Since the early 1990s, Jeremiah Moss has lived in—and fiercely loved—New York City. In 2007, the poet and psychoanalyst launched the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which became the foundation for 2017’s well-received Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul. In blog and book, Moss bemoaned the damaging outcomes of hypergentrification.
Five years on, Moss is back in the fray with the passionate and probing Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York, in which he rails against the results of New York’s tectonic shifts in population and personality during what he calls the “profound accidental experiment” of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Moss expertly and often hilariously indulges his inner curmudgeon when describing the recent influx of moneyed and inconsiderate “New People” and rhapsodizing about the city that emerged once they fled the virus’ epicenter. Along the way, he considers what’s left when the dominant class is skimmed off the top of a city. After all, the New People have other places to go, but what happens to those who have no other options—or a complete inability to imagine living anywhere else?
As Moss walks and bicycles around the city every day, he joins protests and rallies and wee-hours dance parties in search of answers (while avoiding police intent on tamping down rebellion and revelry). He also reflects on his newfound feelings of confidence and freedom as a transgender man who reveled in the joyful queer energy that infused the streets of New York in its feral state.
When officials began declaring that New York should “get back to normal,” Moss felt sad that he (and the city as a whole) seemed to be reverting to pre-lockdown habits. Who and what, he wonders, is normal anyway? Who decides, and why? Is this newly rediscovered rebellious spirit gone for good?
In Feral City, Moss has created an indelible portrait of a city in transition; it vibrates with eat-the-rich energy and time-marches-on poignancy. “One day,” he writes, “the tide will shift and New York will change, as it always does. That, as people like to say, is the one thing you can count on in this town.” Perhaps he’ll be back to write about it when it does.
Jeremiah Moss’ Feral City is an indelible portrait of New York City in transition, vibrating with eat-the-rich energy and time-marches-on poignancy.
For 24 years, Hua Hsu has been carrying around a padded envelope stuffed with memorabilia. Things like “a pack of Export A’s with two cigarettes left,” a funeral program, letters, cassette tapes, receipts, punchlines written on napkins, a paperback copy of Edward Carr’s What Is History? Hsu hastily gathered all of these things and more in the aftermath of the murder of his friend Ken, who was killed in a carjacking in 1998, the summer before their senior year at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I’m an archivist at heart,” Hsu says during a call to his home in Brooklyn, New York. When his friend was killed, Hsu says he “just began writing everything down.” His obsessive cataloging even led his college friends to choose him to deliver the eulogy at Ken’s funeral. Hsu has continued poring over his gathered notes and memorabilia ever since, trying to find a way “to capture certain feelings since those days.” But until recently, he says, “it didn’t seem to have any possibility of becoming a narrative.”
As he describes in his richly probing memoir, Stay True, Hsu grew up in Cupertino, California, the only child of parents who came to the U.S. in the 1960s for college and to escape a repressive regime in Taiwan. He was an often solitary child who found expression through and distinguished himself with his avid love of music, which he wrote about in vibrant personal zines. At Berkeley, he curated mixtapes for every occasion, like trips in his Volvo with Ken and others to pick up friends from the airport or even just for local food runs. Outside of curating the aesthetics of his personal identity, Hsu spent those years tutoring inmates at San Quentin State Prison, volunteering as a mentor for youths in neighboring Richmond, California, and participating in the growing Asian American-led political movements of the 1990s.
Hsu says he hopes Stay True captures the feeling of that moment. “I want the book to sound like what life was like then. It’s hard to describe to someone who didn’t experience America Online what boredom felt like at the time, or what the pace of life is like if you’re in college pre-internet, or just what it felt like to be at Berkeley. . . . I didn’t want it to be purely nostalgic. I wanted it to feel like you’re just hanging out in this other time.”
“I didn’t want it to be purely nostalgic. I wanted it to feel like you’re just hanging out in this other time.”
Within these descriptions of pre-Y2K Northern California, Ken often seems elusive. Hsu quotes his therapist and another friend who asked him how close he really was to Ken, and foregrounding that question was deliberate, Hsu says. “When you’re young, you’re just living day to day. Then if there’s some kind of fracture or trauma, you’re forced to step out of your context and examine what’s meaningful to you. There’s a way I took this friendship for granted. When I was writing in my journal, I was always returning to how to describe [Ken]: his voice, his laugh, his skin. You’d never have occasion to do something like that if he were still alive. The question of closeness only becomes visible when it’s no longer there.”
