In Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, Rachel Aviv examines the challenges of living with mental disorders and how those disorders can define who we are. Aviv shares personal experiences and talks to a range of individuals who deal with—and find a sense of self in—mental illness. Featuring riveting firsthand reportage, moving interviews and important research, Aviv’s compassionate, revealing narrative offers a glimpse into the secrets of the human psyche while tackling tough questions about psychiatric treatment and diagnosis.
Judith Grisel mixes memoir and reportage in Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction, a compelling investigation of drug use and the nature of dependency. Grisel, a former drug user who is now a neuroscientist, writes with honesty about her troubled past and grappling with substance abuse. She also looks at the unique psychology of the addict and provides possibilities for escaping the cycle of dependency. The role of genetics in addiction and the brain’s response to drugs are but a few of the book’s rich discussion topics.
In Mind on Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery, Arnold Thomas Fanning offers a powerful, intimate account of a life spent wrestling with depression and bipolar disorder. Fanning’s first encounters with mental illness took place during his teenage years and left him ill-equipped to navigate daily routines. After spending time in an institution and living on the streets of London, Fanning found help in medication and therapy and achieved success as a playwright. In this poignant chronicle of living with illness, he shows that healing is possible.
Max Fisher considers the ways in which Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms have impacted our daily lives in The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. Bolstered by in-depth research and interviews, Fisher’s fascinating book traces the evolution of social media, the rise of sensational content and the strategies employed by popular platforms to attract users and make profits. Themes like communication, self-esteem and the human need for connection will get book groups talking.
From neuroscience to psychology, these nonfiction titles explore the mysteries of the human mind.
In her earliest days of practicing witchcraft, Diana Helmuth gathered a number of recommended supplies—a special dagger called an athame, many candles, a pentacle. She also carried with her a number of expectations. For starters, she would trace the historical origins of modern witchcraft; this would ground her practice in a knowledge of its roots. She expected to find it structured like many organized religions: a set of rules and doctrines, a built-in community and moral framework—and the security of knowing what happens when you die.
But the practice had its own plans for Helmuth. “Witchcraft was quickly revealed to me to not be that kind of path,” she tells BookPage.
In The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft, Helmuth tells the story of dedicating 12 months to learning everything she could about what one fellow witch calls “the crooked path.” Living with her partner and two cats in an apartment in Oakland, California, Helmuth performs solo spellwork at a cardboard-box altar in her office nook (naturally, the cats are intrigued) and participates in Wheel of the Year rituals in the company of fellow witches. She journeys to Stonehenge in search of a connection with her ancestors, and spends a week at a camp for witches in the woods. Her research takes her deep into the tangled beginnings of Wicca, which emerged around the 1940s and was more or less an attempt to package witchcraft into something resembling that familiar box of midcentury Western religion. (Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner remains a widely respected text for aspiring witches.)
“Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me.”
Throughout the year, Helmuth consults a number of witches who also happen to be some of her closest and oldest friends. (Her friend Lauren, a key mentor in the book, nudged Helmuth toward this project in the first place.) Now living on the Washington coast, Helmuth acknowledges that at one point she counted among her friends and acquaintances more witches than people of any other belief system aside from atheism. She attributes this to her northern California upbringing. “That’s where all the hippie buses broke down. And that’s where we came out of the yurt and said, ‘We’re bringing goddess culture back.’ ”
Helmuth has an easy wit—her first book, a beginner’s guide to backpacking, is cheekily titled How to Suffer Outside and is full of both practical advice and hilarious commentary. In a way, the same can be said of The Witching Year. Her wry perspective keeps the narrative deeply entertaining. But it’s also an endeavor with ample heart, rigorous inquiry and an extensive bibliography. Comedic tendencies never eclipse Helmuth’s genuine curiosity about, and respect for, her subject matter.
“I didn’t want to punch down,” she says, “despite the fact that I knew I had massive internal skepticism.” When she forced herself to look closely at the impulse to crack jokes, her personal journey really took off: “Deeply interrogating this urgent need to make fun of something is, occasionally, where the book deviated from a comedy into something far more serious, and I think richer,” she reflects.
Helmuth ultimately found that modern witchcraft in America is largely self-directed and not confined to any set of top-down, codified methods. This could, she admits, feel challenging at times. She found that the practice was “more about the discovery and healing and nourishment of the sacred self. So effectively, it’s therapy. And that work is hard and never done.” She adds, “I don’t actually think it’s particularly enjoyable work.”
The Witching Year contains candid chronicling of the challenging emotional endeavors her practice requires. “There are several parts in the book [when] I was like, ‘I want to get off the ride,’ and I couldn’t,” she says. Ultimately, the year included “really profound moments that absolutely changed my life in good ways and bad ways.” In the book she discusses the delight of feeling deeply interconnected with others: “Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me,” she writes. About communing with the goddess Isis, she reflects, “I had no idea this level of joy was this accessible to me on my own. In Witchcraft, people talk about shadow work, justice, self-help. . . . Rarely do I hear anyone talk about bliss.”
