Investigative journalist and award-winning author Rachel Louise Snyder has reported on natural disasters, genocides, wars and social justice issues around the globe. Acclaimed for her seminal 2019 study of domestic violence in America, No Visible Bruises, she turns her focus to her own troubled family history in Women We Buried, Women We Burned, a memoir that is compelling, propulsive, gripping and disturbing in equal measure.
Snyder was 8 when her mother died of breast cancer at age 35. Growing up with her older brother near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Snyder had basked in her Jewish mother’s beauty and love; the loss left her feeling haunted and forever incomplete. Their father soon remarried, moving them near Chicago and immersing the newly blended family into the fervid world of evangelical Christianity. Church, Bible readings, forced hugs and bruising spankings were the remedies for all broken rules, and Snyder eventually rebelled in every way she could.
Snyder was kicked out of her house at age 16, and her path from a homeless teenager to a college professor—one who, in her work as a journalist, has borne witness to women’s victimization across the world—is a journey worth following. It began when Snyder spent a semester of college traveling internationally by boat, funded in part by her mother’s brother. Though she had never left America before, she ended up visiting Japan, China, South Africa, India and Kenya with other college students. Along the way, she discovered that several of her fellow students had also lost a parent, and she wondered if that made them all more curious about simply being alive.
Later, Snyder’s years living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge’s legacy of genocide still silently throbbed between generations, provided another education altogether. She describes the pulsing monsoon rains, the never-ending search for soldiers gone missing during the Vietnam War and the geckos climbing her apartment walls with a precision that makes even her most everyday observations vividly alive.
With the birth of her daughter, Snyder was able to reach a deeper understanding—and a sharper judgment—of her father and stepmother. The life she builds from this new wisdom is another kind of journey, one equally worth following.
The award-winning author of No Visible Bruises turns her focus to her troubled family history in a memoir that is compelling, propulsive, gripping and disturbing.
Our top picks for June include the latest from S.A. Cosby, Dominic Smith and Uzma Jalaluddin, plus the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades.
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Geena Rocero was a trans pageant queen in the Philippines who became a successful model in the United States. As you’d expect, her life story is a completely engrossing whirlwind.
Humorist Harrison Scott Key’s memoir of the fallout following his wife’s affair offers plentiful food for thought about faith, humor, courage and love.
Lisa See’s spellbinding historical novel, inspired by the true story of a female physician, vividly depicts 15th-century China with artfully woven details, rich characters and descriptive language.
With Return to Valetto, Dominic Smith doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but he doesn’t need to: He is a master of his trade who has executed a flawless novel that satisfies on all counts.
Deanna Raybourn will keep readers’ minds working and hearts pounding as they root for her fabulous assassins of a certain age in Kills Well With Others.
Okchundang Candy is a beautifully rendered remembrance of grief and loss, as well as a moving meditation on the bonds of family and the power of everlasting love.
With its earnest and likable protagonist, The Peach Thief is a lovely, well-drawn novel that will appeal to historical fiction fans and kids who love plants.
Our top picks for June include the latest from S.A. Cosby, Dominic Smith and Uzma Jalaluddin, plus the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades.
Before the release of each of his previous two books—The World’s Largest Man, winner of the 2016 Thurber Prize for American Humor, and 2018’s Congratulations, Who Are You Again?—Harrison Scott Key had what one might call a bit of a freakout.
As Key explains in a call from his Savannah, Georgia, home, “You’re working on a book for two, three, sometimes four years, and it’s like a lightning rod that focuses all of your creative vitality.” Then, when you’re finished, “you have all of this psychic energy that has to go somewhere. I usually just try to pour it into a new book idea . . . and I usually hit a wall with that . . . and then I start wandering around the house and talking about how maybe I’ll go to dental school because I clearly can’t write anymore.”
While the author has become accustomed to the stressful “interregnum” between a manuscript’s completion and the reading public’s reaction—via interviews and reviews, as well as a flurry of promotional events—Key has experienced even more heightened emotion and anticipation since the completion of his newest book, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told.
