Ten days after ending her engagement, CJ Hauser (Family of Origin) joined a scientific expedition to study cranes. She felt like a fraud: Should a person take such a trip days after a relationship’s end? Should a writer—a novelist, no less—take up space on a scientific excursion?
As she wrestles with these questions in the titular essay of The Crane Wife, which received over one million views after its July 2019 publication by The Paris Review, Hauser compares the dissolution of her relationship with her ex-fiancé to the tale of the crane wife. In that fable, the bird wants so desperately to be with a man that she spends every night plucking her feathers, tricking him into seeing her as a human woman. She withers, ignoring her own needs, but succeeds in becoming what she thinks the man wants.
The 16 other pieces in Hauser’s memoir-in-essays likewise explore love’s many forms with frank, raw honesty, charting an artful path through one woman’s experiences. Hauser often draws from both myth and the mundane as she seeks to understand her relationship to the world. She explores the aftermath of romantic relationships, particularly those in which she lost her connection to not only a partner but also his child, as well as an array of her particular fascinations, such as with The Wizard of Oz and with the romance between Mulder and Scully in “The X-Files.” Hauser’s wry, introspective investigation of her assumptions about love will likely free readers to examine their own personal narratives as well.
Sometimes Hauser intentionally peels apart commonly intertwined ideas. For example, in “Uncoupling,” she challenges her ideas about parenthood and her body. Hauser separates the ideas of being a parent, giving birth and dating someone she might want to parent alongside. As she examines these desires, Hauser also interrogates her body: What are her tits (her word of choice) for if they aren’t for feeding someone or giving someone else pleasure? She explicitly rejects the idea that her body exists to serve other people and asks, “Who told you these things went together? What stories were you told, and not told, about the shape of love, the shape of yourself, the shape of a happy life?”
When her writing students claim that Hauser dislikes happy endings, she turns the whole idea of happy endings on its head. “The rare happy ending I appreciate is one that makes room for the whole painful fact of the world at the same time it offers the reader some joy,” she writes. The Crane Wife embraces this philosophy again and again as Hauser excavates her past loves and losses, thoughtfully examines them and declares the pain of love to be worth the risk.
In this collection of essays, CJ Hauser excavates her past loves and losses, thoughtfully examines their aftermath and declares the pain of love to be worth the risk.
Memory is already a slippery thing. And when it’s tangled in family lore and embedded in a country’s violent history, it can prove even more elusive. When Ingrid Rojas Contreras was in her 20s, living far away from her native Colombia, she suffered a head injury and became a terrified amnesiac. Desperate to retrieve her memory and understand the dreams and ghosts that plagued her, she set out for her family’s hometown of Ocaña, Colombia, to find the facts of her family’s history. (Mami heckled her daughter’s use of the word facts: “Can you believe the girl is going to Ocaña to look for facts? To Ocaña! In a family like ours? With the quality of our stories?”)
In Rojas Contreras’ enthralling memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, she finds the historical and genealogical facts she’s looking for, but the stories her family reveals are far more powerful. In fact, they are magical, especially those involving Mami and her father, Nono, who could move clouds “for farmers who needed rain.”
In a dream Rojas Contreras had—the same dream her Mami and two aunts also had—her dead grandfather, Nono, made it clear to her that he wanted his remains disinterred, and so the author’s journey from Chicago to Colombia began. Nono was known as a curandero, or homeopath. He was sought after as a healer and feared as a mystic, endowed with “secrets” such as communing with the dead and foreseeing the future. When Mami fell—or was pushed—down a well as a child, he saved her life, and she seemed to inherit his powers. Rojas Contreras’ head injury also left her with “secrets,” such as the ability to appear in two places at the same time. In her large Colombian family, none of these skills seemed strange, though some members saw them as blessings and others feared them as a curse.
Rojas Contreras’ acclaimed first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, introduced the fraught landscape of Colombia in the late 20th century, when assassins and kidnappers thrived while parents struggled to keep their children safe. Now, in her deftly woven memoir, she makes this history more immediate and personal, with prose that in itself is enchantingly poetic.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras makes the recent history of Colombia immediate, personal and magical, with prose that in itself is enchantingly poetic.
