call waiting, which she would always take,” Kalb says. At the other service, Kalb delivered “a more freewheeling description” of how her grandmother repeatedly waited beside her preschool door in an effort to calm her fearful, 4-year-old self. 

After the funeral, Kalb continued to write in her grandmother’s voice. And once, while speaking by phone with her grandfather, Kalb began impersonating her grandmother, telling him what his wife would have said. “He just got quiet,” Kalb says. “I remember thinking, if I can make her feel present again for him, then maybe there is something to this.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Nobody Will Tell You This but Me.

fter challenging herself to write Bobby’s story in Bobby’s own voice, Kalb emailed a sample to her literary agent, who responded enthusiastically. “And lo and behold,” Kalb recalls, “those 40 pages are the first 40 pages of the book.”

This lively, unique book describes Bobby’s rags-to-riches life, beginning with a penniless birth on a dining room table in a Brooklyn tenement. Bobby’s mother (Kalb’s great-grandmother) had left her family at age 12, emigrating alone from Tsarist Russia to the United States in the face of religious persecution. Bobby and her husband, Hank (who still lectures at Columbia University), worked tirelessly, earning a fortune in real estate developments and sometimes dodging Mafia bosses. These family stories unfold in nonlinear fashion, interspersed with frequent exchanges between grandmother and granddaughter: some real, many imagined.

Kalb readily admits that her book is hard to categorize, since it isn’t truly a memoir. “I was aware of how many ethical lines I was crossing throughout. I don’t want [the book] to be taken at face value as her words and her telling of her life story. It is mine, and it is through the lens of my relationship with her. This is an act of ventriloquism more than it is reportage.”

“It ended up being a really, really therapeutic way of saying goodbye while also getting to know her again.”

As her grandmother’s “humble scribe,” Kalb spent hours with her mother and grandfather after Bobby’s death, trying to fill in any gaps in the stories she heard growing up. “It ended up being a really, really therapeutic way of saying goodbye while also getting to know her again,” Kalb says. “In many ways I feel like I understand my grandmother better than I did when she was alive. Getting inside her head and walking in her beautiful Ferragamo shoes . . . was an important way of connecting with her that I actually didn’t get to do in her life.” Kalb calls the final product a “Russian doll of a memoir, in that it’s a story within a story within a story . . . an intergenerational container for many lives.”

In the epilogue, during a brief, imagined conversation between Kalb and her grandmother, Bobby cautions, “I’m in a box in the ground. You’re putting words in my mouth. In a dead woman’s mouth.” In response, Kalb asks, “Are you angry?”

When questioned about whether she thinks her grandmother would approve, Kalb quips, “I think she’d go, ‘Oh, God. I hope somebody reads it other than your mother.’”

Ironically, Kalb’s mother—whose often fraught relationship with Bobby forms a centerpiece of the narrative—has yet to read the book, calling it “too painful.” Kalb says that after reading several pages of the manuscript, she paid her daughter’s writing perhaps the greatest compliment possible, saying, “That’s Grandma.”

This formidable grandmother was hardly shy about offering opinions, such as, “Never mind what you like—would it kill you to wear some color every once in a while? . . . Why don’t you take down my credit card number and go to Bloomingdale’s and buy yourself some nice things that aren’t morose.”

Despite such comical exchanges, Kalb asserts that her grandmother defies the stereotype of the overbearing Jewish grandmother, which Kalb says “misses the dimensionality of her character and her point of view. My grandma was opinionated because she had some really great opinions.” Kalb says her grandma’s constant guidance helped shape her as both a writer and a person. Not surprisingly, Kalb is no shrinking violet herself—in fact, President Trump blocked her on Twitter after she made a series of jokes about him.

Kalb calls her comedy writing for Jimmy Kimmel “the greatest job of my life,” adding, “I don’t think I would have been able to write this book if I didn’t have the training that I had as a daily TV writer.” Not only did she write the book while working full time, she was also pregnant with her infant son, to whom the book is dedicated—an honor he shares, of course, with Bobby.

Kalb finished writing Nobody Will Tell You This but Me with “heaving sobs,” finding it painful to once again have to say goodbye. Now, however, Kalb loves seeing her grandmother come alive for readers, saying, “It adds a whole new dimension to the reconjuring of a woman I loved.”

Not surprisingly, Kalb continues to hear her grandmother’s voice, often in dreams that she describes as “this sort of weird Grandma A.I. in my brain.” If, for example, she stresses about her baby not sleeping through the night, she hears Bobby advising, “You shut the door. You have a glass of wine. Everyone will live.” Kalb laughs, admitting she has no idea what her grandmother might actually have said on that subject.

“I think that’s what I miss most now,” Kalb continues. “I really have to sort of recobble together her wisdom from the toolkit she gave me.” 

No doubt Bobby Bell would beam proudly as her granddaughter reiterates her grief. Says Kalb, “As much as during my adolescence and teenage years, I felt like maybe I was being pushed—God, what I wouldn’t give for another push right now.”

Author photo © Lucas Foglia.

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s father came from a generation of men who didn’t cry in front of others. That’s why the anecdote in her new memoir, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, about seeing her father cry for the first time is especially poignant.

