Novelist Jami Attenberg invites readers to join her in reflecting on relationships, creativity and the nature of home in her first essay collection, I Came All This Way to Meet You (6.5 hours). Her vignettes intertwine stories of her growth as an author with funny and honest ruminations on a life filled with travel and art.
Attenberg’s vulnerability in these essays, paired with narrator Xe Sands’ quiet, confident voice, makes listening to I Came All This Way to Meet You an intensely personal experience. Sands adds a shade of wistfulness to Attenberg’s wisdom with cool vocal tones, and elevates the author’s witty quips with a cheeky sensibility. Listeners will lean in to enjoy the full range of sentimentality and playfulness. It’s like sitting down with a clever friend to hear stories over cups of tea—nostalgic, conspiratorial and comfortable.
I Came All This Way to Meet You is a relaxing audiobook that will incline the listener toward restful reflection, encouraging them to discover inspiration in even the smallest moments of everyday life.
Interspersing memoir with science writing, Stephanie Cacioppo leads readers through the brain science of love and connection in Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection. At 37, Cacioppo was already a lauded neuroscientist. She’d chosen to study the neuroscience of love, even though her faculty adviser in Geneva had warned her against it, calling it career suicide. Still, she persevered, earning research spots at Dartmouth and the Swiss National Foundation. She and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to create a “map of love,” showing that the brain reacts to love in complex ways and that romantic feelings of love affect the brain differently than friendship or parental love.
Even so, Cacioppo had never fallen in love, or even had a serious boyfriend. Instead, she decided that her passion would be for work. Then, at a conference in Shanghai, she met John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago social neuroscientist who’d done groundbreaking work on loneliness, establishing it as a dangerous health condition that is as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. She felt an instant connection with him, despite the 20-year age difference. After a period of emailing, they began dating long-distance and meeting up at conferences.
They were married soon after. “Looking back, it’s unbelievable to me that neither of us were struck by the irony of our situation, that John and I, which is to say Dr. Love and Dr. Loneliness, were not practicing what we preached,” Cacioppo writes. “Our research, from opposite ends of the spectrum, emphasized the human need for social connection. And yet both of us had the hubris to think we could go it alone.” Once connected, each spouse’s work informed the other’s. They shared a desk at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where they both worked, and at home.
A few years into their marriage, John was diagnosed with a deadly form of cancer. Cacioppo details the closeness they felt during his treatment, as well as her complicated grief after his death and her slow return to life. She is an engaging guide through the scientific portions of the book, and her own experiences of connection and loss enrich the narrative. Together, these intertwined strands of science and personal narrative make for a sprightly, illuminating book.
Interspersing memoir with research, neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo offers a sprightly, illuminating look at the science of love and connection.
Eleanor’s Rebellion: A Mother, Her Son, and Her Secret Adoption is an ancient arrangement dating back to biblical times and probably even earlier. Even so, it was not until the 1850s that adoption was legally recognized in the United States, and decades later, in the 1930s, that laws were created to ensure the confidentiality of adoption participants. Of the 87,250 children born to unwed mothers in 1935, many were placed with orphanages to be adopted. David Siff was among them. In 1975, when he wanted to make his own astrological chart, Siff needed the exact minute of his birth; it was this quest that lead him to a secret more revealing than the stars. Not only did Siff learn at the tender age of 40 that he was adopted, he also learned that the woman who adopted him was the birthmother who had placed him in the orphanage just a year before. The author’s biological father died before the secret was out, but Siff eventually uncovers another startling fact about his heritage: his father was none other than stage and film star Van Heflin. At the mercy of somewhat unwilling biological relatives to understand the father he never met, Siff turns to his father’s celluloid surrogate for clues. Siff repeatedly watches Heflin’s movie performances (including those as Joe Starrett in Shane and as a mad bomber in the 1970 movie Airport ) in a desperate attempt to learn more about his father, and to understand his mother’s secret. Siff’s winding journey, a mid-life discovery process if not an all-out crisis, examines how the layers of his family were folded and shifted to cover up his mother’s rebellious decision to reclaim her son from the orphanage. As he examines the fabric of his family, the author finds that the secret affected his mother even more than it did himself. With a thorough and thoughtful examination, Siff reveals that the emotional effects of adoption, like the ripples from a pebble dropped into a pond, have no concrete border. Though difficult to measure over time, the ramifications are life-altering for many in the extended circle.
An actor and journalist, Siff has also written several books on sports under the name David Falkner.
Diane Stresing is a freelance writer in Kent, Ohio.