And as a defender of wild spaces and a staunch environmentalist (which many, but not all, witches are), Helmuth gains perspective—but again, maybe not what she expected. To her surprise, the spirituality she’d always sought in the backcountry could be accessed closer to home. “I realized I didn’t have to hike 20 miles into the wilderness to have a deep connection with nature,” she says. “I can go down to the oleander under the freeway overpass and stare at it for 60 seconds and meditate on its perfection.”
Now for the big question: After a year’s journey, does she call herself a witch? Not exactly, she concedes, partly because the term is so loaded. How one answers largely depends on who’s asking. She would like to see modern witchcraft cast as less rebellious and more friendly to the mainstream. The enormous number of books about magic and witchcraft in the marketplace, I point out, suggest that this might be happening. “I do ultimately think it’s a good thing,” she says, “because it’s about self-empowerment. And the more people who are self-empowered, the less miserable they’ll be. And isn’t that just a nicer planet to live on?”
Photo of Diana Helmuth by Rob King
The Witching Year is funny, sympathetic and right on time.
John Hendrickson’s Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter is the kind of memoir that educates, endears, impacts and devastates, often simultaneously. A journalist and senior editor at The Atlantic, Hendrickson is best known for his 2019 interview with then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The resulting piece had little to do with politics. Rather, Hendrickson’s article centered on Biden’s lifelong stutter and its influence on everything from his childhood to public speaking. The perceptible beating heart of the piece is Hendrickson himself, who tackled the subject of Biden’s stutter in a way only someone on the inside could. Hendrickson also speaks with a stutter, one that he deems severe. Life on Delay picks up after Hendrickson’s article went viral, when he was left to tackle media attention focused on the disability he had spent most of his life trying not to think about.
Although the book is predominantly a memoir, covering everything from adolescent bullying to teenage angst, it also includes a wide selection of interviews with other people who stutter. These conversations highlight Hendrickson’s journey from reluctant stuttering icon to a person at peace with himself and his stutter. His writing is unflinching as he depicts the daily life of someone with a disability only 1% of the U.S. population has. Personal yet informative, Life on Delay delves into the internal poeticism of someone who feels perpetually on the fringe while offering tangible advice regarding what to say or not say to someone with a stutter. By combining his own personal narrative with others’ life stories, Hendrickson provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of stutterers’ lived experiences, including creating music and art, facing childhood trauma, having their own “coming out” experiences and accepting disability as a part of their identity.
Life on Delay is not a disability memoir that focuses on trying to find a cure for stuttering, nor does it fall into the category of sentimental, inspirational stories of overcoming impossible odds. Instead, the book promotes a simple message: Obtaining true peace comes from accepting every part of yourself, including the things that bring you shame. It’s a universal message from a voice that has been misunderstood at best, demeaned and diminished at worst, making its impact on the reader all the more profound.
John Hendrickson’s Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter is a memoir that educates, endears, impacts and devastates, often simultaneously.
The word windfall conjures images of unanticipated abundance: sweet apples fallen from the tree, ripe for the taking; money unexpectedly found in a coat pocket; or a surprise inheritance of wealth. Erika Bolstad, journalist and former investigative reporter for Climatewire, offers these kinds of unexpected riches in Windfall, a personal family story wrapped in a history of mineral rights, the oil and gas industry, the hard realities for women homesteading in the early 20th century and the American myths of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
This heartfelt, meticulously researched memoir hinges on the author’s great-grandmother Anna Josephine Sletvold, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants who set up a homestead in North Dakota in the early 1900s. In 1907, according to family lore, Anna disappeared.
More than 100 years later, Bolstad’s mother received a surprise $2,400 check from an oil company—a payment for leasing the mineral rights beneath the surface of the lands where Anna’s homestead once was, at the edge of North Dakota’s profitable Bakken oil fields. She was jubilant. “We could be rich” had been whispered throughout their family history, starting in the early 1950s when North Dakota began its quest for oil, and when Bolstad’s grandparents entered into a lease agreement for royalties on mineral rights.
A short time later, Bolstad’s mother died, leaving behind a mystery that sparked the author’s investigative bent: What exactly had happened to Anna? And was the possibility of riches from oil-related wealth a reality or a chimera? Bolstad writes that this mystery “was my inheritance, my windfall. My story to tell.”
Into the personal fabric of this memoir, in which Bolstad recounts her search for how Anna was “lost,” the author weaves a robust history of the Homestead Act; the rise and fall of the North Dakota oil fields; the often nefarious practices companies employed to make huge profits at the expense of lands, workers and the public; and the political, economic and environmental implications of America’s never-ending quest for energy—and wealth.
With so much urgent concern over climate change and the impacts—environmental, political, economic and social—we humans have on our planet, Windfall is a timely, insightful and important read.