The subject matter’s the thing: In his third memoir, Key takes his trademark mixture of radical honesty and frequent hilarity to a new level as he describes what it was like when Lauren, his wife of 15 years and the mother of their three daughters, revealed that, for the preceding five years, she had been having an affair with a married neighbor, whom Key dubs “Chad.” True to the book’s title, the couple has managed to remain married but not without several years of rage, despair, negotiation, crying and therapy, including a lot of talking with each other, friends, family, professionals and more.
Lauren’s shocking revelation came in 2017, and the book’s emotional roller coaster of events concludes in 2022, rendering them still relatively fresh. “Even if nobody bought it, even if my agent hated it, I had to get this mf-ing book out of my brain and my heart,” Key says. “The benefit of writing about it as it was happening and in the year after the drama concluded is that the scenic details were very accurate and intense. . . . Obviously, the downside is that you haven’t really processed what’s happening, and so your perspective on it is very different than it will be in six months, in two years.”
Whether Key welcomed it or not, additional processing did occur during the editing stage of the book. “Even in just the last three months, I probably read through the entire thing four times,” he says. “Being forced to live through these scenes and face the really awful realities of things that happened has been therapeutic, because it has exposed me to them over and over so that I’m not afraid of these memories anymore.” They will be stirred up again as he promotes the book, of course, but “I am not unused to people reading about behind-the-scenes stuff in my life, the kinds of things people don’t talk about,” he says. “What makes this book weird is my wife and her role in it; that part is very strange.”
“Even if nobody bought it, even if my agent hated it, I had to get this mf-ing book out of my brain and my heart.”
By this, Key means the impressively honest and vulnerable chapter that Lauren contributed called “A Whore in Church.” He told Lauren, “I think you need to talk about your mom and your dad and your childhood and everything that’s happened with us. You should just vomit it out there because I feel like it will be really good, and I feel like I can’t tell my story if you don’t tell your story.” And so she did.
Upon reading Lauren’s chapter, Key wasn’t surprised that it was well written and evocative. In fact, “Reading it was horrifying and exhilarating . . . and I loved it,” he says. His previously trepidatious publishing team felt the same way. “When I shared it with my editor and agent,” he says, “they were like, ‘Holy crap, this is awesome, it has to be in there.’” And it is: an unusual aspect of a book that is itself unusual in its unflinching—and often very funny—look at a marriage in extreme crisis, written by a man as open about his own faults as he is about his wife’s—or, you know, Chad’s (wears cargo shorts, listens to Kid Rock).
During Key’s quest for understanding about the breakdown of his marriage, he also found himself reconsidering his Christian faith. “My religion was this enormous toolshed full of strange tools,” he says, “and it wasn’t until this experience that I realized I was so bereft of solutions that I needed to maybe go out into that old Jesus-y toolshed and see if some of it could help.” Key also read widely, from the book of Psalms to the Tao Te Ching, and “just the fact that the stuff I was experiencing was not new . . . was really reassuring.”
“This idea of forgiveness and mercy when you want to punish, it’s so counterintuitive for most people.”
Ultimately, Key says, “this idea of forgiveness and mercy when you want to punish, it’s so counterintuitive for most people, but really the spine of Christianity is forgiveness . . . and not until this moment with my wife did I really understand.” He adds, “I would not be here, I would not be in this house, my family would not be whole, without that faith.”
As Key readies himself for the debut of How to Stay Married, he says Lauren is “owning what’s happening in the story. She and I have gone into this holding hands.” And who knows what else might lie ahead for the duo? The author says with a laugh, “Both of us can X-ray marriages now just by interacting with people. . . . Maybe that’s our next calling, to be the Oprah and Dr. Phil of marriages on TV.”
No matter what future adventure might be on the horizon, for now, Key says, “the ability to see through pain and anger and trauma and bad choices and see the human heart that’s in there—if I could take anything away from this experience, it would be hopefully a better ability to do that.”