Ellyn Gaydos’ meditative Pig Years mixes memoir and nature writing as it details her four years of seasonal farm work in New York and Vermont. In punishingly long days as a farmhand, she planted seeds, tended vegetable plots (weeding, watering, coping with pests, harvesting, sorting and selling) and raised chickens and pigs. The book opens right in the middle of things, describing the pigs on a small farm in New Lebanon, New York, and zooming in to consider Gumdrop, an accidentally pregnant pig, and her piglets, who “came out like torpedoes all attached through different stems to one briny umbilical cord. . . . Nature, being unsentimental, accommodates the reality that some sows eat their young, but Gumdrop is gentle in her new domesticity, tenderly positioning her body so as not to squish anyone. She is a good mother.”
The book’s loose narrative proceeds chronologically through the seasons, and through Gaydos’ relationships with other farmworkers and with Graham, her partner. Gaydos’ close eye on the natural world allows us to vividly see the cycle of a farm’s blossoming and dying seasons. She doesn’t look away from any part of it, either from newborn pig life, for instance, or from the pigs’ later deaths—the procedures of slaughter and the preparation of the pork that she will eat and sell. “I keep seeing death’s face in different ways,” she writes. “It is funny to choose a profession, like farming, in which death is taken into the fold and yet nothing is clarified. It does not steady me for loss even if I have held a pig’s head in my hand or seen a chicken collapsed in the dirt. It is like a blunting of the real.”
The bulk of Pig Years takes place on the farm in New Lebanon, which is part of a former Shaker settlement that’s now a Sufi commune in decline. Throughout the book, Gaydos turns to 19th-century Shaker farm journals for comparison, and we can see the similarities between the current-day farm’s gains and losses and those of the long-ago Shakers. There’s a coming-of-age aspect to Pig Years, too, as Gaydos, a young woman in an unsettled phase of life (and an inherently impermanent field of work), studies the women and moms around her. She reflects on her own path, imagining possible futures as a parent and life partner.
Gaydos’ cleareyed, sometimes intense perspective reminds us that farm work is not always pretty: It often involves constant near-poverty, injuries, even desperation. Still, Pig Years is a poetic meditation on fertility, loss and the farmworkers who eke out a marginal living as long as they can. It’s a narrative that evokes the pleasures and perils of life and work on a small farm.
Ellyn Gaydos’ debut memoir, Pig Years, is a poetic meditation on fertility, loss and the pleasures and perils of life and work on a small farm.
Is there anything original left to say about persevering through a dysfunctional upbringing? Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings by Chrysta Bilton takes this question almost as a dare and shows readers that the answer is yes.
Bilton is one of at least 35 children conceived by her father, Jeffrey. He became an incredibly popular sperm donor for many families—a fact that may have been lost to history if not for the wonders of at-home DNA testing, Ancestry.com and Facebook. Yet that bizarre tale is only one small piece of Bilton’s extraordinary life; in fact, contrary to what the subtitle implies, the memoir is mostly about experiences that have nothing to do with her prodigiously fertile father.
Bilton’s mother, Debra, was full of chutzpah and sparkle. She was a lesbian, a local LGBTQ icon in Los Angeles, an activist in progressive politics and a friend and paramour to countless celebrities. (The actor Warren Beatty was temporarily in the running as a sperm donor candidate.) But Debra kept some devastating family secrets to herself: She was addicted to drugs, a profligate overspender and an enthusiastic supporter of pyramid schemes.
The narrative heart of this memoir is Bilton’s bond with Debra, as well with her younger sister. The tight threesome navigated LA’s wealthiest environs as one of the few openly queer families in the late 1980s and early ’90s. This particular struggle may resonate with readers whose family structures are marginalized in today’s society. And the author’s complicated relationship with her mom—exasperation mixed with admiration—will also be familiar to many.