Erika Bolstad’s heartfelt memoir is also a robust discussion of the environmental implications of America’s never-ending quest for energy—and wealth.
Jami Attenberg (All This Could Be Yours) looks back on her years as a roaming artist in I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. Attenberg has lived an uncompromising life as a writer, and she muses about her choices in this forthright memoir. Frequently crossing the country to promote her books, Attenberg is most at home when she’s on the move. The nature of the creative process and the human need for connection are among the book’s many rich discussion topics.
In I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death, Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet) recalls the harrowing moments that have shaped her as a woman and mother. From an illness that almost claimed her life as a child to a dangerous dive off a cliff in Scotland, O’Farrell details her many near-death experiences. Over the course of 17 chapters, she considers life’s impermanence and the ways in which our bodies betray us. The result is an extraordinary narrative full of poetry and courage.
Akwaeke Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji) delivers a compelling account of their artistic growth and search for identity in Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. Comprised of letters the author writes to friends and colleagues, the narrative is a captivating chronicle of personal transformation. Emezi, who hails from Nigeria, put down roots in New Orleans and has experienced literary success, even as they continued to seek a more authentic existence. Uncertainty and longing animate their correspondence, and Emezi uses the epistolary form to great effect as they question long-held notions of identity, gender and family.
Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing) reflects on the costs of structural racism in Men We Reaped: A Memoir. The death of her brother and a number of male friends inspired Ward to explore mortality and how loss impacts the living. In this searing memoir, she remembers her Mississippi upbringing and the ways in which economic inequality, drugs and societal stressors create an environment in which Black men are needlessly sacrificed. Ward writes with sensitivity about mourning and moving forward, and themes of race, grief and gender will inspire meaningful dialogue among readers.
These revealing memoirs are perfect to read with your book club.
“Having your child die is so brutally humbling I struggle to describe it,” writes comedian and “Catastrophe” actor Rob Delaney. And yet he does manage to describe it, and does it well, in his unspeakably admirable memoir A Heart That Works. The comedian’s first book was memorably titled Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. This second, decidedly different, book describes the life of his 2-year-old son, Henry, who died from a brain tumor in 2018.
Life seemed practically perfect for Delaney and his beloved wife, Leah, with their “beautiful little clump of boys”—three under the age of 5. However, Henry became ill at 11 months from an apple-size tumor right next to his brainstem. Instantly, their lives were thrust into another dimension as Henry faced surgery, chemo and 14 months of hospitalization, only for his cancer to eventually return without any safe options for treatment. Delaney recounts the ordeal in searingly honest terms, conveying the intricate cobweb of emotions he experienced, often simultaneously: grief, rage, gratitude, grace and, most of all, love for Henry, their family and the many people who supported them during this time.
“It often felt like we were falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion,” Delaney writes, “with each successive piece of bad news.” Still, they were able to savor sweet moments with Henry and his brothers, even in the face of an additional family tragedy: Delaney’s brother-in-law died by suicide during Henry’s hospitalization. This unexpected death struck hard, especially since Delaney has wrestled with suicidal ideation himself, and since he wasn’t able to reach out as he normally would have because his son had been so ill.
Despite this tsunami of tragedies, there is humor, often black humor, throughout Delaney’s account. “If you can’t have fun dressed as a family of skeletons in a pediatric cancer ward,” he writes, “I don’t know what to tell you.” There are parcels of advice amid his frank, razor-sharp writing as well. Delaney digs deep on every page, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the worst moments of his life. His is truly a heart that works.
Comedian Rob Delaney digs deep in his second memoir, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the life and death of his son.
John Hendrickson begins his memoir, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter, at the point when most people first encountered his byline: during an interview in 2019 with then-presidential candidate Joe Biden for The Atlantic, where Hendrickson is a senior editor. Although he is a person who stutters, the viral article, titled “What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say,” was Hendrickson’s first piece about stuttering that was written for “public consumption,” he tells me by phone from his home in New York City.
At the time of our conversation, near the end of 2022, Biden is almost halfway through his first presidential term. Hendrickson, meanwhile, has spent the intervening years writing a memoir about stuttering and his journey of self-acceptance, prompted by his highly acclaimed article on Biden’s lifelong stutter. “Writing the article was the first time I had really reckoned with the layers of being a person who stutters,” he says. “[Stuttering] goes well beyond difficulty in saying words. It’s about avoidance and coping. It’s about trying to find self-confidence. It’s about stigmatization. There are so many layers to it that are deeper and more complicated than the mechanics of saying words, and that was the first time I had ever addressed any of that in a meaningful way.”