Headshot of Harrison Scott Key by Chia Chong
In his third memoir, the award-winning humor writer tackles a rather somber subject, to hilarious and heartbreaking effect.
Some retirees quilt; others fish. And then there’s Northern California resident Barbara Rae-Venter, who, with “both feet planted firmly in retirement,” sparked a forensic revolution. How in the world did a retiree sitting alone at her computer looking at family trees manage to crack a horrific criminal case that had been eluding investigators for 40 years?
Sixty-three days after loading a crime scene DNA profile to a service called GEDmatch, Rae-Venter and others in a group who call themselves Team Justice were able to identify a suspect: a police officer-turned-truck mechanic named Joseph James DeAngelo who eventually admitted responsibility for at least 13 murders and 50 rapes in the 1970s and ’80s in California. She tells the story the world has been waiting to hear in her mesmerizing memoir, I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever.
“All my life, mysteries have called out to me to be solved,” Rae-Venter writes. As a child growing up in New Zealand, she had what her mother called a “grasshopper mind,” meaning that Rae-Venter tended to circle a topic, coming at it from odd angles before zeroing in on an insight. She came to the United States at age 20, eventually earning a Ph.D. in biology and becoming a patent lawyer specializing in biotechnology innovations. In retirement, she started researching her own family history, then became a volunteer genealogist at a not-for-profit organization called DNAAdoption that teaches adoptees how to identify biological relatives using autosomal DNA. In 2015, Rae-Venter became involved in a cold case pertaining to an adoptee named Lisa Jensen, who at age 5 was abandoned by a man who claimed to be her father but wasn’t. The now-grown Jensen had no idea who her birth parents were until Rae-Venter solved this family mystery, and what turned out to be a mind-blowing criminal case, using investigative genetic genealogy (IGG).
In addition to Jensen and the Golden State Killer, Rae-Venter describes a number of additional intriguing cases she’s worked on, along with the chilling details of actually being present at DeAngelo’s sentencing. She also discusses the ethical issues that IGG poses to the privacy of individuals’ DNA profiles, explains the complicated process of IGG in layman’s terms and includes a helpful glossary.
After unmasking the Golden State Killer, Rae-Venter planned to be identified only as an anonymous geneticist, but her son finally convinced her to go public. “If my story can inspire a budding young scientist somewhere to pursue her dreams, then my story is a story worth telling,” she writes. Indeed it is, and true crime lovers everywhere will agree.
Some retirees quilt; others fish. And then there’s Barbara Rae-Venter, who identified the Golden State Killer using investigative genetic genealogy and sparked a forensic revolution.
“I started my life with one thing: science. Astronomy, to be specific. And I dove into it,” writes Aomawa Shields in the introduction to her memoir, Life on Other Planets. “Then I found something else I liked: the arts. Acting, to be specific. So I dove into that instead. Neither one by itself felt fully right.”
Beginning with her initial glimmers of love for the stars and planets as a preteen, Shields tells her story chronologically, with writing that is immediate, sometimes poetic. In a scene rich in detail, she recounts the snowy winter night when, as a high school student at Phillips Exeter Academy, she first glimpsed Jupiter and its moons through a telescope. “That I could measure something in space, just by looking—this was the shattered ceiling of the Earth, ascending up and through the atmosphere into nothing,” she writes. At MIT and then the University of Wisconsin, Shields steeped herself in astronomy. But the pull of acting, which she discovered in high school playing the role of Truvy in Steel Magnolias, never faded, and she eventually put her work in STEM on hold to pursue an M.F.A. in acting at UCLA.