Her father was watching a TV show, and in one of the episodes, a pet bloodhound dies. The Boylans had raised many dogs themselves by this point and were no strangers to difficult goodbyes with beloved pets. Still, this death was entirely fictional. It was happening on screen, not in real life.

And yet. 

“When I turned to look at my father when the show was over, I was shocked to see that tears had rolled down his cheeks and that he was silently crying,” Boylan writes. “I had never seen my father cry before. He wiped his eyes.

“ ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s sad.’ ”

Dogs, Boylan realized, were ideal avatars for explorations of love throughout her life.

This kind of emotional display was uncommon among men not only in Boylan’s family but also in the suburban 1960s and ’70s culture in which she was raised. At the time, Boylan—many decades away from coming out as transgender—looked to the family patriarch for instructions on how to be a man. The emotional strictures of maleness that she saw all around her were already a concern. 

“When you were a kid like me, who is female at heart but no one knows that . . . you’re wondering if your father is the person who’s going to be able to show you how to be in the world,” says Boylan, now 61, from the apartment in New York City where she lives for part of the year. “The idea of being in a world where I couldn’t express emotion more effusively was going to be a challenge for me.”

The Boylans were not a touchy-feely family, she says, but a lot of love existed between them. In adulthood, Boylan has come to realize that one of the ways her family could express love and loss—and one of the ways she could express love and loss—was through their pet dogs. For example, it may be too difficult to say to an older sister who has left for college that her absence hurts. But the family dog, who is also mourning the sister’s absence, intuitively understands. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Good Boy.

Dogs, Boylan realized, were ideal avatars for explorations of love throughout her life. Good Boy begins with Boylan’s childhood as a boy in rural Pennsylvania and ends in the present day, when she is a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, married to her wife, Deedie, and the mother of two 20-somethings. Along the way, Boylan explores how dogs can teach us about all kinds of love: romantic love, familial love, love between friends and, most importantly, self-love. 

“It’s hard to talk about love without people rolling their eyes, which is just funny if you think about it, because we all know that there is probably nothing more important in the world then loving each other and expressing the love that we feel,” says Boylan. “And yet it’s the thing that we’re probably the worst at.”

Through every section of Good Boy, Boylan shares one life lesson from each of her seven dogs. Playboy, Sausage, Matt the Mutt and others taught Boylan about coping with unrequited love, learning self-respect, reconciling a lifetime of struggle with her gender identity and accepting herself in the face of widespread cultural bigotry.

“Dogs accept you for who you are, no matter who you are, when you can’t accept yourself.”

“Dogs accept you for who you are, no matter who you are, when you can’t accept yourself,” she says. That particular lesson is crucial for Boylan, who unveiled herself (a more fitting phrase than “came out,” she thinks) as transgender at age 40.

Boylan has written about her gender journey in several other memoirs, most notably 2013’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders—the first bestselling book by a transgender American. Good Boy is not exclusively about transgender issues but rather the transformative journey every human goes through in a lifetime. However, Boylan’s experiences as a trans woman, and as the parent of a trans child, are woven throughout. 

Chloe is the family’s only dog at present; she lives in Maine with Deedie while Boylan teaches at Barnard. The family adopted Chloe in 2017, at age 12, when her previous owner became ill. Eventually, it will be time to say goodbye to Chloe, too. 

“Sooner than you know, there’s this thing with a gray face that’s looking at you, saying, ‘You promised to take care of me when the time comes,’ ” Boylan says. “And then you lose the dog, and you weep your brains out.”

In fact, it’s not so different from losing the humans we love in life. “That, in miniature,” she says, “is the process that we go through again and again and again.”

Author photo © Dan Haar

We talked to Sweetbitter author Stephanie Danler about her extraordinary new memoir, Stray—why it was difficult to write, which memories haunted her and how it changed her perspective on motherhood.

What was the genesis of Stray and how long did it take you to write it?
I didn’t know that I was working on Stray when I moved back to California in the fall of 2015 and started to write about my father. A piece I wrote for Vogue that came out in February of 2016 was the beginning of me even considering writing about such personal material. Then it took another year before I wrote a piece for the Sewanee Review, and that piece was supposed to be about California and not about my family. But once I wrote that piece, I saw that the two were connected—being back in California, remembering things that I hadn’t thought about in over a decade and reckoning with my parents and myself. At that point I knew there was a book in that world.

That was 2016, and I didn’t sit down at a desk to write the first draft of this book until May of 2019. I had been collecting memories on notecards and notebooks, things that came to me that felt tender and hurt a bit to recall. And I figured that if I kept collecting those, a story would eventually present itself—which it did by the time I sat down to write. I wrote the first draft very quickly, in nine weeks, and had to go through multiple drafts after that. But I had been thinking about it for such a long time at that point, it really came out quickly. It had some urgency.

Why did you turn to memoir for this work? With the success of Sweetbitter, did you consider telling this story in a fictionalized form?
I did, all the time. Especially when I was scared, I would want to turn it into a novel. But at a certain point I committed to nonfiction because it felt really important to me that, if you’re going to say hurtful things about people you love—and not hurtful as in mean-spirited; hurtful because they are true and secrets—then I think you owe it to the reader and to the parties involved to tell the truth, and for the reader not to have any question of whether I added this scene where my mother hit me in order to heighten the tension. The material I was dealing with didn’t need any embellishment. However, it would have been a lot less painful to write it as a novel, I think.