Normal Family is about one of the most atypical families one can imagine, and in that way, it’s certainly a page-turner. For most of the book, readers will simply have no idea where this wild tale is headed. But it also demonstrates that the most normal thing in the world is for a family to have—and overcome—its secrets.
Is there anything original left to say about surviving a dysfunctional upbringing? Normal Family by Chrysta Bilton takes this question almost as a dare.
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…
Like much of human life, love can be messy. Add in the complications of conducting a very long-distance, mostly digital love affair, and you get a dubious recipe for happily ever after.
Jamaican American Sutanya Dacres was leading a rather humdrum, unsatisfactory life in New York City. Then one night she met a sexy Jewish Algerian Frenchman in a bar. There was instant attraction—but she lived in the Big Apple, he resided in the City of Light, and cultural and racial differences (she’s Black, he’s white) lay in the shadows. Despite these challenges, they sustained a three-year digital courtship until they decided to marry and make a life à deux in Paris. “It was us against the world,” Dacres writes, “and we would move through life’s ups and downs with ease and grace, together.”
In Dinner for One: How Cooking in Paris Saved Me, podcaster Dacres recounts how this fairy-tale romance went sour. Two years into the marriage, the Frenchman left. Now a heartbroken expat—alone, divorced and navigating the complications of being a single Black woman in Paris—Dacres tried to allay her fears, confusion and despair with too much wine and loveless encounters with men. But when “the deep shame that had been bubbling beneath the surface finally erupted,” she writes, “it was clear that I could no longer hide from myself.”
Dacres recounts with self-deprecating, often brutal honesty her journey to understand and connect with her true self. Like a play, Dinner for One is structured with a prologue and successive acts, ending with Dacres’ gradual and passionate awakening to the very French art of cultivating pleasure, self-worth and an appreciation for well-conceived, delicious food. When Dacres began to cook for herself in her Montmartre apartment, she formed a healing relationship with food as a means of self-care and growth—a hard-won redemption via the myriad joys of French culture.
Often humorous and uplifting, Dacres’ writing is also a bit uneven in parts, sometimes due to superfluous details or unnecessary dialogue. But her true writer’s talent shines when she relates her forays into the world of French cookery. Overall, Dinner for One is hopeful, salubrious and, like a meal served with love, a balm for the spirit.
Sutanya Dacres’ memoir about recovering from heartbreak in Paris is hopeful, salubrious and, like a meal served with love, a balm for the spirit.
Every childhood is unique, but Ada Calhoun’s, as portrayed in her fearless new memoir, Also a Poet, stands out for its blend of adolescent freedom and paternal neglect. The daughter of art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, Calhoun grew up at the vortex of New York City’s East Village bohemia, a world she wrote about in the history St. Marks Is Dead. Young Calhoun, eager and precocious, craved nothing more than the approbation of her father, a complicated, emotionally distant man famously given to saying the wrong thing—a trait from which his daughter was never spared. One piece of common ground that Calhoun and her father shared, however, was a love of the work of Frank O’Hara, the legendary New York School poet who died in a freak accident in 1966.
One day in 2018, Calhoun was searching for something in the basement storage of her parents’ apartment building when she found dozens of loose cassette tapes from the 1970s, labeled with the names of famous artists like Willem de Kooning, Edward Gorey and Larry Rivers. Her father said they were interviews he had conducted with O’Hara’s friends because he’d intended to write a biography of the poet. Circumstances—not least of all a roadblock erected by O’Hara’s sister, Maureen—had killed the project. Schjeldahl told his daughter she could use the interviews for her own purposes, and Calhoun envisioned a new biography of the iconic poet based on these priceless recollections. But the book took on a new shape as she proceeded—in part, again, because of the obstruction of Maureen, who serves as her brother’s literary executor.
As Calhoun began to delve into the interviews, short portions of which she shares in Also a Poet, she began piecing together a multifaceted portrait of O’Hara, greatly loved by friends who painted him as gregarious, whip-smart, generous, sexually fluid and happily promiscuous. (The latter two assessments are most likely at the core of his sister’s posthumous protectiveness.) But the interviews also provided Calhoun with insight into the interviewer: her father.