Shields’ nonlinear path through science, acting, the arts and back to astronomy (she returned to graduate school at age 35 and is now a tenured professor of astronomy and physics at UC Irvine) makes up the rest of the memoir’s narrative. Yes, she faced a bevy of struggles: As a Black woman, Shields was buffeted by racism in graduate school, as well as by self-doubt and impostor syndrome. She’s also candid about the sometimes-difficult balance of marriage, family and work, and her worry about whether she’s “Black enough” in certain settings. Throughout, Shields is an illuminating guide to her own idiosyncratic journey, seamlessly unpacking complicated concepts about stars and planets.
In Life on Other Planets, Shields has written an inspiring memoir about charting her own path and merging her scientific and artistic pursuits. Along the way, she also gives us glimpses of the wonder she’s found while studying the cosmos.
Astrobiologist Aomawa Shields’ Life on Other Planets is an inspiring memoir about charting her own path and merging the two worlds of science and art.
The astonishing first line of Beth Nguyen’s revelatory memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart reads, “Over the course of my life I have spent less than twenty-four hours with my mother.” That time consisted of six brief visits over the course of 26 years, beginning when Nguyen was a 19-year-old college student and reunited with her mother in Boston for the first time since Nguyen was 8 months old.
The explanation for this startling fact is fairly straightforward. In April of 1975, as South Vietnam fell to the forces of the North Vietnamese, Nguyen escaped Vietnam by boat with her older sister, paternal grandmother, father and uncles. Her father and uncles had fought for the losing side and now faced “reeducation,” or worse. So they came to America and ended up in a tiny community of Vietnamese refugees in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nguyen’s mother had been living with her own mother and her other children in another part of Saigon during the collapse. She only discovered that her daughters and their father had fled some days later.
The feelings and implications of these circumstances, on the other hand, are anything but straightforward. Fittingly, Owner of a Lonely Heart is not a chronological memoir. It circulates among memories, embellishing and deepening the reader’s and Nguyen’s understanding of them. In a chapter called “My Mothers,” she writes not of her biological mother but of her grandmother Noi, who provided a safe place for Nguyen in a chaotic household, and of the woman her father married when Nguyen was 3, the daughter of Mexican migrants whom Nguyen credits with saving her life. In another chapter, Nguyen writes of her “white mother,” a high school boyfriend’s parent who taught Nguyen the “ways of whiteness” and helped her read the hieroglyphics of a coded society. Throughout the memoir, Nguyen also writes movingly about being a mother herself, something that has clearly shifted her perspective on her experiences.
During her childhood, Nguyen’s family did not talk about Vietnam or the war. They had no vocabulary for trauma, and her father’s unacknowledged PTSD bodied forth in anger, drinking and home improvement projects that never reached completion. A superb writer, Nguyen gives readers a tactile sense of her childhood home life and the love and anguish she felt there.
“Growing up,” Nguyen writes, “I was afraid all the time. It was a low-lying fear that I couldn’t explain to myself or dare admit out loud.” In her beautiful memoir, Nguyen finally acknowledges this fear—and much, much more—out loud.
Beth Nguyen has only spent 24 hours with her mother over the course of her adult life, and her revelatory memoir depicts all the love and anguish bound up with this fact.
Kate Zambreno’s work blends memoir, art criticism and literary history/gossip to brilliant effect, and in recent years, her books have become even deeper and richer as they have been suffused with the experience of early motherhood. The Light Room, like her 2021 book of literary criticism, To Write as if Already Dead, records the impossibility of finding time and space to write as a new mother. But instead of suffering from these restrictions, the book blossoms because of them, written in furious spurts that both describe and embody the stolen moments between feeding, waking and sleeping.
The Light Room offers readers who are new to Zambreno a perfect entry point into the patterns of thinking and writing that her work is known for. As it follows a daily record of Zambreno’s life with small children during the COVID-19 lockdown—the groceries, the laundry, the mess, the exhaustion and the outings to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York—the book also considers the developmental experience of pandemic babies who see unmasked faces only at home and who haven’t yet met their extended families. Zambreno tracks experiments in early education during a pandemic as well, from an outdoor “forest school” to using Montessori methods at home.