What were the challenges in making the transition from fiction to memoir?
Being bound by the facts is really hard. Making a satisfying story out of something as chaotic as lived experience is really challenging. When you’re writing a book, you are creating a world, and when you’re writing nonfiction, that world is yourself; you are the foundation of that world, and it makes you feel vulnerable pretty much all of the time. I didn’t get that feeling of control that I have in fiction writing.

With Sweetbitter, I wanted to write about big abstract things. I wanted to write a subversive female coming of age, and I wanted to write about being 22, and I wanted to write about family and the workplace, and with Stray, I couldn’t even think in the abstract. I was just trying to tell my story sentence by sentence. I still don’t even know what Stray is about really, in an overarching way—but that might just be me. That might not be the case for all nonfiction writers.

I hope that I can just tell my story and through my story say that you can change your life.

In Stray, you write, “I want to stop writing things I’ve only said out loud to a handful of people, most of them paid professionals.” How hard was it to write this book?
It was very hard. I think initially it was hard because children of alcoholics are trained from birth to be secret keepers. I had a lot of pride in my ability to keep secrets, as evidenced by the love story in this book about an affair I had with a married man. And I took a lot of pride in being able to stoically bear my pain, and pride in my coping mechanisms. And so to me, telling my story was weakness. It was complaining. It was navel-gazing and self-absorption. I went through a long period of time when I thought the story wasn’t worth anything, that it wasn’t bad enough—that the abuse wasn’t bad enough, that the neglect wasn’t bad enough. All of that is really, really common in adult children of alcoholics.

The next part that was really hard was spending time writing about such a dark period in my life and such dark memories while having a newborn. I would come out of the office to nurse and feel like I wasn’t there—like I was still in 2015 or in high school—and I would look at this miraculous baby and this life that I created for myself and think, well this isn’t possible because the woman in that book is about to self-destruct. She could never have these things. And so the day to day, the actual writing, was really hard. I remember reading an interview with Mary Karr where she said that when she was writing The Liars’ Club, she would nap on the floor in the middle of writing sessions like a trucker. I had a very small child, so I wasn’t able to nap in the same way, but that level of exhaustion and despair was really hard to live with.

Stray has a distinctly episodic structure. What led you to organize the book in that fashion, rather than a more linear narrative?
I think that memory works in an episodic, emerging-from-the-unconscious fashion. We don’t remember our lives linearly. Sometimes when we tell a story at the dinner table, we will make it into something linear because that’s the easiest way for people to digest it. But when I was back in California, having all these memories come back and haunt me, they weren’t haunting me in a particular order, per se. And I wanted to reflect that in the form. I’m also really drawn to this imagistic structure, in which I try to expose a moment as completely as possible and then move away from it, which is something that poets do so beautifully. There is a way to tell this story linearly, but I don’t think that you would feel the impact of it in quite the same way.

One of the most impressive aspects of the book is its atmosphere, especially the scenes in nature in California. How important was it to you to evoke that atmosphere?
Such a huge part of returning home was rediscovering this state as an adult and feeling like there were traces of my own personal trauma embedded all over, sort of like landmines. But there was also so much I didn’t know. Part of meeting the Love Interest in the book (my now-husband, Matt) was seeing California through a new set of eyes. Growing up, I always believed that the desert was ugly. But being taken there by someone who has a different lens on the world, who isn’t troubled by his past or trauma, and seeing the desert with new eyes—that is why I live here. That transition that I go through in the book is how I discovered my home again and made some peace with it. I also think there’s a volatility to Southern California that’s embedded in me—a sort of distrust and fear or awareness of the natural world, and I didn’t realize that this is where it came from. It came from this environment.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Stray.

For a variety of reasons (including your mother’s brain aneurysm that left her disabled), your parents were unreliable sources. How did you approach that problem from a narrative standpoint?
The entire book was always going to be about my experiences and not about trying to imagine their lives. I love memoirs that do that—Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance comes to mind—but I didn’t want to investigate. I could have called all of my aunts, all of my cousins, any living grandparents, my mother’s ex-boyfriends, and really tried to figure out who they were. But the book is more concerned with their absence. It’s about grieving them and accepting the loss of them and accepting in some ways the loss of the potential to know them. In my mother’s case, she changed so drastically after her brain aneurysm and lost her memory. And in my father’s case, he hasn’t earned the privilege of us knowing each other yet. So I didn’t need to piece together who they were, but I do wonder throughout the book what were their joys, and what were their private conversations, and what did they want when they were my age, and what was it like for my mother to become a mother. The fact that those things are not available is very common. A lot of people never get that from their parents, whether because their parents pass or because they simply aren’t capable of sharing these things. So that felt truer to the book.

At one point you write, “God, how I envy my mother’s lack of memory.” That’s a striking statement for a memoirist. Can you comment on the irony of that statement?
Later in the book, my sister and I wonder if our mother is happy, and I reflect that states like being happy or sad are sort of ancillary, or unnecessarily existential, because she just is. She just is. The days are the same to her. She has little frustrations, and she has little moments of victory like all of us do, but she doesn’t want anything anymore, and she’s not living in the past or the future. There's something about that that really appeals to me—that seems much more peaceful than the extremely heady, neurotic existence that I’m currently in. I’m not saying that I would prefer to be brain damaged, but I do think that memory sometimes is a hindrance. The stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re capable of doing can limit us in the present. I think that’s what I meant when I wrote that line.

