Vietnamese refugee, American professor and acclaimed writer Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, The Sympathizer, in 2016. In both his fiction and nonfiction, he has represented the searing, often seething, always sensitive voice of the displaced, the decolonized, the erased and the marginalized: those whom he calls “The Other” in U.S. history and culture. In his memoir, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial, Nguyen blazes a nonlinear, literary way through the histories of Vietnam and the US, his parents’ arduous lives in each and his own struggles to find his voice as citizen, son and writer.

Although the memoir neatly organizes Nguyen’s life’s trajectory, starting with his arrival at the age of four at a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, his memories are fragmented on the page. That is, until the artistry behind them becomes apparent, and then it is a sheer thrill to follow. Nguyen pushes his parents’ past traumas against the ever-bruising present. They must leave an adopted daughter behind in Vietnam; they are shot on Christmas Eve while working in their grocery store. While Nguyen shares their fate as disrespected, underestimated “Other,” he is the only one who rails against it. For his Ba and M&aacute fleeing their ruined homeland, America is a dream; for their son, America did the ruining during the Vietnam War, leaving his family forever torn apart.

Always divided between his Vietnamese and American “faces,” Nguyen even narrates in a double voice, interjecting an introspective “you” into more straightforward threads of history, questioning everything as he lurches from childhood to his own parenthood, and on to his parents’ old age. “Be quiet,” he advises himself. “Be polite . . . But you have a character flaw. You are an ingrate.” It works as a kind of time-traveling history lesson that startles and fusses, but also endears. He “re members” and “dis remembers,” excavating and reassembling memories as if working on his family’s portrait, a pentimento of words.

Yet there is no self-serving artifice here. Nguyen even includes a blistering list of The Sympathizer’s bad reviews, and advice from another writer that he seek therapy. His regrets run as deep as his anger and disgust. He cannot remember enough about his mother and the onset of her mental illness that would eventually destroy her. Her “war story” becomes his. He is compelled to write about her “because writing is the only way I know how to fight. And writing is the only way I know how to grieve.”

“I was transformed into an old man quite suddenly, on June 11, 2011, three days short of my sixty-ninth birthday,” writes Jonathan Raban, describing the effects of a massive stroke that left him a wheelchair user and without the use of one hand. Raban, who died in January 2023 from complications from that stroke, used voice dictation software to write and edit this posthumously published book, Father and Son, which interweaves his weeks in rehab with the World War II story of his father, who served for three years in the British Army—in Dunkirk, Tunisia, Anzio and Palestine—not meeting his son until his return. It’s a highly personal account of two very different experiences of trauma, loss of agency and adjustment.

Throughout, Raban is brutally honest, not shying away from the ways his personal habits may have contributed to his stroke (“I had left my high blood pressure unmedicated. I was a daily wine drinker and . . . a lifelong smoker.”) or the many indignities he had to suffer during his recovery, such as asking for assistance going to the bathroom. He sings the praises of kind helpers and skewers others, such as a doctor who greeted him by saying, “You’re the one who used to be a writer.” With piercing humor, he notes: “I very much hope that I’m still a writer. I very much hope that I’ll write about this—about you—when I get out of the rehab ward.” He devours other memoirs about strokes and is never short on opinions, calling, for instance, Jill Bolte Taylor’s much-lauded My Stroke of Insight “an unsatisfactory blend of neuroscience, woo-woo, and outdated locationism.” In alternate chapters, Raban meticulously traces his parents’ courtship and his father’s unhappy stint as a teacher and rapid rise as a military officer during the war, using his parents’ letters as well as other histories. Although it’s not exactly a natural pairing with his own medical journey, Raban’s masterful prose makes it work.

The book ends rather abruptly as Raban leaves rehab for a rental home while his own house is being remodeled to meet his new needs. A brief editor’s note provides little additional enlightenment but drops a bombshell: When he died, Raban had been drafting a chapter about a son he had been recently getting to know. (Interestingly, his obituaries mention only one child, Julia.) That chapter, I’m sure, would have been a fascinating addition to Father and Son, and certainly fitting with its title. It’s a sign of Raban’s talent and powerful voice that, even in death, he leaves readers wanting more.

With unparalleled lyricism and a command of language only a poet could possess, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir recounts Safiya Sinclair’s life as a Rastafarian child raised under the oppressive and patriarchal rule of her father. While providing a contextual background on Rastafari—a religious movement and cultural community many have heard of, but few outsiders understand—Jamaican-born Sinclair tells the story of her and her siblings’ upbringing of isolation, fear and poverty. Shining a spotlight on the persecution and unwanted attention her unorthodox upbringing garnered in Jamaica, in addition to the acts of racism running rampant in the Western world, Sinclair describes acts of ignorance and cruelty from a perspective so close, you can feel her wounds. How to Say Babylon contemplates matters of race and religion, of class and equality, of identity and womanhood, through an unforgettable voice that’s unflinchingly raw and powerful.

The beacon of light throughout this often tragic narrative is Sinclair’s journey to her vocation as a writer. With rich descriptions that feel languid and decadent, each sentence should be consumed like a meal—filled with literary nutrition and poetic garnishes that’ll leave Sinclair’s fellow writers begging for the recipe. Inhabiting a space between poetry and prose, with the very best elements of both on display, How to Say Babylon is truly a poet’s memoir. A story of Black womanhood that grips the reader through its obvious feat of craft and its captivating storytelling, the style of Sinclair’s work is utterly unique, including phonetic dialogue that brings Jamaica’s Rastafarian world to life. How to Say Babylon also considers the power of literature and education, the strength and perseverance of familial bonds and the complex notion of identity for people of color worldwide.

Above all, the pages of How to Say Babylon should be savored like the final sip of an expensive wine—with deference, realizing that a story of this magnitude comes along all too infrequently.

“Like most of the events in my life, the thought of assembling this book came to me accidentally,” Donna Leon notes in the preface to her memoir, Wandering Through Life. Leon, the author of the long-running Guido Brunetti detective series, has perfectly captured that serendipitous nature in the personal essays that make up Wandering Through Life.

The memoir runs mostly chronologically, beginning with her childhood in New Jersey, where she lived on her grandfather’s farm. Leon is conversational and self-deprecating: “My brother and I get our almost total lack of ambition from [our mother]: she just wanted to have fun, to go through life seeing new things, learning about what interested her, going to new places. Because of this, I went through life never having a real job, never having a pension plan, never settling down in one place or at one job, but having an enormous amount of fun.” And “never settling down” is one of the memoir’s themes. The essay “Drugs, Sex, and Rock ’n’ Roll” tells the astonishing story of the years she taught English to helicopter pilot trainees in the Iranian Air Force. She arrived in Iran in 1976 knowing little of the country, and began to live an expat life (lots of tennis) with her American and British coworkers, even as the Iranian Revolution arrived. This is just one episode in a peripatetic life that includes stints in late-Maoist China and Saudi Arabia and decades in Europe, particularly Venice, Italy (where her Guido Brunetti novels are set).

These essays feel like dispatches from a different era and world order, and they’re conversational, breezy and occasionally comic rather than contemplative. Leon’s tone is like that of an older friend who has a deep well of entertaining anecdotes from her storied life, and who has also developed an array of interests, among them opera, Handel and beekeeping. The layered essay “Bees” is a standout, describing her slow journey to gardening and her fascination with bees and their threatened existence. “They pulled me into the mystery of their being,” she writes of the bees. But Guido fans be warned: other than noting how her bee research worked its way into a novel, Wandering Through Life offers little detail about her writing life—Leon may be a prolific novelist, but in this memoir, she turns her focus elsewhere.