Frustrated by the ways Schjeldahl had sabotaged his own project, Calhoun plunged back into their often difficult father-daughter relationship with fresh eyes. Lifelong resentments resurfaced as she viewed her father with redoubled awareness. When the aging Schjeldahl, who had smoked three packs a day for decades, was diagnosed with lung cancer, his solipsistic reaction to his illness rankled Calhoun, even as she dutifully stepped in to help.
The unexpected convergence of the challenging O’Hara book project and her father’s sudden decline provide Calhoun with a singular perspective on the timeless issues of family relationships, most especially the vulnerabilities of following in a father’s eminent footsteps and the elusive possibility of ever fully understanding our parents. Calhoun’s honesty and willingness to push beyond her own resentments make Also a Poet a potent account of a daughter reaching out to a perhaps unreachable father before it’s too late.
Ada Calhoun’s literary biography of the poet Frank O’Hara unexpectedly transformed into an absorbing and insightful personal memoir about her father.
Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (14 hours) takes listeners through Hannah Gadsby’s life up to the release of “Hannah Gadsby: Nanette,” her groundbreaking 2018 Netflix special, in which she declared her intentions to quit comedy while offering a razor-sharp commentary on the industry’s dark side.
As an autistic lesbian arts historian whose best friends growing up were her elderly neighbors in Tasmania, Gadsby has a unique perspective to share. From barely making it through school to mingling with Jennifer Aniston at Hollywood parties, she’s had quite the journey. Gadsby is a marvelous storyteller, and as a narrator she guides us through the sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious story of her life with good humor and a dry wit. Her impressions of her Mum are very funny and give us a real sense of the woman’s charmingly brusque personality.
Four years after “Nanette,” Gadsby continues to bring eye-opening insight to the art of storytelling.
Hannah Gadsby is a marvelous storyteller, and as the narrator of her memoir's audiobook, she guides us through heartbreaking and hilarious moments with good humor and a dry wit.
At this moment in our collective obsession with true crime, we have a pretty good idea of what compels audiences to look into the darkest parts of human nature. Some people like to feel as though they’re contributing to a real-life whodunit. Some people want to feel the victory of seeing the bad guys punished. And some people, frankly, might just enjoy the morbidity.
Less certain, however, is what compels a key character of every true-crime tale: the investigator. What motivates someone who can’t just turn off the podcast or change the channel? What drives someone to make their entire career about investigating children’s deaths, women’s rapes or the crimes of people who are severely mentally ill? Paul Holes, a former cold case investigator for Contra Costa County in California, tries to explain in his memoir, Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases.
Holes is best known for devoting years of his life to catching the serial killer and rapist known as the Golden State Killer, but he hadn’t planned on writing a memoir about that experience. ‘My initial intention was to write a book like [an] encyclopedia of the Golden State Killer investigation,’ he explains by phone. But his agent, as well as his co-author, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Robin Gaby Fisher, saw potential in adding more of Holes’ life story to the book. When Fisher interviewed Holes about his experiences, she found the other cases he’d worked on—such as Laci Peterson’s murder and Jaycee Dugard’s kidnapping—just as impactful.
Most importantly, though, Fisher picked up on “this undercurrent that I have—that most people in this field have—in terms of the trauma of having to work these cases,” Holes explains. “So she was trying to draw that out of me. And then when we finally got a publisher involved, the publisher said, ‘We need more Paul.'”
But providing “more Paul”—especially opening up about his traumatic experiences hunting rapists and murderers for 27 years—didn’t come easily to Holes. He had spent decades compartmentalizing painful memories about the worst things humans are capable of and, somewhat understandably, developed a mistrust of people.