The unending domestic care work, however, is balanced by Zambreno’s reading, writing and thinking. Nursing at 4 a.m. while reading Yuko Tsushima’s novel Territory of Light about single motherhood in 1970s Japan conjures a sense of “cozy dread.” A child’s collection of found objects evokes visual artist Joseph Cornell’s box art. Translucent building blocks suggest a literary form for the book itself: a mother writing in tiny increments, stealing bits of time to build, entry by entry, a chronicle of “seasons and exhaustions.”
The restrictions, fear and grief of parenting during a pandemic are ultimately measured against moments of joy and glimmers of beauty, what Zambreno calls “translucencies.” Thinking through Natalia Ginzburg’s 1944 essay “Winter in the Abruzzi,” Zambreno approaches a vital truth that lies at the heart of this memoir: What if these days of domestic constraint turn out, in the long run, to be the happiest time in a family’s life together?
Kate Zambreno’s memoir The Light Room measures the fear and grief of parenting during a pandemic against moments of joy and glimmers of beauty.
Before Walt Disney World paved Orlando with parking lots and erected glittering idols to commercialism, lush orange groves carpeted central Florida. Children were entertained not by a grinning rodent wearing a bow tie and white gloves but by playing among the glossy green leaves and sweet-smelling blossoms, or by chasing after the mosquito fogging trucks that arrived every evening in the summer. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull’s exquisite memoir, Through the Groves, carries readers back to a time when citrus, not Disney, was king in Florida, even as she reveals the fissures in her life beneath those fragrant orange blossoms.
As a young child, Hull spent her summers riding shotgun with her father, who was an inspector for a citrus grower. They bounced through the rutted aisles of the orange groves, car antenna whipping through the leaves and knocking fruit into the car. She met the growers and those who worked for them, whose bodies had been ravaged by years of close contact with pesticides. “I had never seen such a reptilian assemblage of humanity,” she writes. “Their faces cracked when they smiled. Cancer ate away at their noses.” During one of those rides, when she noticed her father screwing the cap back onto a bottle that was different from the Pepto-Bismol bottle he often drank from, Hull realized that her father was abusing alcohol.
Hull’s mother, who looked like “Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” had dreams of being a journalist. But when the family moved to Sebring, Florida, her mother instead started teaching elementary school. Hull’s father’s drinking eventually drove a wedge between him and his wife, and Hull and her mother moved in with family in St. Petersburg. She recalls the opening of Disney World around this time and its effects on the region, writing, “I hated it before it ever opened. . . . It was front-page news; it was practically a religious holiday in Florida.” As she grew up, Hull learned to navigate the streets of St. Pete and to live life on her own terms. During her first year at Florida State University, she awoke to her attraction to women, and her mother accepted and embraced her. Hull left college to become a rep for Revlon, and instead of oranges, the back seat of her car was crowded with “six-foot-tall beautiful women made of cardboard.”
As Hull walks out of the Florida groves and into her adult life, she can clearly see the shadows they cast on her world. In her closing chapter, she shares a valuable gem of wisdom that reveals her vulnerability and ours: “Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It’s bought, sold, paved over, and reimagined in a cycle that never quits. The landscape I saw through my father’s windshield as a child has been so thoroughly erased I sometimes wonder if I made it up.” Through the Groves captures the ugliness and the beauty of growing up in a Florida now long gone.
Anne Hull’s exquisite memoir carries readers back to a time when citrus was king in central Florida, even as she reveals the fissures in her life beneath the fragrant orange blossoms.
Early on in her job, Barbara Butcher got an invaluable piece of advice from a colleague: “When you leave here each day, surround yourself with things of beauty. Enjoy nature and art and food and music and love. Just do it, and don’t skip a day.” Those words turned out to be crucial, lifesaving wisdom for Butcher, who spent 22 years working at the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It was her job to investigate the circumstances surrounding unexpected deaths, carefully examining the bodies and their surroundings for clues to determine if it was an accident, a suicide, a death by natural causes—or a murder. Although she calls it “the best career I could ever imagine,” the emotional toll was painful—often excruciating—as she explains in her colorful, compelling memoir, What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator.