Hsu, who arrived at Berkeley with alternative rock sensibilities and a deliberately oddball style of dress, did not immediately like Ken, a handsome, conventionally dressed, self-assured fraternity member. Ken was a Japanese American whose grandparents had been incarcerated in an internment camp during World War II, but compared to Hsu, Ken had thoroughly assimilated, down to the Abercrombie wardrobe. In this way, Ken seemed to represent to Hsu a different life path—one he was initially skeptical about. “He was comfortable in his own skin,” Hsu says. “He was confident. . . . It started off as something I would just dismiss, and then it became intriguing.”
One of Stay True‘s many fascinating qualities is its examination of the differing ways Asian Americans embrace and reject American culture. In particular, Hsu writes lovingly of his parents’ experiences as new immigrants. At one point, Hsu’s father was able to return to Taiwan to work as a well-paid professional. This being the pre-internet age, he communicated with his son via fax machine while he was in Taiwan, and the fatherly love expressed in those faxes is remarkable. At another point, Hsu describes his mother, no longer among the newest immigrants to her San Jose suburb, almost comically deriding the rudeness of more recent Chinese immigrants to burgeoning Silicon Valley.
“The question of closeness only becomes visible when it’s no longer there.”
But Stay True‘s focus remains on a friendship: its qualities, its vagaries, its lingering questions and impacts, frozen and spotlighted by its traumatic end. After Berkeley, Hsu went on to Harvard, where he continued to obsess over his late friend while feeling “marooned” on the East Coast. These days, he says he “doesn’t feel entirely at home anywhere,” but he’s at least acclimated to the East Coast. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and until recently, he was an associate professor of English and director of American Studies at Vassar College. In 2022, he became a professor of literature at Bard College, teaching writing and Asian literature. He and his wife have a 7-year-old son. Marital strife, he jokes, centers on alternate street parking and who will fulfill the work quota at the food co-op.
So much has changed in the last 24 years—but creating this book after so much time and deliberation has not brought Hsu catharsis or closure, he says. “That feels too climactic. But it has given me a lot of peace.”
Headshot of Hua Hsu by Devlin Claro
Ever since his friend was murdered in 1998, Hua Hsu has been searching for a way to capture the feeling of their time together.
Poet and author Ander Monson has seen the 1987 movie Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger on the run from an alien in a Guatemalan jungle, 146 times. To explain why, he wrote Predator: A Memoir. Through a scene-by-scene exploration of the film, which he describes as “satire wrapped in gun pornography,” Monson reckons with his lifelong obsession with the movie and how it has informed his relationships to fatherhood, violence, fanaticism and masculinity.
“How dumb is this to have spent a decade or more watching this kind of dumb movie?” Monson asks throughout the book. What he proves is that Predator is both dumb and insightful; spending a lifetime with Predator is both a fun, escapist pastime and a profound self-education. Through repeated rewatches of the film, Monson better understands the real-life predators that have lingered in his imagination. One recurring image is the shocking rape and murder of his childhood babysitter by a budding serial killer in his small hometown in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In the character of the Predator, Monson sees a culmination of how violence, particularly violence committed by men, has been fetishized: “What’s hunting us is us, Predator tells us. It’s a version of us—male, equipped, single-minded, armed, aggressive, showy, and powerful.” With complete candor, he interrogates violence he has both witnessed and committed, violence that has both harmed and benefited him.
This is not film analysis, and though Monson does provide critique, he’s not looking at the film as a work of art. Predator is about Monson’s shifting relationship to a fixed cultural object and how he has seen himself reflected in it and found himself reflecting it back. However, navel-gazing is skillfully avoided. Monson’s narration has the rampant energy and good-natured, aw-shucks humility of a lively conversation in a movie theater lobby.
Some level of interest in the film is definitely required to understand what Monson is saying, but his storytelling spills over with tactile curiosity and fervor, making this work accessible to those who have seen the movie 145 fewer times than he has. It’s a book that will ignite conversation (and multiple film rewatches) for those who can relate to Monson’s familiar sentiment: “I’m not angry at masculinity exactly but I do have questions for it.”
Ander Monson’s exploration of the 1987 film Predator has the rampant energy and good-natured, aw-shucks humility of a lively conversation in a movie theater lobby.