Like Biden and Hendrickson during their interview, Hendrickson and I share a common experience: We stutter. We spend the first few minutes of our phone call exchanging mutual relief that there’s no pressure to hide our stutter during introductions, and no apprehension about how the person on the other end might react to the repetitions, prolongations, blocks or other auditory elements of our stutters. That sense of camaraderie is one Hendrickson highlights in his book as well, which not only covers his firsthand experience with stuttering but also incorporates interviews with stutterers from diverse backgrounds. “My personal story is mine, and it contains certain elements that are universal. But there are so many other people, so many other stories and other perspectives out there that are very different from the life that I’ve lived, even if we’ve both lived with a stutter,” Hendrickson explains. “Those different perspectives really broadened my understanding. I can only convey my own way of living, but that wouldn’t be a full enough picture. I wanted to make sure I was offering the reader a true variety of perspectives on navigating this disorder.”
Those other perspectives include a guitarist named Lyle who sells self-referential T-shirts about his stutter; a nurse practitioner named Roisin who became the co-leader of a stuttering support group, where she eventually met her spouse, Stavros, who also stutters; and a “multitalented artist” who has “reclaimed the power of his stutter like no one I’ve ever met,” Hendrickson writes, by rendering his first name, Jerome, with a preferred spelling of “JJJJJerome,” further cementing the connection between his identity and his speech.
“The underlying message of the book is: Never underestimate your capacity for change.”
Alongside these compelling conversations, Hendrickson provides the most up-to-date medical and scientific research on stuttering. He describes therapy practices that emphasize self-acceptance over more traditional techniques, like fluency shaping, that approach stuttering as a problem to be solved or eliminated. “It was very important to me to highlight the most cutting-edge, modern and progressive approaches to therapy, in which they’re giving clients the primary message of: ‘Communicate confidently,’” Hendrickson says. “‘It’s OK to stutter, and we want to work with you to make you feel empowered to speak in any situation. If you’re disfluent or fluent, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re talking at all. What matters is that you’re living a full life with your stutter.’”
There’s an interesting sense of disconnection when writing about a stutter, which can be physically transcribed on the page—by repeating certain letters or sounds, or using ellipses and white space on the page to mimic blocks and pauses—but can’t be fully realized until it’s spoken out loud. Even so, there are scenes in Life on Delay that capture the strain, pressure and anxiety of daily interactions as a person who stutters. “This is the tension that stutterers live with: Is it better for me to speak and potentially embarrass myself or to shut down and say nothing at all?” Hendrickson writes in an early chapter. “Neither approach yields happiness.” In the first half of the book, there’s a sense of melancholy, isolation and anger toward his speech that Hendrickson captures beautifully: “I understand that my stutter may make you cringe, laugh, recoil. I know my stutter can feel like a waste of time—of yours, of mine—and that it has the power to embarrass both of us. And I’ve begun to realize that the only way to understand its power is to talk about it.” Hendrickson shares that part of his motivation for writing Life on Delay, for addressing those feelings of shame and isolation head-on, was to “write a book that my teenage self wanted to read.”
“It’s harder and it takes longer to reach a place of acceptance—to really undergo this change in perspective and make peace with the fact that things aren’t perfect.”
As Hendrickson reflects on his own childhood, interacts with more people who stutter and conducts interviews that foster open and authentic communication over the course of Life on Delay, a sense of acceptance for his own speech begins to emerge. “I’ve changed,” Hendrickson says succinctly. “I’ve undergone a change with my relationship to my stutter. Five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I would have never expected to be writing a book about stuttering, or giving interviews, or doing anything remotely resembling public speaking. So the underlying message of the book is: Never underestimate your capacity for change.”
Hendrickson says the change he experienced was a result of finally accepting his speech and regarding it as a fact of his lived experience, rather than an obstacle to be altered or avoided. “The subtitle of the book is ‘Making Peace With a Stutter’ because that was really my goal. It’s possible to reach a place of peace with it, and that is a really profound feeling, because it’s different from liking something or hating something,” he says. “There are so many things in our lives we likely wish were different or, if we had a do-over, that we would change. It’s harder and it takes longer to reach a place of acceptance—to really undergo this change in perspective and make peace with the fact that things aren’t perfect. When you’re able to internalize a message like that and apply it to other parts of life, it does give you a sense of peace.”
Author headshot of John Hendrickson by Matthew Bernucca.
The author of Life on Delay stopped regarding his stutter as an obstacle and started viewing it as a fact.
In Have I Told You This Already?Stories I Don’t Want to Forget to Remember (4.5 hours), Lauren Graham, the beloved actor and bestselling author of Talking as Fast as I Can, offers conversational, witty essays about everything from changing trends in undergarments to the process of coming to terms with aging, from adventures in pandemic cooking to the ways in which adopting an ailing dog can resurrect old anxieties. Graham also provides some behind-the-scenes glimpses of Hollywood, all delivered with the same down-to-earth, self-deprecating humor that makes her so endearing. Longtime fans will likely feel a little “Gilmore Girls” nostalgia while listening to her deliver these frank, honest anecdotes.