Did your perspective on your family’s predicament evolve over the course of writing this book?
Yes. Having Julian, my son, and starting the memoir so shortly after he was born, my view on my mother naturally changed. As I thought about my mother’s hope and all of her expectations as she married my father and did what she had been told since childhood she was supposed to do, which is get married and have children, and being 24 years old and not really knowing herself and then being a single mother of two kids by the time she was 28—I don’t know how she did it. I don’t know that I’m capable of that level of sacrifice. I don’t know that it wouldn’t make me as angry as it made her. So I think the easiest way to put it is that I have more empathy for her—but it’s not even empathy, because I can’t imagine it. It widened this misunderstanding between us because, God willing, I will never be able to imagine that life. And even if for some reason I did end up a single mother, I would have started when I was 35 and not 24. I can’t know how she kept going.

I’m constantly learning. The best part of being a writer is getting to read.

What did you learn about yourself from writing this book?
I learned first that I’m not my parents—which has been haunting me since I was fairly young, that I would become them. But I’m not an alcoholic or a crystal meth addict. I don’t plan on becoming either one of those things.

I also learned that the mistakes I will make as a mother and as a partner and as a friend and a writer will be new and my own. It won’t be their mistakes. When I look at my son, there are certain things that I’m very relieved he won’t have to experience, but then again . . . to be determined what his journey will be. In a way, it’s not up to me. You can give your kids absolutely everything and sacrifice your life for them and still not get to be in control of their story, which is terrifying. But there’s a certain amount of relief to have arrived at motherhood and be able to say, OK, I’m not going to make those mistakes that my parents made—at least not those specific ones.

Stray will not be easy reading for anyone with a family member who’s an addict. What do you hope such readers will take away from your book?
I don’t have a takeaway. And I think that’s part of the reason I never wanted to write a memoir, because they often have really cathartic turning points that are prescriptive—and I love that, I need that, please tell me how to live—but I don’t have that for readers. Instead, I hope that I can just tell my story and through my story say that you can change your life. It is possible.

When it comes to nonfiction, who are some of your literary role models?
I was thinking a lot about people who do both—people who write novels and write nonfiction and do both well. The obvious choices are Joan Didion and James Baldwin in the 20th century. Those are the titans that really mastered both forms. I really admire Dani Shapiro, who is also able to do both, and Carmen Maria Machado, who is a brilliant fiction writer and maybe an even more brilliant nonfiction writer. I loved her book In the Dream House. Rachel Cusk does both really well. There are so many. I’m constantly learning. The best part of being a writer is getting to read.

What’s your next project?
Before the world fell apart via Covid, I was working on a novel. I find it very hard to sustain that focus right now. And happily I have a lot of work to do promoting Stray and pivoting from a tangible, physical tour to thinking instead about what we can do in the digital space and how I can connect with my readers. So that’s the perfect kind of work for this time because it’s busy work and it feels vaguely productive. I also have some scripts I’m working on. I always have many projects going at once, which I think you have to if you’re going to make a living as an artist. So I’m excited. I think if my brain can get there, I would be excited to go back to working on that novel.

Author photo credit Emily Knecht

My phone interview with the 19th poet laureate of the United States happens just days after a series of national tragedies: the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade at the hands of police officers, crimes that have plunged the world—and Black communities in particular—into grief and rage. These circumstances momentarily shift the direction of our interview, and it is Natasha Trethewey who asks the first pointed question: “How are you holding up?” Her voice is rich with an accent that reminds me of home (we both grew up in states along the Gulf Coast), but it’s also tinged with something else: the bone-deep knowledge of what it means to survive violent, life-shattering loss.

Trethewey has spent much of her career studying tragedies of both national and personal scale, and her seventh book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, is no different. It chronicles the life and death of her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who was murdered by her second ex-­husband, Joel Grimmette Jr., in 1985. Though several of Trethewey’s poetry collections deal with the subject of her mother’s murder (in particular Native Guard, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007), Memorial Drive is the poet’s first memoir.

The prologue begins with a description of Turnbough’s last professionally taken photograph, in which her black dress is so indistinguishable from the background that her face appears to emerge from darkness “as from the depths of memory.” What follows is a haunting exploration of memory—unpredictable, incomplete and at times obfuscating—through the metaphor of negative space, the area around a subject. Interwoven with the book’s chapters are breathtakingly short vignettes in which Trethewey recalls dreamscapes where her mother is still alive, sometimes older than she was at the time of her death. In the vignette that precedes the first chapter, a piercing light shines from a bullet wound in the center of her mother’s forehead, ringing her face in utter darkness as she asks Trethewey, “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?” 

“I can tell you how remarkable my mother was, and resilient, and strong, and rational. Or I can show you.”

The chapters vary drastically in length, from single pages to much longer ones like “Evidence,” which includes transcripts of Turnbough’s final conversations with the man who would kill her only a few days later. During our call, Trethewey explains that she included these because, even when she’s recalling her own painful past, she is, at heart, a historian. “I’m someone who likes documentary evidence,” she says from her home outside Chicago. “I can tell you how remarkable my mother was, and resilient, and strong, and rational. Or I can show you.”