Sophia’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Goldman, knits hats for just about everybody she knows, and Sophia helps by making the pompoms that go on top. “Keeping keppies warm is our mitzvah,” Mrs. Goldman tells Sophia, explaining that “a mitzvah is a good deed.” When Mrs. Goldman gives her own hat away, Sophia wants to knit her something special, but knitting turns out to be harder than she realized. I love this sweet introduction to the Jewish concept of mitzvot. Author Michelle Edwards’ text has lots of delightful little details, like when Sophia notices that a hat she and Mrs. Goldman began knitting together many years ago still smells like chicken soup. But what gets me every time is Edwards’ description of Sophia’s emotions when she realizes the perfect solution to her knitting woes: “Sophia feels her heart grow bigger and lighter, like a balloon.” If ever a book were a mitzvah, it would be A Hat for Mrs. Goldman.
—Stephanie, Associate Editor
America
Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher whose obsessive analysis of the effects of unchecked consumerism becomes more prescient with each passing day. In his 1988 essay collection, America, Baudrillard follows Route 66 across the United States toward Death Valley, California, as he seeks to answer a seemingly simple question: What makes an American? The thing that synthesizes American identity, he finds, is faith: from the evangelical fervor of Salt Lake City, to Las Vegas’ ascendant belief in the dollar, to the ever-elusive future of San Franciscan tech lords. Everywhere he looks, Baudrillard finds sprawling cities not built on trade or natural resources but suspended on dust clouds, spinning rivers of capital and an unshakable belief in American mastery over nature, by whatever means. Even if you disagree with Baudrillard’s funny, sometimes biting analysis of the United States, his surprisingly nuanced poetry, complex worldview and foreign perspective still make for a unique and engaging read during these dynamic times.
—Anthony, Editorial Intern
Open Book
Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, I knew that Jessica Simpson had started out singing in church. What surprised me when I read her memoir, Open Book, however, was how much Simpson’s Christian faith still matters to her all these years later. The book opens with the day she decided to stop drinking, after years of using alcohol to quell her anxiety through tough relationships and even tougher career breaks. As she gets honest with friends about her dependency on alcohol, the group decides to pray together to validate Simpson’s decision. This moment of honesty and faith is a good entry point, since these values are Simpson’s guiding lights throughout her memoir. She’s honest with readers about childhood sexual abuse, the demands of record labels, her marriage to Nick Lachey, her relationships with family and the wild ups and downs that have shaped her life’s terrain. At every point, Simpson’s Baptist roots ground her and keep her from straying too far from her authentic self.
—Christy, Associate Editor
The Sparrow
First published in 1996, Mary Doria Russell’s science fiction classic The Sparrow examines organized religion and faith on a cosmic scale. Spanning the years 2014 to 2060, the novel follows an interstellar mission led by skilled linguist and Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz to discover the source of hauntingly beautiful music that was detected on a planet four light-years away. Accompanied by a motley yet qualified group of friends, Emilio feels called by God to explore the planet and make contact with its alien inhabitants, the music makers. But as the trip unfolds, the group’s well-meaning intentions have catastrophic consequences that cause Emilio to have a crisis of faith. Raised Catholic, Russell left the church at an early age, identified as an atheist for several years and later converted to Judaism. This background, combined with her skills as a multilinguist and her career in paleoanthropology, provide a unique perspective from which to tell such a rich, multifaceted story.
Uzma Jalaluddin’s enemies-to-lovers romance Hana Khan Carries On is a joyful homage to the classic 1990s rom-com You’ve Got Mail, with an Indian Canadian family’s halal restaurant subbing in for the Shop Around the Corner. Hana is our leopard-print hijab-wearing heroine, and she dreams of someday telling true stories that honor her Muslim culture and community. The local radio station where Hana interns is hyperfocused on Muslim stereotypes, so she creates an anonymous podcast to express her true thoughts. Meanwhile, her family’s business has run up against a competing restaurant, with an attractive man named Aydin leading the charge. But as romance grows and the restaurants duke it out, the heart of the novel remains with Hana. Despite microaggressions at the radio station and outright racism on the streets of Toronto, she remains strong in her culture and religion, never abandoning these parts of herself. She finds happiness by being her whole wonderful self—a lover, a fighter, a devout Muslim woman, an open-hearted storyteller and a heroine to believe in.
—Cat, Deputy Editor
Whether your own approach to religion is devout, irreverent or somewhere in between, you’ll find characters to relate to within these narratives.