However, Holes now realizes that he may not have been as good at compartmentalizing as he originally thought. His obsessive nature made him a dogged investigator of cold cases, but he wouldn’t have won any awards for being an attentive husband or present parent, both because of the urgent demands of his work and because of how its lingering effects spilled over into his personal life. In this regard, Unmasked depicts an aspect of working in law enforcement that surpasses the reductive binaries that have calcified around discussions of police in recent years. Addressing mental health issues in law enforcement is a murky area and is often handled within the profession with machismo and gallows humor. Because of this, Holes didn’t exactly leap at the chance to address his own mental health for most of his career.
And yet he became an author who writes on the very first page of his memoir, “I’ve looked at a woman, and rather than seeing the beauty of the female body, I dissected it, layer by layer, as if she were on the autopsy table. I have visualized dead women during intimate moments and I shut down.” Readers will know straight away the unsettling mental glue traps that lie ahead in Unmasked.
“Law enforcement has one of the highest divorce rates, and you can see why.”
But Holes’ candor about his work, and his eventual diagnosis of and treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, provide helpful context for some of the personal casualties of his former profession. “Law enforcement has one of the highest divorce rates, and you can see why,” Holes says. “A lot of it is just the cynicism that develops in officers as they interact with the public in usually bad situations. . . . They bring that home. You know, I brought that home. And that does impact relationships.”
Fisher interviewed Holes’ ex-wife and his current wife to incorporate their perspectives into Unmasked as well, and a legal review was conducted about cases covered in the memoir. “But nothing in the book was passed by anybody for preapproval,” Holes says. “What I put in there, the intention was to be as authentic as possible.”
In addition to Holes’ mental and emotional evolution, the memoir’s other throughline is tracking down the Golden State Killer—at first known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Nightstalker, until those two criminals were discovered to be the same person. Holes sought the Golden State Killer for 24 years with many twists, turns and false starts along the way. Law enforcement agencies from several California counties eventually tied the crimes to a former police officer named Joseph DeAngelo, thanks to the work of Holes and the late crime journalist Michelle McNamara (whose posthumous book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark details her experience trying to solve the Golden State Killer case). When DeAngelo was finally caught in 2018, he turned out to be living a fairly mundane life in a suburban neighborhood.
“There are real people whose lives have been lost, whose families have been impacted. And the professionals that are working these cases are also impacted.”
The details of Holes’ investigative work will fascinate any “Dateline” viewer or “Serial” listener; the book is practically a love letter to forensic DNA technology. But it’s the psychological component of Unmasked that is most compelling. Holes writes both chillingly and movingly about how tracking the Golden State Killer for so many years forced him to become very familiar with the killer’s mindset. Why did he rape some victims with a certain pattern of behavior? Why did he kill certain victims but not others? Why did he sometimes cry after committing his crimes or whimper for his “Mommy”?
These are unnerving questions to explore, even for a professional. “I felt as if I’d come to know him well enough to get in his head when I needed to,” Holes writes. “Sometimes it worried me how easy it was for me to feel what I thought he was feeling. . . . As even-keeled as I was, there were times when I was shaken by the darkness I’d invited myself into.”
Many readers will be eager to venture into that darkness with Holes, but he cautions them to tread lightly. “I want the true-crime fans to make sure that people understand that true crime is real crime,” he says. “There are real people whose lives have been lost, whose families have been impacted. And the professionals that are working these cases are also impacted.”
A talented new crop of memoirists explore the friction between their queer identities and their cultural and geographical surroundings.
Asylum
Edafe Okporo’s aptly titled memoir, Asylum: A Memoir and a Manifesto, recounts his experience growing up gay in Nigeria, a place known for having harsh laws against “known homosexuals.” Okporo writes with sensitivity about the scenery that shaped his childhood, his powerful familial relationships and the friendships that formed his identity. One night in 2016, however, all of these things were threatened by a mob that gathered outside his home. Okporo tried to escape out a window, but before he could, they broke down his door and beat him until he was unconscious. It was his 26th birthday.
