No matter how much chaos they wreak or how catastrophic the destruction they leave in their wake, dogs can wriggle their way out of a scolding simply by casting an innocent glance or woeful expression at their owners. The truth, as Markus Zusak (The Book Thief) reveals in his playful and poignant memoir, Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth), is that owners love their canine companions no matter how incorrigible they are.

With affection and some exasperation, Zusak recalls the highlights and lowlights of life with Reuben, Archer and Frosty—the three boisterous rescue dogs who, one by one, swagger into his family’s life. The bulk of the book chronicles the misadventures of Reuben and Archer, “essentially a two-dog mafia” who terrorize the dog park with a playfulness under which lurks the animal instinct to kill. In the most harrowing moment, Reuben knocks Zusak down, breaking his knee. Reuben and Archer corner a possum in a local park and kill it; they kill the family cat; they bite the piano teacher. At the same time, the dogs are often perfect companions: They lavish affection on the Zusak children, Kitty and Noah, and slow their pace when the children are walking them. The family is overcome with misery and pain when the two dogs fall ill and die—Reuben in 2019, Archer in 2021. “There are terrible and poetic things in our lives,” writes Zusak, “and so often they’re one and the same.” Following the “dogless drought of 2021,” the family adopts another rescue dog, Frosty. Though sometimes “ADHD on legs,” Frosty slept at Zusak’s feet as he wrote this book.

Despite the many challenges Zusak and his family faced with their burdensome beasts, Zusak tenderly recalls that “on account of our many animals, we’ve lived a beautiful, brutal, awful, hilarious, escapadical life.” Telling these stories gives Zusak reason to meditate on his own nature. He reflects that Reuben and Archer, especially, “were dogs who somehow made me. . . . They were a mirror, I suspect, to my own hidden turmoils—my wilderness within.”

Though it sometimes overreaches for humor, Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) will be enjoyed by readers of the best dog tales, such as The Art of Racing in the Rain, for its ability to evoke both the aggravation and deep love that dogs foster in those who build their lives around these creatures.

It’s a toss up whether our culture has become more or less sex positive. Shows like Sex Education might make you think more, while the increasing popularity of the 4B movement, which uses celibacy as activism, might make you think less. Regardless, Edmund White has been writing beautifully about sex for 50 years, and his writing is very, very sex positive. Sex does not appear only in his fiction, where it plays an important role in the coming of age novel A Boy’s Own Story and the psychosexual romp A Saint From Texas, but also in his nonfiction, which ranges from accounts of his time in Paris, biographies of Jean Genet and Rimbaud (both sex symbols to literary-minded folks) and the homosexual sex guide The Joy of Gay Sex. All these books celebrate and investigate sex, showing it lucidly (and, at times, lingering on it pruriently). In The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, White collects all his sex memories into one book, and the result is a brilliant, envelope-pushing memoir that explores how we have sex and why. The answer? It’s fun and feels good!

White tackles hot-button issues surrounding sex deftly and frankly. In one chapter, White writes about the men he has paid for sex. He notes that paying gets you a more attractive partner and sets very clear boundaries: I pay, you give and when we’re done, we’re done. But White also describes the complicated power dynamic at play in these relationships: The patron has the power in the bedroom or back seat, but outside, the sex worker may enjoy more attention and social capital because of their youth and attractiveness. The candid tone of this chapter carries throughout the book, as, later, White writes about the age gaps he has had with several partners. While others may frown on this kind of relationship, White embraces it: His current husband, Michael Carroll, is 25 years younger than him. To White, age gaps allow for rich cross-generational interchange and the possibility of exploring exciting power dynamics.

To any White superfan (which this reviewer is), The Loves of My Life is a must-read. To those not inducted, this rousing memoir still provides intriguing, fresh ideas about how we connect. Ultimately, pleasure reigns supreme.