Alice Wong’s memoir is a moving addition to her celebrated body of work as an activist, community organizer, media maker and editor of the 2020 anthology Disability Visibility. In Year of the Tiger, Wong creates a collage of blog posts, artworks, interviews and other ephemera with disability at its center, seasoned generously with her quick wit and fierce calls to action.
Wong emphasizes connection with others as a generative, necessary force in her life, and she incorporates a chorus of voices in these fragments to illuminate the experiences of people who are constantly confronted with a world built without disabled people in mind. In seven thematically distinct sections, Wong collects conversations with artists, activists and thinkers, each offering new perspectives and delights. She chats with W. Kamau Bell about disability representation in the 1999 film The Bone Collector and riffs on reframing ideas of beauty and attraction with the artist and author Riva Lehrer. Though they are often brief, these dialogues and excerpts come together into a kaleidoscopic image of Wong’s life, illuminated by her revolutionary ideas of interdependence and care. Access is love, she says, and love for the disabled community resounds throughout.
Wong’s thoughtful use of multimedia elements—cheeky cat-themed graphics, photographs from her Indiana childhood and a clever crossword puzzle, to name a few—adds playfulness and dimension to Year of the Tiger. She maintains the compelling conviction that pleasure and joy are crucial to activism and liberation, and these offerings demonstrate that belief. They also imbue the book with the scrappy spirit of zine-making, and others looking for creative encouragement will certainly find it here.
In “No to Normal,” Wong writes, “Every day I experience the very real distance between myself and the nondisabled world, which, by the way, is the default we all exist in,” and this notion is the undercurrent that moves through the entire book. As this stylish memoir demonstrates, each person, disabled or not, can demand more from a world that is largely built without access in mind. Wong wants better for us all, and she will stop at nothing to get there.
In Year of the Tiger, Alice Wong creates a collage of blog posts, artworks and interviews about disability, seasoned generously with her quick wit and fierce calls to action.
In her early 50s, Australian historian Inga Clendinnen found herself diagnosed with an incurable liver disease. As her body and her mind deteriorated, she felt a need to write about her childhood as well as her experience with illness. The result is Tiger’s Eye, a moving story about the fragility of self and the strength of the creative spirit.
Though she had written historical texts about everything from Mayan culture to the Holocaust, Clendinnen had never turned her historian’s eye inward. Illness, however, forced her hand, and she began to write fragments at first, and then full-blown reminiscences about her parents, aunt and siblings, about her loves, lies, embarrassments and joys, about all of the messy, half-remembered, half-created memories that make up a life. During her many days in the hospital, Clendinnen grew attached to her laptop, the writing serving as her only defense against the cold impersonality of existence in an institution and against the slow wasting of her body and mind.
Luckily, she eventually became a candidate for a liver transplant. Some of the most striking writing in the book comes in the hallucinatory days after the transplant, in which all semblance of a whole, non-fragmented self completely dissolves. Here, her writing becomes a mad, frightening and vivid jumble of images, which nonetheless reveal truths about her mind and personality.
One of the things Clendinnen learns, through her illness and her personal writing, is that she cannot completely rely on memory; memory, she finds, is as much fiction as it is an accurate reflection of reality. This lesson ultimately carries over into her professional, historical writing, which she takes up again once she is well. Memory, she has learned, is unreliable, but however imperfect, it nonetheless forms the foundation of history.
One of Clendinnen’s earliest revelations in Tiger’s Eye is of the divide that exists between those who are well and those who are ill. She soon learns that little communication is possible between the two sides. Her memoir, however, ultimately works to bridge that divide. To take the Alice in Wonderland metaphor she offers in the book’s opening pages, Clendinnen shows how she fell into the rabbit hole of illness and returned to tell the tale.
Vivian A. Wagner, Ph.D., is a freelance writer in New Concord, Ohio.
In her early 50s, Australian historian Inga Clendinnen found herself diagnosed with an incurable liver disease. As her body and her mind deteriorated, she felt a need to write about her childhood as well as her experience with illness. The result is Tiger's Eye, a…
Legend has it that the marathon commemorates an ancient Greek herald who collapsed and died after running 26 miles to announce a victorious battle at the city of Marathon. Today, the race, while an impressive feat of endurance, is nonetheless a commonplace one.
Still recovering from the shock of his older brother’s suicide, New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson learned of a race that would define a new kind of endurance. The Badwater Ultramarathon is a grueling 126-mile run with a course that unfolds across the scorching desert of Death Valley.