This event marked the beginning of Okporo’s one-way journey to America as a refugee. Once he arrived in New York City, there was a potent juxtaposition between his experiences as a Black gay man from a place of repression and the freedom he encountered as an asylum-seeker. Still, the cruelty of America’s immigration system and the overwhelming whiteness of New York’s gay community presented stark new forms of injustice. With clarity and grace, Okporo casts light on the racism and oppression he discovered lurking within communities that are themselves oppressed.
Okporo was able to explore new relationships in New York, sexual and otherwise, and ultimately found both professional and personal purpose in America as a global gay rights activist. Along the way, Asylum chronicles a range of hardships, from the severe laws of the author’s home country to the bitter realities of immigrating to the U.S. Throughout these difficulties, Okporo weaves a thread of hope that he will find freedom while remaining true to himself. If you are seeking a read that couches complex issues in a heartfelt personal narrative, Okporo’s memoir will surely delight.
★ Boys and Oil
In Boys and Oil, environmental activist Taylor Brorby masterfully recounts his upbringing in coal-fractured North Dakota. Growing up, Brorby was teased by his peers because he played with girls and didn’t gravitate toward sports. Like many queer boys, his sexuality was in conflict with traditional models of what men were meant to do and how they were supposed to act.
Brorby’s memoir opens with superbly detailed insight into North Dakota’s geography, which becomes a powerful symbol throughout Boys and Oil. This jagged imagery grounds the narrative and the author’s journey, and Brorby’s attention to it throughout the book feels nearly ekphrastic, with sweeping, alluring descriptions of a land that is at once beautiful and damaged.
It’s within the context of this landscape that Brorby’s life unfolds, from a taunted child whose grandmother lovingly painted his fingernails, to a young man being physically assaulted outside of a small-town bar, to an out poet and environmentalist. In many parts of the country (and world), defying your culture’s expectations comes with a price. Whether as a boy in love with books or as an adult fighting to protect the broken land of his youth, Brorby writes about the personal price he has paid with striking honesty.
Queer politics calls perceived norms to task, subverting the status quo and making it possible for new structures to emerge. In his unique and breathtaking memoir, Brorby does just this, creating wonderful new categories for rural communities and American masculinity, and for gay kids’ places within both.
★ Ma and Me
Putsata Reang was born in Cambodia amid civic turmoil and unrest. Her family fled in 1975, when she was only 11 months old, and her journey would become legend. Aboard the ship her family escaped on, the infant Reang was believed to be dead. A Navy captain suggested that she be thrown overboard, but her mother resisted. Upon arriving at a U.S. naval base in the Philippines, her mother handed Reang to the doctors, and under their treatment, she survived—accruing a lifelong debt to her mother in the process.
Reang’s relationship with her mother is a strong feature in Ma and Me as the author examines her past with a surgeon’s precision and artist’s view. Reang takes a kaleidoscope of influences into consideration—including cultural expectations for girls and women, the institution of marriage and trauma caused by war and flight—as she inspects her upbringing as an immigrant in Oregon, learning to balance her Cambodian identity with the pressure to assimilate. Up close, she handles these influences on her mother with grace and compassion, even when her mother severs their relationship because she can’t handle Reang’s engagement to a woman. Reang does an excellent job of portraying the permeability of accepting loved ones for who they are and finding the limits of that acceptance.
In the world of Ma and Me, stories grow larger than life and queer identity creates conflict as it becomes a part of the long-woven tapestry of family lore. With great care, Reang addresses the legacy of trauma—both as a child of war who is displaced geographically and as a gay woman who is estranged from her family. The layers stacked together in this memoir, and Reang’s treatment of their complexity, are simply brilliant.
Edafe Okporo, Taylor Brorby and Putsata Reang beautifully capture the places that shaped their queer identities.
Every year, the BookPage editors must once again ask the question: What, exactly, does “summer reading” even mean? Here are our definitions, in literary form.