Memorial Drive achieves all of the above, and the reader’s knowledge of how the story will end does nothing to detract from the beauty of its narrative. Trethewey’s life began in racially segregated Gulfport, Mississippi, where she spent her early years surrounded by her mother’s large family in a town that often treated her parents’ interracial union with open hostility. Nevertheless, she lived happily, doted on by great-aunts, uncles and her young mother, with whom she spent time alone as her father pursued graduate studies in New Orleans.

Tall and graceful, Gwendolyn Turnbough was a stylish, creative woman who made her own clothes and eagerly supported her daughter’s ambitions. For instance, when they moved to Atlanta shortly after Turnbough’s first divorce, a dark space beneath the stairs in their new apartment frightened young Trethewey until her mother transformed it into a playroom planetarium, complete with a desk, books and a velvet cloth sky with stars made from cardboard and aluminum foil. Years later, when Trethewey shared with the family her dreams of being a writer and her stepfather told her it would never happen, Turnbough openly defied him with the full knowledge of the abuse she might later suffer. “She. Will do. WHATEVER. She wants,” she told him in front of their two children. In every instance, Turnbough worked to make use of the spaces available to her daughter, ensuring that they were nurturing and, when possible, safe. “In some ways,” Trethewey says, “all of my relationship with my mother, up to losing her, was shaping me. I think that the love I had from her gave me the kind of resilience that could help me survive losing her.” 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Memorial Drive.

And yet, in spite of Turnbough’s efforts, the Atlanta years mapped out in Memorial Drive are warped by violence. Trethewey describes Grimmette’s physical abuse of her mother, but also his secret torture of Trethewey herself when the two of them were alone. Grimmette would force her to pack her things, then take her for long drives along Interstate 285, threatening to abandon her at every turn. On another occasion, he broke the lock on her diary and read its contents, after which Trethewey began addressing her entries to him, sometimes with explosive language.

When asked about writing to her stepfather in that diary, which her mother purchased in an attempt to offer her a private place to process her thoughts, Trethewey laughs. “I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew that if I did this, that it would be between us, and it would be this way that I could push back. It wasn’t until much later, once I became a writer, that I began to think about it as a defining moment in terms of me having an audience, or imagining that I was writing for someone to read it. I think that it had everything to do with the writer I became.” This destruction of privacy transformed Trethewey’s personal space into a public one, and the poet began speaking truth to power.

Trethewey’s loss of her mother shortly after turning 19, however, is the point at which she believes the second half of her life began; Turnbough’s death split her daughter’s life into two parts, much like the book itself. “I became a whole other person,” Trethewey tells me. “That’s why I structured things as ‘before’ and ‘after.’ The hardest thing to acknowledge sometimes is I don’t know who I’d be without her death. If you were to say to me, ‘She could come back right now, we could undo that,’ it would mean I’d be the one gone. I don’t know who would be here.” Again, what is missing highlights what is left.

Memorial Drive makes clear that the dead are more than their absence, the blank space where there was once a body, a life.

This admission reminds Trethewey of a moment that took place shortly after Turnbough escaped her abusive marriage. During a Friday night football game, Grimmette appeared in the stands as Trethewey stood with the other cheerleaders on the field. When she saw him, she waved, and only later discovered that he’d planned to shoot her that night as punishment for her mother leaving. Near the end of this section in Memorial Drive, Trethewey writes that, theoretically, her mother’s murder would have been impossible had Grimmette killed her first, a sentiment she echoes during our call. “For a long time, it felt to me like I had traded my life for hers,” she explains. 

However, loss and self-preservation are never mutually exclusive, and Memorial Drive makes clear that the dead are more than their absence, the blank space where there was once a body, a life. The book ends with the singular image of Turnbough’s still-beating heart, a choice that was influenced by a trip Trethewey took to South Korea. Over the phone, she paraphrases what a local poet told her during her visit. “One does not bury the mother’s body in the ground, but in the chest. Or, like you,” he said, turning to her, “you carry her corpse on your back.” Trethewey admits the observation was, at first, deeply painful, but over the years it has come to represent the ways her mother’s death and life live on. “I have planted my mother like a seed in my chest, in my heart—that’s the living mother,” Trethewey tells me. “The memory of my living mother grows every day; it continues to grow. And I carry her corpse on my back at the same time. And I wouldn’t dare put it down, and don’t want to.”

Poet Destiny O. Birdsong is author of the forthcoming collection Negotiations (Tin House).

Author photo © Nancy Crampton

For Vicki Laveau-Harvie, raw emotion has no place in the act of writing a memoir, even one as harrowing as The Erratics. “I believe really sincerely that I won’t write anything that will have an impact for other people if I’m not paying attention to craft, if I’m writing it in the heat of emotion,” the author says in a call to her home in Sydney, Australia. “That would be like reading somebody’s diary. That’s not as interesting as memoir.”