Assigned to write about the race, Johnson decided to participate in it, although he had never even run in a regular marathon. He set out to discover the limits and definitions of human endurance, and he shares his discoveries in To the Edge, a compelling memoir about his training for and running of Badwater.
Johnson’s involvement with the marathon surprised even himself. Though serving as a sports reporter for the Times, he was not athletically inclined. But the suicide of his older brother, an avid runner, gave him a need to understand why people give up and what reserves of strength humans find in order to endure. In his early passages, Johnson notes the striking contrasts between the marathon and the ultramarathon. Although run as a competitive race, the latter is all about endurance; a third of the participants don’t even complete the course. His own amateur status caused Johnson to feel an unaccustomed aversion to speaking with those participating in the race, lest they ridicule his lack of experience or his presumption at joining them. This intimidation motivated him to attempt several 50-mile-plus races, a punishment his body was hardly capable of taking.
Johnson writes candidly about these and other self-doubts. Though attempting such a race at all is a remarkable feat, he shies away from center stage, instead relating the stories of the race’s diverse participants. The common thread these runners share is not so much perseverance as courage and an indomitable To the Edge is a remarkable, inspiring memoir about the strength people can find within themselves and the camaraderie of individuals sharing a solitary yet common struggle.
Gregory Harris is a writer and editor living in Indianapolis.
Legend has it that the marathon commemorates an ancient Greek herald who collapsed and died after running 26 miles to announce a victorious battle at the city of Marathon. Today, the race, while an impressive feat of endurance, is nonetheless a commonplace one.
The boy in question in Deborah Digges’ riveting new memoir The Stardust Lounge is her son Stephen, a reckless young boy who, by the age of 12, was bringing home guns and mixing with street gangs. With a turbulence that goes well beyond everyday teenage rebellion, Stephen tries his mother’s patience but never her love. Digges, in desperation, attempts everything to help her son. Following Stephen while he prowls the city streets, she watches as he takes the subway and sprays graffiti on the walls of the Massachusetts town where they live. She goes to counseling with him, tries to help him make his own way in the world and shares with her readers the tribulations and unexpected joys of parenting a very troubled adolescent.
Digges’ memories of her son’s growth are often painful, but she is unflinching as she recalls both Stephen’s actions and her own. She ruminates on why he is her more difficult son compared with his polite and studious older brother: "Why is he so troubled? Why does he act out in this way? How can two sons of the same mother and father be so different?" But she never lets herself off the hook, either, writing that "I am someone I never imagined, an isolated, bitter, defensive mother navigating by shame the deep waters of her son’s adolescence." With this sort of candor, Digges, a successful poet whose skill with language pervades her prose, provides insight into the many different sides of her and Stephen’s situations.
Digges’ own marriage and career ultimately take a back seat to Stephen and his problems. She devotes countless hours to keeping the boy in school and to making their home a place she and her son can share. As The Stardust Lounge progresses, the rewards of being Stephen’s mother become more apparent to the reader. Through her honest storytelling, Digges conveys the special connection she and Stephen share. "Not so deep in Stephen’s blood a wildness endures," she writes, "Good luck to the world, I laugh to myself, with Stephen in it."Eliza McGraw writes from Cabin John, Maryland.
The boy in question in Deborah Digges' riveting new memoir The Stardust Lounge is her son Stephen, a reckless young boy who, by the age of 12, was bringing home guns and mixing with street gangs. With a turbulence that goes well beyond everyday teenage…
When actor Michael K. Williams prepared for his iconic role of Omar in “The Wire,” he turned to his memories of a dear neighborhood friend from Brooklyn: an unconventional, swaggering lesbian named Robin. She had helped him survive a sad adolescence. She had also introduced him to crack cocaine.
Williams’ path from bullied, frightened boy to respected actor and advocate for justice ended tragically in 2021 when he died of a drug overdose at 54 after decades of struggling with addiction. He leaves behind the poignant, vivid memoir Scenes From My Life, written with Jon Sternfeld, which will cement Williams’ legacy as a kind, thoughtful man who used his public prominence to give back to his community.
As Williams often noted, his personality was far from that of ruthless Omar. Growing up in an East Flatbush housing project, Williams was a fragile outsider, tormented for his dark skin and his fluid sexuality. But he did have some luck in the form of a determined mother and loyal friends who helped him break loose from his neighborhood’s insularity.