I devour lighthearted, escapist romances and mysteries during the summer. Basically, if it can hold my attention despite all the distractions of a packed pool or a sunny park, it’s going in my tote bag. However, to keep my brain from snapping in half when I inevitably turn to more challenging books in the fall, I also make sure to reach for a few weightier yet still seasonably appropriate titles. Kristen Richardson’s history of the debutante is my gold standard. Impeccably researched but unabashedly glam and gossipy, The Season describes gorgeous gowns and high society queen bees with the same inquisitive rigor it applies to unpacking the intersections of race and class. In its various permutations, the debutante tradition encapsulates cultural ideas about femininity and its value; depending on the context, it can be regressive or liberating, stifling or affirming. (The chapter on African American debutante balls alone is worth the price of admission.) Make this your afternoon poolside read, and you’ll be the most interesting person at dinner later that night.
When my yard is alive with bugs and birds, when they’re screaming and singing and zipping through the trees, I want a book that crackles with that kind of electricity, like Deacon King Kong. Set in 1969 Brooklyn, James McBride’s seventh novel opens in the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing projects where, in broad daylight, a 71-year-old alcoholic church deacon known as Sportcoat shoots the ear off a 19-year-old drug dealer. That seemingly gritty opening leads into an affectionate village novel that follows a multitude of characters, including congregants of the Five Ends Baptist Church, a lovelorn police officer and an Italian mobster known as the Elephant. As readers learn the truth about Sportcoat’s actions, they also follow foibles and treasure hunts and slapstick party scenes. No one’s the “bad guy,” not even the mob bosses or dirty cops. The dialogue is some of the best you’ll ever read, and many scenes are gut-bustingly funny. Summer is a joy, and so is this book.
—Cat, Deputy Editor
Group
I am not a great lover of summertime. The heat, the dirt, the bugs—all of it sends me indoors with a glass of lemonade. This makes a book like Group by Christie Tate my perfect summer read. I tore through this book on vacation last year, using every moment alone in the empty, air-conditioned house to fly through a few more chapters while everyone else was outside. Tate’s memoir of the years she spent in an unconventional group therapy setting ranges from salacious to vulnerable to truly touching. All she has to do, her new therapist tells her, is show up to these group sessions and be honest—about everything. Sexuality, food, relationships, family, death—everything. As Tate slowly opens up to her fellow group members, she builds real friendships for the first time and learns to defuse the shame and low self-worth that had kept her from making authentic connections during her first 26 years. Perfect for a weekend trip or plane ride, this book’s got heart, hope and enough juicy confessions to keep you turning the pages at lightning speed.
—Christy, Associate Editor
All That She Carried
Whether I’m traveling across the world on a plane or installed under an umbrella on the beach, summer adventures inspire me to decenter screens and their attendant distractions. This means I have the capacity to focus on books that reward a reader’s careful attention, like Tiya Miles’ National Book Award-winning All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Miles, a historian and MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient, uses a single artifact—a simple cotton sack given to a 9-year-old child named Ashley by her mother when Ashley was sold to a different plantation—to offer insight into the often undocumented lives of Black women. As she traces the journey of Ashley’s sack from its origins in 1850s South Carolina through the Great Migration and to its eventual discovery at a Nashville flea market, Miles honors the strength of family ties and finds creative ways to fill gaps in the historical record. This book will make you both think and feel, providing a reading experience to remember.
There is nothing I want more in the summer than a big honking series. (Especially if it’s complete. No cliffhanger endings for me!) I want to dive into a fictional world for as long as possible before coming up for air, and Libba Bray’s quartet of novels about supernaturally gifted teens solving mysteries in New York City during the Roaring ’20s fits the bill to a T. The series opener is replete with positutely delicious period vernacular and horrors both imagined (a murderous ghost resurrecting himself with body parts carved from his victims) and all too real (“color lines” at jazz clubs where Black Americans perform on stage but aren’t allowed to enter as customers). The Diviners is exactly the sort of tale I love to stay up into the wee hours of hot summer nights reading—which is good, because in Bray’s talented hands, some scenes are so terrifying that I wouldn’t be able to turn off the lights anyway.
—Stephanie, Associate Editor
Any book can be a beach read if you put your mind to it.
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