The Erratics is anything but uninteresting. Rather than a way to release emotional pain, its careful and artful creation was an opportunity to explore a constellation of life events that had long resisted Laveau-Harvie’s efforts to commit them to the page. Readers who can relate to her story will find comfort in knowing that there are others who understand what they’ve endured. Those who cannot imagine such goings-on will have their eyes opened to what it might be like to have a father who seemed to lack any protective instincts and a mother who relished telling her children, “I’ll get you and you won’t even know I’m doing it.”

After surviving a traumatic childhood, Laveau-Harvie left her home in Canada to attend university in France, where she remained for 27 years until she and her husband and children moved to Australia in 1988. In 2006, Laveau-Harvie’s elderly mother broke her hip and was hospitalized. “My sister and I decided to go without thinking much about it,” she says. “They were our parents. Our father was in need of our help, so we went.”

“That has been the best part of all this, connecting with people.”

The memoir opens as the author and her sister, both estranged from their parents for nearly 20 years, arrive in Canada and soon realize that their mother has been starving and isolating their father. The sisters attempt to find appropriate care for their mother, whom they know requires mental health care, in order to protect their increasingly frail father. Old pain and fear are dragged back into the light, and it’s often not clear whether the women will be able to save their father from their mother, or save themselves from having to return to a place where they endured so much anguish.

Laveau-Harvie didn’t begin writing The Erratics until six years after this initial act of daughterly duty. The memoir’s form is often poetic, sometimes impressionistic, with hits of dark humor. “I wanted the writing to be spare,” she says. “I wanted the movement between direct speech and thought to be fluid. That’s why there are no quotation marks. I wanted that distance to be there in the way I told the story.” This creative choice echoes the distance she put between herself and her lived experiences. “That’s what I had to do to survive,” she says.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Erratics.

In testament to its broad emotional resonance, The Erratics gained critical acclaim upon its initial publication in Australia, which was itself an emotional roller coaster. Laveau-Harvie put the manuscript in a drawer for two years after writing it and only brought it out again after she had applied for a week at a nearby writers’ retreat. An author there urged her to try to publish her story, and she took their advice. “Finch [a small Australian press] had a memoir prize of publication and $5,000,” she says. “It’s a well-known prize, one of the few for memoir here. So I did submit my manuscript [in 2018], and I won. I was flabbergasted! It was a wonderful opportunity.”

Then things took a turn. Finch closed down after Laveau-Harvie’s book had been in print for just six months. “I was casting about for what to do,” she recalls. “Do I self-publish? Sell it on a street corner? I had no idea, and no experience in the publishing world.” She gained some experience in short order, though, when she won the prestigious Stella Prize in 2019 (and its $50,000 purse), secured an agent and was signed by a major publisher. The Erratics was published in the U.K. and Australia in 2019 and is being published in the U.S. and Canada in 2020. “It’s been a fairy tale!” she says.

From start to finish, The Erratics offers moments of wonder and beauty amid struggle and distress.

As for the enthusiastic response from readers, Laveau-Harvie muses, “After the book came out, people would say, ‘You’ve written my story.’ I’d think, no, I haven’t. I’ve written my story. But themes of aging, estrangement, mental health issues in families and their destructiveness, the different ways people cope—those are universal kinds of things.” She adds, “That has been the best part of all this, connecting with people—once I got over the shock of people who didn’t know me buying my book.”

It’s no wonder those early readers expressed such excitement. From start to finish, The Erratics offers moments of wonder and beauty amid struggle and distress. There are lovely and affirming reunions with long-lost family members and many lyrical contemplations of the Canadian landscape that sustained the author first as a child and again when she returned so many years later.

During those intervening years, Laveau-Harvie, who is now 77, endeavored to recover from the family dysfunction that serves as the centerpiece of her moving and memorable debut book. “I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” she says. “I’ve been getting the monkeys off my back for many years.”

Author photo © Michael Chetham.

An abandoned baby bird helps a talented new writer come to terms with his past.

“Whenever I see a magpie flying overhead, in the back of my mind, I think it’s going to come and land on my shoulder,” says Charlie Gilmour, speaking by phone from West Sussex, England.

Such thoughts are hardly surprising, given that Gilmour and his partner once nursed an abandoned chick and raised her to adulthood. The magpie, whom they named Benzene, took over and transformed Gilmour’s life, helping him come to terms with the fact that when he was 6 months old, his biological father, Heathcote Williams, suddenly and inexplicably abandoned Gilmour and his mother.

Heathcote, who died in 2017, was a poet, actor and political activist, as well as an amateur magician with a knack for disappearing. Although Gilmour met him a handful of times, he never really got to know him. Gilmour describes his stellar debut, Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie, as “the conversation we never had.” Writing about his father came somewhat naturally, Gilmour says, because “in one sense, he has always been a character in my imagination.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Featherhood.

Though he just turned 31, Gilmour sounds infinitely wiser than his years. He, his wife and their child, Olga, have been weathering the pandemic with Gilmour’s mother, writer and lyricist Polly Samson, and his adoptive father, David Gilmour, the renowned musician of Pink Floyd fame. Commenting on his creative, colorful family, Gilmour admits, “I was very, very fortunate to have quite a cast of characters to play around with—quite a few larger-than-life people.”