Singer-songwriter Neko Case has always had a sort of feralness about her. Case cut her teeth in the ’90s Pacific Northwest punk scene, with a hardscrabble backstory perfectly suited to the era. She joined the Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers, which she still records and tours with today, and she’s recorded seven solo albums over the past two and a half decades. A self-described “critter,” Case embodies an animalistic spirit that’s tangible in the magical, swirling energy of her music. In her richly told memoir, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, Case invites readers into her origin story.

Case was born to deeply unready teenage parents of Slavic descent who she describes both as “if a tree and a doe had a baby,” and “two young people [who] had no business being together and even less business forcing a human soul into this world.” Her descriptions of their poverty, her nomadic existence moving back and forth between her parents and her fractured relationships with both ring gritty, painful and true. Yet Case employs the same fairy tale-like storytelling language in The Harder I Fight that she uses in her lyrics, casting a veil of enchantment over her experiences, however painful. For example, while in college, Case experienced a mental breakdown that caused her to believe a man was following her wherever she went—a terrifying time. And yet, when she pauses to wait for her pursuer to show himself while walking one day, a coyote, which she names “a timeless trickster god,” emerges from the mist, and the image hangs frozen in time for the reader.

Fans of Case will note that the book shares a title with her 2013 album, a sign that this literary work functions as an extension of her art and music. Even for the uninitiated, however, The Harder I Fight is lush with meaning. Now in her mid-50s, Case came of age as one of the first generations to begin parsing generational trauma, and therein are the best lessons of her remarkably tender narrative. It is a handing down of wisdom on how to turn wounds into magic, and an ode to the persistent ability to love, and how that transforms our lives.

Case describes discovering the literary figure of the psychopomp in her studies of the Slavic tales of her ancestors: a trickster god who guides a protagonist through their story, “dol[ing] out the clues—cryptic but always correct—that allow the protagonist to solve an important riddle or find the path out of the forest themselves.” She felt an immediate attachment to the archetype: “Like a psychopomp, I wanted to inhabit a den in the forest and possess the answers to transformation and growth that I’d croak out now and then to visitors.” Her disappointment was sharp upon discovering that, as a human being, she was excluded from ever being one. This book, however, might beg to differ. Hold The Harder I Fight in your lap like a warm, furred creature. Listen to what the psychopomp has to say, and let it guide you out of the woods.

After years of downplaying his Haitian roots, anthropologist and writer Rich Benjamin changed course when a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in 2010. He wanted to rush there to learn and help. His Haitian American mother, Danielle Benjamin, had a different take. Don’t go, she begged. But if you must go: Wear a tie.

After all, the family had a position to maintain. Benjamin’s maternal grandfather, Daniel Fignolé, was a charismatic populist politician forced into exile in 1957 by Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, with covert assistance from the U.S. government. Fignolé returned only briefly in 1986, at the end of his life, following the fall of the Duvaliers.

Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History is Benjamin’s account of the intergenerational trauma caused by the family’s wrenching experiences in Haiti and struggles in the U.S. Benjamin, the author of Searching for Whitopia, depicts Danielle, who ultimately became a United Nations official, as a fierce mother with impossibly high standards. As he learns more about the violence and emotional abuse that she and her seven siblings suffered in Haiti and New York as children, a subject she had never openly discussed with her children, he begins to understand and forgive.

Benjamin explores in depth the lives of his grandparents and other relatives in a novelistic style that immerses us in the vital, chaotic world of pre-Duvalier Haiti. We see the family’s rise and fall in Port-au-Prince largely through his mother’s eyes, as her relatively privileged childhood lurches first into deadly peril, then into the grinding hardship of exile. Benjamin then shifts into a memoir of his own early life, when family affluence and his educational achievements masked inner uncertainty complicated by chronic illness.

Benjamin is a vivid writer whose honesty spares no one, including himself in his party-boy years. He depicts his grandfather as a dedicated advocate for the poor who was also an overbearing, self-centered husband and father; Danielle, brave and driven, achieved worldly success, but it came at a high emotional cost to her own family. In Talk to Me, violence, whether in war, politics, crime or families, has a long afterlife that is dangerous to overlook.