Butcher’s life was almost upended by depression and alcohol addiction. Despite rising in the ranks as a physician assistant and a hospital administrator, she was on an extreme crash course to destruction when she landed in Alcoholics Anonymous. By chance, after she got sober, she was hired as a medicolegal death investigator. Butcher was only the second woman to hold the job; the first had quit after only a month.
Writing in a fast-paced, no-nonsense, sometimes funny and always precise style, Butcher shares a treasure trove of life and death stories that touch on racism, wealth, poverty, prejudice, misogyny, justice and injustice. In many ways, it’s the ultimate behind-the-scenes tour of the Big Apple from the 1990s through 2015, including the 9/11 attacks. Butcher guides readers through mansions, flophouses, back alleys, squatters’ buildings, train tunnels and more while taking note of the immense breadth of humanity, both living and dead.
Visceral, impassioned and hard to put down, What the Dead Know is a lively account of an unimaginable career.
Writing in a fast-paced and precise style, Barbara Butcher shares a treasure trove of stories from her 22 years as a death investigator in New York City.
Daniel Wallace (Big Fish) idolized his brother-in-law, William Nealy—an artist, author, outdoorsman and renegade—until the day he died by a meticulously planned suicide in July 2001. In This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew (6.5 hours), Wallace paints a double portrait of his friend: the heroic mask he presented to the world, and the traumatized, troubled man behind it.
This story is painful. The audiobook begins with information on how to contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), and listeners should be prepared for a frank exploration of Nealy’s lifetime of suicidal ideation. But Wallace’s tale of loss, anger and absolution is also redemptive and beautiful, and Audie Award winner Michael Crouch’s sensitive and convincing narration gently leads the reader toward Wallace’s reconciliation with his beloved friend.
Daniel Wallace’s tale of loss, anger and absolution is painful yet redemptive, and Audie Award winner Michael Crouch’s sensitive and convincing narration gently leads the reader toward Wallace’s reconciliation with a beloved friend.
R. Eric Thomas is a big personality, and he owns it: “I’m a lot without reason or provocation.” He likes exclamation points, and he’s fun, funny, vulnerable and one hell of a storyteller. Readers will find him a hoot to hang out with in his second book of essays, Congratulations, the Best is Over!: Essays. It’s an excellent follow-up to Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, which recounted his coming-of-age in Baltimore, education at Columbia and early career writing for Elle. Now a multitalented pop-culture guru, Thomas has published a YA novel, Kings of B’more, and written for the TV shows “Better Things” and “Dickinson.”
These latest essays chronicle his courtship and marriage to David Norse Thomas, a white Presbyterian minister who was raised in Oregon. Their dissimilar backgrounds provide tender comedy, as seen in the account of their engagement on top of an Oregon peak at sunset: Eric describes the mountain as “one that we walked up with our feet and bodies and such.” By the end of the expedition, he’s shivering uncontrollably, saying, “David, I think nature is trying to kill me!”
In the first half of the book, “Homecoming,” the couple move from Philadelphia back to Baltimore —which is problematic for Eric, since Baltimore “was where all the ghosts of the unhappy person I used to be still lived.” Eric’s discussions of his depression are frank and charismatic. “I feel like I’m talking about the inner workings of a stranger. The sadness is real and it is always around and it is not who I am.” Readers can feel his loneliness as he writes at his apartment desk, and his attempts to find friends and community are both touching and hilarious.
Engaging stories about neighbors, landscaping and a horde of very loud frogs ensue in the second half of the book, “Homegoing.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hits, Eric and his husband buy a house set on a half acre of land—which Eric poignantly connects to the failed promise of 40 acres and a mule to formerly enslaved Black people in 1865—out in northern Baltimore County. As Eric explains, “Apparently the key to getting me to consider the appeal of the suburbs is locking me in my city apartment for fifty-two days. On day fifty-three, suddenly I’m like, ‘You know what really rings my bells? A Nest camera, a cul-de-sac, and an HOA handbook full of microaggressions.’”