By far the star of the memoir, however, is Benzene, who had free rein of Gilmour’s London home, stealing trinkets left and right while leaving droppings everywhere, often in Gilmour’s long, dark, curly hair. One time the brazen bird even plucked a contact lens right out of the eye of their visiting friend, a photographer. “Benzene had this weird knack of being able to know what people value, and then she would go for it,” Gilmour muses. Despite such antics, he never considered caging the magpie. “She wouldn’t have stood for it in any case,” he says. “She would’ve shouted the house down.”

Gilmour began honing his writing skills while he himself was caged— in prison. In 2011, during a state he describes as “possessed of maniacal energy and messianic purpose,” he was part of widespread student protests in London against raises in tuition. The 21-year-old was later arrested for violent disorder and sent to prison for four months, followed by additional time on house arrest. “People are often punished when actually what they need is some form of treatment,” he says.

“I think

NonfictionMemoir

Featherhood

By Charlie Gilmour

Scribner

ISBN 9781501198502

 one of the few things you can do for someone in prison. . . . It gives them the opportunity to at least very briefly escape from where they are.”

One bright spot during his sentence was a box of books he received from Elton John and his husband, David Furnish. “I’d never met either of them in my life,” Gilmour says, but he devoured their gift, which featured prison classics including War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. The gift of books “was a very generous and kind gesture,” he says. “I think it’s one of the few things you can do for someone in prison. . . . It gives them the opportunity to at least very briefly escape from where they are.”

While imprisoned, Gilmour kept a daily journal, and he continued writing after his release. Several years later, when Benzene became part of his life, the bird’s presence intensified his need to know—and understand—his biological father. He learned that Heathcote had also rescued a young bird not long before Gilmour’s birth, a jackdaw that he kept as a pet.

In a mysterious moment that seems straight out of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Gilmour says that when he was in the midst of writing the scene about Heathcote’s death for his book, he heard “a cacophony of screams from all the crows and jackdaws and rooks around me.” He recalls, “I ran towards the noise, and there was this angry cloud of corvids over the field, and underneath them, red kites [birds of prey] were standing over a jackdaw. I ran towards them and snatched the jackdaw off the red kites, and the jackdaw just died right there in my hands. It felt like this incredibly eerie coincidence considering I had just, in writing, killed my biological father.”

“After four years of it, I can safely say that the best place for birds is in the trees—not sleeping above your bed."

Featherhood also explores Gilmour’s own journey into fatherhood. “I love being father to this child,” he says of Olga, now 2. “It’s a joy. And it also makes me very sad that this joy was something that Heathcote couldn’t allow himself to experience.” One of Heathcote’s favorite quotations was Cyril Connolly’s adage, “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” but Gilmour has found the opposite to be true. Somehow he became a more efficient writer after Olga’s birth, often attending to her needs at 4 a.m. and then writing for two or three hours. “It also feels like a bit of an f-you,” Gilmour admits. “I was going to prove him wrong by writing this book while the pram was very much in the hallway.”

As it turns out, nurturing Benzene was excellent preparation for fatherhood. “She taught me a lot about what it means to love and care for another creature,” Gilmour says. And of course, both birds and toddlers can be distracted by shiny objects.

As much as Gilmour treasures the time he spent with Benzene, he doesn’t endorse keeping wild birds as pets. “After four years of it, I can safely say that the best place for birds is in the trees—not sleeping above your bed, defecating on you as you yourself sleep. . . . I loved her, but I wouldn’t recommend the experience to anyone else.”

Author photo by Polly Samson

To celebrate Memoir March, we spoke to the authors of this spring’s most exciting memoirs about their research processes, writing roadblocks and biggest fears as they put their personal stories out into the world. Elizabeth Miki Brina shares some of the joys and difficulties behind her book, Speak, Okinawa, about whether love can heal a family traumatized by racism and colonization.

What do you love most about your book?
I love how my book aims to capture more than my life and my story—or rather, how my life and my story encompass so many other lives and stories, including my mother’s story, my father’s story, the history of the people of Okinawa. Through writing this book, I love how I was able to realize the connectedness of it all, to understand myself and my place in this world, the events that had to transpire, the hardships that had to be endured and overcome in order for me to exist.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?
Readers who are children of immigrants. Readers who are biracial or have multicultural heritage. Readers who were once estranged from their mothers or fathers and therefore from their origins. Readers who want to witness this experience.

What is one thing in your book that’s true that readers may have a hard time believing?
I hope readers don’t have a hard time believing anything—but what was hard for me to believe is how I really didn’t know myself for most of my life. I avoided and denied such important aspects of my identity for so long, and that took a huge toll on me and greatly hindered my ability to love and be loved. Still does. I grew up trying to believe that race, family history and cultural history were inconsequential. I’m glad I don’t believe that anymore.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Speak, Okinawa.

What resistance did you face while writing this book?
I got nothing but support and encouragement from others as I was writing this book. The resistance I faced was from myself: deciding what personal details to share or not share, deciding what was mine or not mine to tell, and knowing that these decisions would affect and alter the narrative as well as the reader’s perception of and attitude toward the people being portrayed. That is a great deal of responsibility I didn’t want to abuse. Kept me awake some nights.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?
I was surprised by how much I remembered, and how much my perspective on memories shifted as I was writing, rewriting and revising. There were so many revelations I could only have reached by putting memories on paper, seeing them reflected back at me, trying to view them objectively and finding the precise words to describe them.