After sharing her life story in Becoming, former first lady Michelle Obama now offers readers an exceptional follow-up—“a glimpse inside my personal toolbox”—in The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times.
Obama describes the publication of Becoming as “one of the happiest and most affirming periods of my life so far.” That said, the night before starting her international publicity tour, she lay in bed, terrified at the thought of the arena-size audiences she would soon face. As it turns out, Obama is a worrier who understands all too well that “your fearful mind is almost always trying to seize the steering wheel and change your course.” She offers a supreme example: When her husband wanted to run for president, he first asked for her blessing. “I was pretty ready to shut it down,” she writes, because she didn’t want to launch their orderly family life into inevitable chaos. “It’s strange to think that I could have altered the course of history with my fear.”
Much later, the COVID-19 pandemic knocked Obama off her feet, sending her into what felt like a “low-grade form” of depression. During lockdown, she found salvation in an unexpected place: teaching herself to knit by watching YouTube videos. That story is one of many private moments she shares in The Light We Carry. For instance, she admits to an ongoing frustration with her husband’s lack of punctuality, writing that “when feeling cornered, it turns out, I am capable of saying some stupid, hurtful things.” It’s comforting to hear that our heroes are human, and Obama’s signature openness—in addition to her encouraging, sometimes funny, always chummy voice—make her relatable and admirable throughout the book.
The Light We Carry contains a multitude of other poignant, amusing anecdotes and helpful advice for all types of readers: anyone feeling marginalized; young people finding their way in love, education and careers; parents of young children; and just about anyone trying to keep a steady course in the world. Obama writes about the importance of forming and nurturing friendship (which isn’t easy to do when the Secret Service surrounds a potential new friend’s car) and imparts a lifetime of lessons from her parents, who showed her “what it felt like to be comfortably afraid.”
In these frequently dark times, The Light We Carry feels like a hug from a trusted advisor and a good friend. As Obama writes, “The practice I’ve had in finding and appreciating the light inside other people has become perhaps my most valuable tool for overcoming uncertainty and . . . keeping my hopefulness intact.” As one of the brightest lights in America, Obama helps shine the way for others along our shared path.
Michelle Obama’s signature openness—in addition to her encouraging, funny voice—make her relatable and admirable throughout The Light We Carry.
Sam Heughan, known to legions of fans as Jamie Fraser in the popular TV show based on Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, recently decided it was time to walk the rigorous West Highland Way in Scotland, a long-distance hiking trail that runs from north of Glasgow to Fort William in the Scottish Highlands. He wanted a solitary challenge and a pause in the acting career he has worked tirelessly at, and packing 96 miles into five days seemed like it would provide the right combination of endurance and introspection. In his remarkable, thought-provoking memoir, Waypoints: My Scottish Journey, he welcomes readers along for the journey.
Before Heughan stepped out the door onto the West Highland Way, he was a runner, not a walker. Marathons, yes; walking slowly, not his thing. His camping and hiking experiences were limited; he even thought hiking poles were “cumbersome” and almost threw them away once he hit the trail. His overstuffed rucksack, complete with whiskey and cigars, weighed him down. The rain in late October almost ruined him on the second day, and he soon chose comfortable wayside inns over his tent. But he was nearing his 40th birthday (making him the same age as the Way) and, despite these challenges, felt it was simply time he got this done.
Bracketing Heughan’s journey is an account of his visit to his dying father in faraway British Columbia, Canada. The man was a stranger who abandoned his family long ago, but Heughan and his brother felt nonetheless compelled to offer a goodbye. Once they arrived, Heughan was stunned to learn that his father had been following his acting career all along. He recorded their visit on his phone, but later, back on the set of “Outlander,” the phone vanished. It was, he writes, “a fitting epitaph.”
The award-winning actor, author, philanthropist and entrepreneur offers plenty of details of his walk to Fort William, including a daunting hike up Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the United Kingdom. Along the way, Heughan has a clear, precise and entertaining style. He is a funny man, and his encounters with roaming sheep, other hikers and clusters of mushrooms are wonderfully comic.
If Waypoints were merely about Heughan’s walk, it would be delightful, instructive and enticing. But this is a memoir, after all, and it is his reflection on his life and work, interspersed with the challenges and discoveries of the Way, that lend his story heft and grit.
“Outlander” star Sam Heughan’s reflections on his life and work add heft and grit to his memoir about walking the West Highland Way in Scotland.
A few years after British actor Tom Felton hung up his Slytherin robes for good, he hit rock bottom. It was the first step toward reclaiming his identity, as it prompted him to ask how and when he left the wisecracking kid from Surrey behind and instead became dependent on the numbing effect of alcohol. In Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, Felton looks back in order to uncover the path forward as he candidly details the surreal experience of being a prominent part of a pop culture juggernaut.