As he grew older, Williams progressed from Manhattan dance clubs to a nascent modeling career, which was truncated when a razor wound from a bar fight left a deep scar across his face. Ironically, the scar gave him the distinctive appearance that led to a successful dance career, then to acting.
Williams’ fans remember him for his roles in “The Wire,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Hap and Leonard,” “The Night Of” and so many other productions—but his memoir offers relatively few details about his acting career, drug use or romantic relationships. Instead, it is a sensitive exploration of his journey to become an advocate for young people from backgrounds like his who get stuck in the school-to-prison pipeline.
Despite Williams’ own challenges before his death, he made important progress in his aspiration to scatter what he called “breadcrumbs”—pathways to help others escape poverty and injustice.
Scenes From My Life cements “The Wire” actor Michael K. Williams’ legacy as a kind, thoughtful man who used his public prominence to give back to his community.
Poet and author Juliet Patterson was in her 40s when her father, James, died by suicide. James was a child when his father, Edward, died by suicide. And Patterson’s mother, Carolyn, was raising young children when her father, William, died by suicide.
Patterson spent more than a decade trying to make sense of this family history, repeatedly visiting Pittsburg, Kansas, the city her father, Edward and William all called home. It’s an old mining town with a surface pockmarked by sinkholes, scars of past industry that may have also left marks on the town’s residents. As Patterson researched the men in her family tree and suicide itself, she wondered about the effect this wounded history could have had on her family.
The result of this meticulous research and soul-searching is Sinkhole: A Natural History of Suicide. The memoir is at moments reminiscent of Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Like Williams, Patterson surveys both the land around her and her inner emotional landscape. She searches for connections between the Industrial Revolution’s effects on society and her family’s repeated losses before ultimately recognizing that every tragedy stems from numerous influences.
Patterson’s poetic sensibility informs her prose as she weaves together ideas about family and research about land in a lyrical way. She’s looking for answers in Sinkhole, but the path that leads to a suicide isn’t linear. It’s more akin to a sinkhole, Patterson writes, spreading and consuming everything around it.
Juliet Patterson combines her own soul-searching with a decade’s worth of research in Sinkhole, a lyrical memoir about her family's history of suicide.
The final separation of death is so frightening, so thorny and so difficult for humans to grasp that we tend to distill it into something simpler, with easy-to-follow directives and guidelines. Perhaps the most well-known guideline is that we do not speak ill of the dead. Instead, we rewrite history. Fights and foibles are mysteriously erased. Troubling moments dissolve into nothingness. We loved them, we say. We miss them every day. We do not know how to go on without their goodness. We would give anything to have them back again.
But in Rebecca Woolf’s case, her relationship with her late husband wasn’t just imperfect but toxic. Her memoir, All of This, eschews any such flattering postmortem revisions in favor of the messy, freeing truth.
Woolf had been planning to leave her husband, Hal, when he was diagnosed with an advanced form of pancreatic cancer and given only months to live. With four children, they had hacked it as far as they could through a relationship riddled with acrimony, casual cruelty and Hal’s control issues, which left Woolf feeling desperate and stifled. Their impending divorce felt like a rapidly approaching springboard to freedom for Woolf, until Hal’s diagnosis threw up a confusing and painful wall. Suddenly she found herself fulfilling the wedding vow she had been determined to escape: that she would stay until the end.
Woolf does not mince words or deal in niceties in this memoir. Hal was frequently difficult to like even as he was dying: He was demanding and childish about the fast-moving course of his illness. He was distant from his children, and the stress he caused his wife seemed deliberate. Shortly after his death, Woolf began looking for new partners, mostly brief hookups, as her joy and relief became braided with her grief. Along the way, Woolf reveals more of Hal’s humanity, showing that within the strife and heartbreak of their marriage, there were bright moments as well. Aptly titled, All of This is an all-encompassing portrait of a marriage that didn’t work, and Woolf is as unflinchingly honest about that marriage as she is about the experience of loss that terminated it.
“I loved this man once and then I hated him and then I loved him and then I hated him and then I loved him and then I hated him and then I loved him again, and then he died,” Woolf writes. “This was our love story.”
In All of This, Rebecca Woolf is as unflinchingly honest about her marriage as she is about the messy, freeing experience of her husband’s death.