Is there anything in your book that you’re nervous for people to read?
I’m definitely nervous for my parents to read the book. I’m nervous for them to read their secrets. I hope they forgive me.

“In a memoir, I can be judged and evaluated and hopefully redeemed as me, a real person, not a fictional character.”

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?
I feel very scraped out but also fuller and more complete. I feel relief.

What’s one way that your book is better as a memoir than it would have been as a novel?
In a memoir, I can claim my experiences and observations as my own. I can be judged and evaluated and hopefully redeemed as me, a real person, not a fictional character.

Many people think writing memoir means you just write from memory and don’t have to do research, but obviously that’s not true. What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?
Everything I researched was interesting to me. The history of Okinawa, which I hadn’t learned before writing the book and which helped me better understand myself and my mother. The life of my mother, which I hadn’t learned about before writing the book either. Our conservations, asking and answering questions, helped heal our relationship and brought us closer.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Author photo credit: Thad Lee

To celebrate Memoir March, we spoke to the authors of this spring’s most exciting memoirs about their research processes, writing roadblocks and biggest fears as they put their personal stories out into the world. Menachem Kaiser shares some of the joys and difficulties behind his book, Plunder, about his journey deep into the shadowy realm of Nazi treasure hunters.

What do you love most about your book?
How it embraces uncertainty. The story I recount in Plunder—namely, my quest to reclaim my grandfather's building and falling in with modern-day treasure hunters along the way—is not a straight-line story. Nothing went as planned. There were so many mishaps, misunderstandings, errors, and the book doesn't gloss these over, doesn’t smooth out the bumps. 

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book? 
Anyone who's confronted or wanted to confront their family story, especially with respect to World War II. So many of us don't know what our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents went through in the war, or know only fragments, bits and pieces. And I think sometimes we’re a little complacent, incurious, satisfied with undetailed family lore, because it’s always been there. It is so hugely rewarding to investigate, to step into your story. It is so much stranger, more complicated, more beautiful, more tragic than you thought.

What is one thing in your book that’s true that readers may have a hard time believing?
The way I first learned about my relative, Abraham Kajzer, the man so revered by the treasure hunters, does admittedly sound like a very unlikely story. I had initially sought out the treasure hunters only because I was curious. I had never heard of Abraham—in fact, I had no idea that my grandfather had any relatives who had survived the war. So here's what happened: I was sitting with the treasure hunters, having a beer, talking about Project Riese—the underground Nazi complex they had showed me that afternoon—and I overheard them saying, in Polish, my last name. I don’t speak Polish, I just caught my name, and I knew they weren’t talking about me. So I asked what was going on, who was this Kaiser? They explained they were talking about Abraham Kajzer, a Jewish enslaved laborer who, on account of the diary he had kept while working on Project Riese, has become an almost mythological figure among their community. 

My first thought was that it was a funny coincidence. But later that night, after pulling up some documents and translating the preface to Kajzer's diary, I was able to trace the family tree, and I realized that this was my grandfather's first cousin and his closest relative to have survived the war.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Plunder.

What resistance did you face while writing this book?
It’s a touchy subject, reclamation. I encountered resistance on all sides. Some people, including many of my relatives, were disappointed and upset that I was being at all sympathetic to the Poles living in my grandfather’s old building, who were benefiting—even if unknowingly—from the murder of my grandfather’s family. And some people, particularly in Poland, accused me of being something like an evil landlord, trying to displace helpless tenants. I understand both sets of objections, even if I disagree.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?
So, so many people, upon hearing about my book, would tell me their own story of lost family property in Eastern Europe and beyond: in Egypt, the Ivory Coast, South Africa. It wasn’t the dispossession that was so surprising—that part is horrifyingly ubiquitous—but how, even generations later, the descendants of those who were dispossessed still cling to a place they often have never even been to.

Is there anything in your book that you’re nervous for people to read?
One of the chapters details the relationship between Abraham and the German woman who hid him in the final weeks of the war, saving his life. They became lovers; after the war, Abraham stayed with her and her children. (Her husband, a soldier in the Wehrmacht, was killed on the front.) It’s a beautiful but challenging story—not exactly taboo but still not the sort of Jewish-German wartime narrative people are used to.

"The constraints of memoir can be frustrating but also allow you to turn inward, to be introspective, to not have answers, to question your own motivations."

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?
Really just grateful and kind of amazed that the book exists.

What's one way that your book is better as a memoir than it would have been as a novel?
I actually address this question directly in the book: I wonder aloud if I should have written it as a novel, because then the narrative could be neat, clean, linear, not plagued by false starts and misunderstandings. But that would have been the wrong move. Ultimately memoir was absolutely the appropriate genre for this story. The constraints—it has to be true, whether or not it makes sense, whether it helps or hinders the narrative—can be frustrating but also allow you to turn inward, to be introspective, to not have answers, to question your own motivations. 

Many people think writing memoir means you just write from memory and don’t have to do research, but obviously that’s not true. What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?
There are some very out-there conspiracy theories rampant among the treasure hunters, particularly with respect to Nazi technology that’s been lost or covered up. I spent months researching Nazi UFOs, Nazi antigravity, Nazi time travel, Nazi space stations and on and on. Fascinating if occasionally horrifying stuff.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Author photo credit: Beowolf Sheehan