Felton’s first major on-screen role was in 1997’s The Borrowers, an adaptation of the classic children’s book. This opened the door to other promising opportunities, notably playing The Boy Who Lived’s archenemy: sneering, peroxide-blond Draco Malfoy. At the time of his audition, 12-year-old Felton had never read a Harry Potter novel and couldn’t quite understand the breathless excitement that the books inspired.
Felton spent nearly a decade immersed in the world of witches and wizards, where he became accustomed to a singular life on set. The final stretch of filming was bittersweet, and when it was through, he hoped to transition into a career brimming with star-studded blockbusters and high-end craft services. Instead, Felton’s move to Los Angeles made him feel like a rudderless ship. “I missed having an ordinary conversation with an authentic human, who didn’t know who I was, and didn’t care,” he writes.
Felton’s memoir isn’t a shameless tell-all or a cautionary tale about the ills of fame. He frequently expresses gratitude and praises the skills and professionalism of older actors who were in the Harry Potter films, such as Jason Isaacs and Alan Rickman. He has no problem poking fun at himself, but his moments of self-reflection are compassionate. Beyond the Wand may focus on Felton’s Harry Potter days, but it’s so much more than fan service. With introspection and charm, Felton’s narrative captures the growing pains of adolescence.
In his memoir, Draco Malfoy actor Tom Felton captures the growing pains of adolescence with introspection and charm.
Lauren Graham is perhaps best known for her acting, particularly her role as the young, headstrong single mom Lorelai in the television show “Gilmore Girls.” But Graham, who has a bachelor’s degree in English from Barnard College and master’s of fine arts in acting performance from Southern Methodist University, is also the accomplished author of a novel (Someday, Someday, Maybe), a collection of personal essays (Talking as Fast as I Can) and a book of advice for graduates (In Conclusion, Don’t Worry About It).
Graham’s second book of personal essays, Have I Told You This Already?: Stories I Don’t Want to Forget to Remember, is composed of 15 insightful pieces relaying impactful moments and life lessons that have shaped who she is. She explains how her creative outlook was molded by people and experiences from her youth. For example, although her mother was largely absent from her upbringing, Graham sees a positive side to this fact: “I think not growing up with my mom means I didn’t have any preconceived notions of what a mom is supposed to be!”
Graham takes the reader on a behind-the-scenes tour of Hollywood, sharing acting jargon such as “pumpkin” (the term for when child actors have to be done working for the day) and “sold it in the room” (getting backing from someone with clout). She’s candid about the demands of show business, too, and the acrobatics that actors have to perform to fit into the Hollywood mold. In a chapter aptly named “Forever 32,” Graham reflects on aging, comparing her recollections of being a 20-something to when, at the age of 32, she realized “I had a sense of myself I’d never had before.” She also muses about her days as a young actor, hustling to various jobs while trying to make it. These stories and anecdotes are especially raw, real and humorous.
Graham’s writing is fresh, sharp and very funny, with fast, staccato sentences that evoke what it must be like to have a conversation with her. Her voice invites the reader in, emanating a refreshing openness that will make them want to be her best friend. Have I Told You This Already? is an enjoyable, amusing revelation.
Actor Lauren Graham’s second collection of essays is fresh, sharp and very funny, with staccato sentences that evoke what it must be like to have a conversation with her.
Oh, Lord Grantham, patriarch of Downton Abbey! We feel as though we already know you, with those twinkling eyes and deep, reassuring voice. In Playing Under the Piano: From Downton to Darkest Peru, stage and screen actor Hugh Bonneville shares what he calls “a series of snapshots I’ve taken along the way,” allowing us to know him more truly. As you might expect, his account is intriguing, breezy and full of intellect and humor. It’s also a delicious stroll down a red carpet lined with big names, including Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Laurence Olivier, Celia Imrie, Leonardo DiCaprio and many more.
The memoir is divided into sections discussing Bonneville’s childhood, theater years and film roles. His father was a urologist and his mother a nurse—or so he thought before learning after her death that her second job was with MI6, the British Secret Service. “I may not have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth but I realised I had a nice set of crockery compared to so many others,” he writes. Early on, he began thinking of the theater as a “magic toybox,” although he originally thought he would become a lawyer and also contemplated theology until drama school beckoned.
There’s no mean-spirited gossip in this memoir, just plenty of humorous self-deprecation and some laugh-out-loud anecdotes—like the time an actor in a live theater performance was popping peanuts while making a confession and ended up choking and passing out. Or the time Judi Dench dropped a note that said “Fancy a shag?” in the lap of an audience member she thought was a friend. Turns out, the man was not her pal.
Bonneville’s years of rich stage, television and film performances are nicely detailed, including amusing audition mishaps and disappointments. Although he offers a number of anecdotes about his parents, siblings, wife and son, he remains largely private about his personal life. But the “Downton Abbey” stories are wonderful, even if rabid fans like myself will wish for more. We shouldn’t complain though, given tidbits like Shirley MacLaine’s comment, “I had lovers all over the world. Overseas was fun. This one time, three in a day.” To which Maggie Smith responded, “Oh darling, you have been busy.”