Thomas will keep you laughing, but underneath his mirth lies a wealth of thoughtful observations about his life, family, politics, pop culture and especially his marriage.
R. Eric Thomas will keep you laughing, but underneath the mirth of this excellent essay collection lies a wealth of thoughtful observations about his life, family, politics, pop culture and especially his marriage.
When award-winning poet Shane McCrae was born to a white mother and a Black father in Oregon in 1975, his maternal grandmother designated him “white” on his birth certificate, claiming it was because she wanted him to have “all the advantages.” However, when she and her husband kidnapped him from his parents and brought him to Texas three years later, the 13 years McCrae spent with them were filled with anything but.
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping is more than the memoir of an abduction: It is a story about how racial identity is shaped by both presence and absence in a child’s life. McCrae explores memory itself and what happens when violence and deception warp the brain’s ability to maintain clear distinctions between fact and fantasy.
In chapters that read more like vignettes than chronological narratives, McCrae traces his journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest and back again; narrates the complicated relationships between his mother and her parents; and mourns the absence of a father whom his grandparents attempted to erase from his life in every way possible. Throughout, McCrae undertakes in prose the age-old bard’s task: to lend a voice to—and by extension, make sense of—the inconceivable, even as the admitted gaps in his own memory work against meaning, resolution and wholeness.
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun wrestles with the brain’s unreliability in the wake of trauma, as well as the reality that, regardless of who raised us, few of the stories we inherit about ourselves are accurate. McCrae’s work becomes less about arriving at any irrefutable conclusion and rather about reaching a point where we are willing to concede the impossibility of truth, even as we continue to reconstruct all we know in an attempt to get as close as we can.
In a gripping memoir, acclaimed poet Shane McCrae tells the remarkable story of how his white maternal grandparents kidnapped him in an attempt to shape his racial identity and erase his memories of his Black father.
A stigma continues to exist around blindness, even though blind people are a vital part of society as writers, actors, engineers, artists and more. Blindness has reliably appeared at or near the top of the list of “most-feared disabilities” in polls and surveys for decades, a fact Andrew Leland relays in his debut book, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. Through eloquent prose, Leland vividly details his experiences with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a genetic disorder that has slowly caused his vision to deteriorate and will eventually result in total blindness. Because he still has some sight, he is able to “perceive everything with a paradoxical double vision: through sighted eyes, and through blind ones.”
Providing a raw and honest depiction of what it is like to straddle two worlds, Leland lays his feelings and the realities of his condition out on the table, in particular the impact of RP on his personal interactions. Along the way, he chronicles the backstory of how he discovered he had RP, the genetic aspects of the disease and a general history of blindness. Other chapters focus on topics such as both low- and high-tech sight-assisted gadgets for blind people, national blindness organizations and their differing philosophies, blind activists (including folks from the Disabled Students’ Program at UC Berkeley) and medical therapies for blindness (such as the gene-editing tool CRISPR, gene therapy and wearable technology). Leland interviews myriad people with varying levels of blindness to get diverse perspectives, interspersing their accounts with statistics and expert commentary.
The Country of the Blind does not leave readers with a sense of sadness—quite the opposite. By mixing reality checks with wit, Leland’s prose exudes hope and authenticity. As he movingly writes, “As I lose my vision, I want to cultivate this picture of blindness—in Oscar [his son], and Lily [his wife], in myself, and in the world—of a blind person who’s an active protagonist in his own life.”
Facing blindness due to a degenerative eye disorder, Andrew Leland provides a raw and honest depiction of the realities of his diagnosis and what it feels like to straddle two worlds.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
A decade and a half in the making, The Antidote brings together undertold history of 1930s America and the fantastical vision that made Swamplandia! so remarkable.