Food is among the greatest human connectors. In her latest book, How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, chef and award-winning journalist Bonny Reichert weaves together vignettes about her family, her life and, most importantly, her intergenerational trauma, skillfully using food as a focal point and way to tie the past and present together. 

As the child of a Holocaust survivor, Reichert’s trauma stems from the horrors she knows her father lived and breathed. Although her father chooses not to dwell on the past, Reichert is still haunted by his experiences. As a child, she imagined herself enduring his hardships. “The more I could put myself in his skin, the more I soaked up his suffering, the less hurt he would be,” she recalls.

After years working as a journalist and then as a chef, Reichert experiences a pivotal aha moment while enjoying a simple bowl of borscht on a pilgrimage to Poland with her family to visit the tomb of her great-grandfather. “I want to go forward but I have to go back,” she realizes, in order to heal. “Back to a time before the borscht in Warsaw, before the talk of writing the book, even before I found the blue-green numbers inside Dad’s arm.” 

And go back she does, relaying how after the war, her father moved to Canada and opened and operated several restaurants. Between this exposure and her maternal baba’s delicious home cooking, food was always a central part of Reichert’s upbringing; food waste an “anathema to all of us, an attitude bred right into our bones.” Her baba especially embodies the importance of food in her family. On weekends, she’d come to the house bearing enormous amounts of food wrapped in parcels and packages she called pekeleh, which means bundles, and also burdens, in Yiddish. She’d cook cheese blintzes “fried to a crispy gold and ready to be smothered in syrupy strawberries and sour cream”; wild blueberry varenikes “ready to squirt their purple juice into your mouth”; and chicken necks, “boiled until the bones were soft and the meat fell off in strips.”

Reichert’s story extends far past childhood, with literal and metaphorical culinary journeys in spades. How to Share an Egg is a beautifully written, eye-opening memoir that movingly shows how food—and writing about it—can bridge divides and heal generations. 

Twenty years after her memoir She’s Not There became the first bestselling book by a trans American, Jennifer Finney Boylan returns with the essay collection Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us. Despite the think-piece-ish subtitle, Cleavage is a memoir in essays; Boylan reflects on gender through the lens of her experience, a perspective tempered by the passage of time, parenthood, a long marriage and old friendships.

Boylan sets scenes well, as in the opening of the book’s first essay, “Fathers,” which sees Boylan and her father setting firecrackers with neighborhood kids. “I lit the fuse, and we watched the spark race down the long red string: Dad, me, and the Culbertson Rocketeers. Summer was ending. Ahead of us was middle school, and adolescence, and all the forces that would, inevitably, tear us apart. But for now we were gathered together, one last time.” These lines signal one of the book’s themes, that even though Boylan knew she was “meant to be female from my earliest memory, an insight that succeeded in twisting my heart around like an Amish soft pretzel,” there were also joyful days presenting as a boy, and later as boyfriend, husband and father.

Boylan’s tone is conversational, staying grounded in her own experience when exploring complex topics like “passing,” as in “Voice,” which recounts her search for a new female voice. This funny, poignant essay features a strange encounter with a ventriloquist who tries to use his voice-throwing skills to hit on Boylan. Many of the book’s essays rove between disparate episodes. “Daughters” oscillates between a night that teenage Boylan had a tense moment with her parents, and a visit to Cape Cod 50 years later with her wife, Deedie, and one of their now-grown kids. The two experiences reflect the long journey of coming to terms with herself.

While each essay stands alone, if you read Cleavage straight through, you’ll experience a moment of great surprise, much as Boylan and Deedie did, midway through the book. Boylan is an amiable, self-aware narrator—she recounts one of her kids calling her out for name-dropping Edward Albee during a heart-to-heart—poking gentle fun at herself and noting her good fortune in being privileged enough to live in comfort and safety, unlike many trans people. Cleavage is a sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac, meditative collection.