Playing Under the Piano is a must-read for Bonneville fans, as well as an excellent look at the ups and downs of being an actor. Now excuse me while I go watch Paddington again.
Hugh Bonneville’s memoir is intriguing, breezy and full of intellect, a delicious stroll down a red carpet lined with big names and laugh-out-loud anecdotes.
Actor Paul Newman was known for many things: acting, car racing, philanthropy through his Newman’s Own food business and, of course, his rugged good looks and piercing blue eyes. He was a beloved Hollywood icon, but he didn’t think of himself that way. In fact, he wrestled with internal demons throughout his life.
Newman’s memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, composed posthumously from interviews he began conducting in 1986 with the help of screenwriter and close friend Stewart Stern, is raw, honest and revealing. Through his own reminiscences and those of his contemporaries, including Elia Kazan, Stuart Rosenberg, Eva Marie Saint and Tom Cruise, the book provides a firsthand glimpse of Newman’s life and how his choices affected those around him. His upbringing, military service in World War II, first marriage to Jackie Witt, second marriage to actor Joanne Woodward, six children and professional and personal endeavors are all laid out on the table.
Even after he became famous, Newman was often unsure of himself. Part of this stemmed from the fact that he likely had a learning disability. The way he was treated by his parents, especially his mother, was also detrimental. She could be hurtful and treated him like a dress-up doll rather than a son. Newman’s memories of his father depict the man as an indifferent alcoholic. Unfortunately, this contributed to Newman’s own problems with alcoholism, as well as his son Scott’s substance issues and depression—burdens Newman carried his whole life.
But Newman also had more positive traits, from charisma and humor to compassion and business savvy. These qualities pop up throughout the book and were obvious to those who knew him. But even after all his success, he just couldn’t seem to shake his feelings of self-doubt. “If I had to define ‘Newman’ in the dictionary, I’d say: ‘One who tries too hard,’” he writes. The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man is a humble and candid look into the life of a celebrated but often misunderstood man.
In Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir, his upbringing, military service, marriages, children and professional endeavors are all laid out on the table.
Nothing could have prepared Melanie Jayne Chisholm—aka Sporty Spice—for the loneliness, isolation and debilitating episodes of imposter syndrome that accompanied the extreme highs (and lows) of fame. In The Sporty One: My Life as a Spice Girl, the singer, songwriter and tracksuit-wearing Brit carefully unpacks her nonlinear journey toward self-acceptance while pinned under the glare of the spotlight.
The Spice Girls were a pop culture supernova at the turn of the new millennium. Contrary to the narrative wrought by the misogynistic media, the group was not the brainchild of industry executives. After answering a magazine advertisement, Victoria Adams (Posh), Geri Halliwell (Ginger), Melanie Brown (Scary), Michelle Stephenson and Chisholm came together to form the band Touch. When Stephenson proved to be a weak link, Emma Bunton (Baby) was recruited. It would take a pivotal name change and the reclamation of creative autonomy from their early male managers, but the Spice Girls would go on to smash records and, even more importantly, disrupt the cultural and musical landscape.
This type of rise at a young age leaves a few scars, and Chisholm isn’t afraid to recount her personal battles. The pressures of being a ubiquitous pop star coupled with her innate perfectionism brought on depression and severe anxiety. At one point after the Spice Girls had gone on hiatus and Chisholm had embarked on a successful solo career, she was nearly agoraphobic and plagued by incessant panic attacks. And despite her public image of health and fitness, the singer was secretly contending with disordered eating, which eventually led to anorexia and binge eating disorders. In 2009, Chisholm gave birth to her daughter, Scarlet. Motherhood wasn’t a cure-all for her mental health issues, but this new caregiver role allowed her to appreciate the extraordinary power of her body and all she has put it through.
Chisholm’s narrative voice is warm, funny and unabashedly real. Fans will feel as though they’ve been invited to an enlightening soul session with a close friend. Hard truths about patriarchal oppression and the fickle nature of celebrity are examined with sympathy and understanding. The Sporty One is more than the memoir of a pop star; it’s an emotional revelation.
Melanie Chisholm, aka Sporty Spice, unpacks her nonlinear journey toward self-acceptance while pinned under the glare of the spotlight.
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The art of letter writing seems all but doomed in our age of digital communication, and one wonders where future literary biographers will turn for the singular insights that a writer’s correspondence affords. Scholars of John le Carré will have no such concerns. Le Carré, real name David Cornwell, who died in December 2020, was perhaps the most thoughtful and erudite purveyor of the spy novel in the second half of the 20th century, a crackerjack storyteller who elevated the thriller to literary heights. He was also a prolific correspondent, and in A Private Spy, Tim Cornwell has assembled a generous collection of his father’s letters spanning a lifetime.