“A few months after my pastor asked God to kill me, my mom ran to the bathroom, and I ran after her.” You can’t look away from the riveting opening sentence of Casey Parks’ spellbinding Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir. It draws you quickly in to her atmospheric tale of self-discovery after coming out as a lesbian to her mother in her small Louisiana town.
After Parks came out, her grandmother revealed that she “grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man” named Roy Hudgins in the town of Delhi, Louisiana. Astonished, Parks asked if Roy was happy, and her grandmother replied that she didn’t know but that she’d always wondered what happened to him. Parks announced to her grandmother, “I’ll find out about Roy.”
Seven years later, Parks, then working as a reporter for The Oregonian, made a series of visits to Delhi in search of clues about Roy, interviewing anybody who would talk to her. Although she was on a quest to find out about Roy for her grandmother, Parks also started to unravel clues about herself, her sexuality and her fraught relationships with family and church. The more she learned about Roy, the more she learned about her own yearning for the love and acceptance that Roy seemed to have felt in a town where the church had rejected him but where his neighbors looked out for and took care of him. Then, as she flipped through Roy’s journals, she discovered a poem titled “The Town Misfit” in which he had written, “When my life on earth is over, and it’s time for me to die, / No one here will miss me. There will be no one to cry.” Parks had hoped “reading Roy’s diaries would settle something inside me. . . . But I understand now that most of what haunted me before might haunt me forever.”
Like Harper Lee, Parks evokes the simmering suspicions of a small Southern town. Like Eudora Welty, she tells a poignant story of people trying to fit into a way of life that once suited them but no longer wears well. And like Truman Capote, she packs her memoir with eccentric characters—especially her mother, whom Parks describes as “bright and joyous when she was off the nose spray, vacant and mean when she was on.” Parks’ dazzling narrative gift imbues Diary of a Misfit with all the makings of a great Southern story that readers won’t be able to get out of their minds.
Casey Parks’ dazzling narrative gift imbues Diary of a Misfit with all the makings of a great Southern story that readers won't be able to get out of their minds.
In Frances Mayes’ sparkling new collection of essays, she ponders the meaning of home. It’s a subject about which she knows plenty, having made so many homes over her lifetime. In A Place in the World, Mayes’ fans can revisit some familiar places, such as Bramasole, the villa in the Tuscan countryside that she famously renovated in Under the Tuscan Sun, and the humid and fragrant Fitzgerald, Mayes’ Georgia hometown and the subject of her memoir Under Magnolia. Readers will also visit some new locales, namely Chatwood, the North Carolina farmhouse where she and her husband, Ed, live when they’re not in Italy.
Chatwood spoke to Mayes much like Bramasole did: It was instant love. “When the agent turned in at the lane leading to an upright farmhouse with book-end chimneys, a porch along the front, magnolia trees, and a meadow along a river, I was ready to sign the dotted line before I opened the car door,” she writes. “Ed agreed, this was Eden. Inside the house smelled like closed-up chapels I’ve come across in the Italian countryside. The kitchen fireplace had a swinging arm for hanging a pot over the coals. Copper sinks, bookcases everywhere, staircases that twist, many-paned windows splashed with green views—we are home. That fast.”
There are many such lovely descriptions of Mayes’ houses in A Place in the World, but this is not a book about buildings. It’s about the concept of home, that intangible thing to which countless magazines and blogs are dedicated. Mayes examines home from many angles. She devotes gorgeous chapters to the Chatwood garden, filled with tea-scented camellias, jasmine, honeysuckle and magnolia, not to mention an enormous veggie garden she put in at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. She also writes mouthwateringly about cucina povera, or the poor kitchen—the simple rustic Italian fare eaten during times of war—and how skills such as foraging, using every ounce of the pig and eating seasonally are learned at home. She even recalls temporary homes, rentals in Mexico and Capri that nourished her creativity.
My favorite essay might be “Home Thoughts: A Litany.” Here, in almost stream-of-consciousness prose, Mayes recalls the homes of her dear friends. “What an intimate act, to invite someone into your home,” she writes. And it’s true! She remembers in striking detail the sculptures, books, kitchens and fireplaces of her friends’ homes around the world. It’s a whirlwind home tour and homage to friendship in 10 pages.
Tempered by a dash of wistful examination as Mayes enters her 80s, A Place in the World is a beautiful, thought-provoking read.
A Place in the World is a beautiful meditation on home, tempered by a dash of wistful examination as author Frances Mayes enters her 80s.
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