Fans of le Carré’s fiction know the outline of his own story—how, when working for British intelligence, masquerading as a junior diplomat in postwar Germany, he began to publish espionage novels that precipitated the end of his budding career as a spy but rapidly brought him fame and unaccustomed wealth. The letters from this seminal period paint a portrait of an enthusiastic and ambitious young man not fully comfortable in his new garb. Some of that discomfort, we discern, stemmed from the lingering effects of an alienated childhood and his god-awful relationship with his huckster father, Ronnie, whose unwelcome presence, both real and psychic, hovers over much of le Carré’s early story. The letters also imply that another casualty of le Carré’s newfound success was his first marriage; but while Cornwell fills in gaps with helpful background commentary, the letters often skim the surface about this and other personal events. Not for nothing is the book called A Private Spy.
The sweep of le Carré’s formidable 60-year career resists easy encapsulation, but through these letters readers encounter a panoply of the interesting people he called his friends and colleagues: fellow MI6 agents; writers such as Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Tom Stoppard; actors Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman, who each portrayed le Carré’s best-known recurring character, George Smiley. There are many insightful letters to his stepmother, Jean, another survivor of the Ronnie long game, that reveal le Carré as a man who often contributed to his family’s well-being by assuming the roles of benefactor, confessor and substitute patriarch. Letters to publishing colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, while more formal than the personal missives, offer a window into a literary life pursued with meticulous and demanding professionalism.
“I hate the telephone. I can’t type. Like the tailor in my new novel, I ply my trade by hand,” le Carré once wrote. The engrossing letters in A Private Spy—curated with great affection and care by Cornwell, who sadly passed away in May 2022 before seeing the book published—are not unlike an exquisite bespoke suit crafted by a master: careful to both accentuate the assets and conceal the flaws.
The collected letters of John le Carré, master of the spy novel, reveal and conceal in equal measure.
Actor Constance Wu (known for her lauded roles in “Fresh Off the Boat,” Crazy Rich Asians and Hustlers) narrates her thoughtful and revealing memoir in essays with an endearing blend of passion and playfulness.
Throughout her career, Wu has learned that life is a series of scenes that shape us; we don’t shape the scenes. She shares memories of people and events that have influenced who she is, including humorous and heartwarming tales of her parents’ assimilation into American culture, humbling mistakes she’s made in love and work, an unexpectedly touching goodbye to her black Toyota Prius and insightful commentary on technology, American culture and Asian diaspora.
Evocative, provocative and always heartfelt, Making a Scene (8 hours) is worthy of an encore. It’s a great match for fans of Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart.
Evocative, provocative and always heartfelt, Constance Wu’s Making a Scene is worthy of an encore.
Evette Dionne’s anticipated second release after her celebrated children’s nonfiction book, Lifting as We Climb, is a bracing essay collection on the dangers of fatphobia and her personal resistance to its claims. The former editor-in-chief of Bitch magazine braids the personal with the political in Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul, breaking down society’s deep-seated beliefs about fat people and setting new standards that allow her to thrive as she is.
Dionne takes up a variety of interconnected themes, such as the meaningful representation of fat women in media and equitable access to spaces that are meant for all of us. She writes about her first experiences of ostracization as she struggled with agoraphobia as an adolescent—which was also one of the first moments her decision-making agency was challenged in a medical setting. Despite her parents’ support, Dionne was met by doctors with indifference and even hostility, a pattern that reached its nadir when a doctor failed to promptly diagnose her heart failure, pointing instead to her size as the issue. These personal encounters with fatphobia are part of a continuum of discrimination that Dionne locates in pop culture, as well—from people’s obsession with celebrities’ weight to the preoccupation with policing fat bodies in shows like “My 600-Lb. Life.”
Dionne incorporates extensive research into Weightless, from the economic underpinnings of Reagan-era reductions to well-balanced free lunch programs and medical professionals’ widely held biases. All of these topics point to one sobering fact: Profound disgust toward fat people in American society circumscribes their lives in potentially lethal ways. However, despite these grave threats, Dionne is not hopeless. In fact, Weightless is a testament to resilience and an offering of realistic optimism. In the essay “I Want a Love Like Khadijah James,” Dionne remembers the first time she saw a woman whose body looked like hers on television: Queen Latifah as Khadijah James on “Living Single.” This feeling of being recognized lit Dionne’s world with the bright glow of possibility, and it has continued to transform her understanding of what her life could look like if she settles for nothing less than what she deserves, whether in terms of medical care, romantic relationships or professional endeavors.
Dionne writes, “I never thought I could do better because I rarely saw a fat Black woman modeling that reality for me.” With Weightless, Dionne is the model she so desperately needed, and one that other fat girls and women deserve. Her assertion of liberation for fat people brings us one important step closer to achieving it.
Evette Dionne braids the personal with the political in Weightless, breaking down society’s beliefs about fat people and advocating for new standards that allow them to thrive.
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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.