Eleanor's Rebellion: A Mother, Her Son, and Her Secret Adoption is an ancient arrangement dating back to biblical times and probably even earlier. Even so, it was not until the 1850s that adoption was legally recognized in the United States, and decades later, in the…
Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things That Matter Author Beth Kephart looks at an often overlooked topic in her sharply detailed Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things That Matter. And here, the things that matter most are the author’s friendships that have formed, changed, and evolved over the years. Following A Slant of Sun, Kephart’s National Book Award winning account of parenting a disabled child, Into the Tangle of Friendship threads the complicated strands of ever changing relationships into an intertwining story.
Kephart writes, “I am who I am because my friendships keep growing because there are always new people slipping into my life, new voices, new stories, new faces I look for, new homes that open up to me.” And over the years, her friendships have included an array of characters.
We meet a next door neighbor who sends daily notes of encouragement, observe two young boys learning what it means to be friends, and watch Kephart fall in love with Bill, a man who loves silence and her poetry. Kephart reunites with a lost best friend who stole her first love, learns to love her in-laws from El Salvador, and gives comfort after a neighbor’s husband succumbs to cancer.
Kephart honestly presents herself and her cast of characters. With remarkable detail, she relates the ups and downs of those she loves. Each chapter moves to a different friend and a different aspect of friendship, ultimately creating a novelistic story with its believably real characters and their interwoven stories.
Rather than presenting a mere litany of people met and loved over the years, Kephart uses her own examples to look closer at the dynamics of friendship. She explores the strange characters that wander into our lives, the energy that goes into sustaining friendships, and the myriad reasons people stay together or grow apart. Her illuminating stories address questions such as: What is friendship? What makes us cling to one another for comfort and support? Sharing her ever-growing band of companions, Kephart invites us into her world and in the end, adds this reader to her cast of friends.
Stephanie Swilley is an editorial assistant for BookPage.
Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things That Matter Author Beth Kephart looks at an often overlooked topic in her sharply detailed Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things That Matter. And here, the things that matter most are…
How can anyone take this man seriously? Answer: You can’t. Nor should you. And nor does he, for that matter. Mel Brooks—the multiple Tony, Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning comedian, writer, filmmaker and Broadway showman—has found reasons to laugh all his life and, thankfully, has shared that laughter with the public. Now he’s doing it again, this time with his memoir, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (15 hours).
In his raspy, unmistakable voice, Brooks reveals his enduring passion for such comedy classics as Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs and History of the World, Part I, as well as his respect for his relationships with showbiz luminaries Sid Caesar, Gene Wilder, Anne Bancroft and more. Even Brooks’ most personal memories of growing up in Brooklyn are peppered with his trademark sense of humor.
It’s easy to hear that Brooks had fun telling these stories, which clearly hold a distinct place in his heart. They’ll find a way into yours, too.
Mel Brooks has found reasons to laugh all his life and has shared that laughter with the public. Now he’s doing it again, this time with his memoir.
One hour after learning that his father had died of a heart attack at age 57, Rory Quirk was flying out of Vietnam with five fellow soldiers. Those five lay stacked, dead, in body bags at his feet. Quirk’s Wars and Peace begins there. He little expects, as he flies toward home, that he is going, not just to bury his father, but to begin a fascinating journey back in time, on which he may unearth the meaning of his dad’s legacy.
Quirk’s father, James, was a lifelong soldier who, almost daily, wrote letters home to his wife Mary, detailing his presence and perspective at turning points in world history. He served under General George Patton during World War II, rubbed shoulders with General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean war, and played absentee father for the good of this nation.
With breathtaking description, James’s correspondence speaks of the heady era in which he lived and fought. There are battle vignettes, proclamations of affection, and profound thoughts on war, love, and life. At times the events feel surreal, even for the man who is witnessing them. The whole drama of this thing is so intense, begins one note James wrote from Normandy, in July of 1944. Because it is so real and because the actors in the thing are so completely unconscious of the heroic role they play. Mary’s letters back are equally poignant as she writes of joining her fellow war wives to work, raise children, and hold down the fort at the homefront. The enormity of it was dreadfully hard to take, she says of the D-Day invasion. I was so keyed up that I never went to bed at all . . . went to church to offer my own little aimless prayer for all the guys most especially my own. The touchstone of each letter is the underlying hope for a peaceful future when the couple will live a simple life raising their child together. That never really happened. By the time his father was no longer soldiering, Quirk was fighting battles of his own. Part intimate dialogue, part guided tour, Wars and Peace is an American treasure. By adding family photos and personal narrative to his parents’ riveting letters, Quirk freezes moments and icons in time, creating the ultimate living history and nearing, if not achieving, his personal goal of an elusive inner peace. Emily Abedon is a freelance writer in Charleston, South Carolina.
One hour after learning that his father had died of a heart attack at age 57, Rory Quirk was flying out of Vietnam with five fellow soldiers. Those five lay stacked, dead, in body bags at his feet. Quirk's Wars and Peace begins there. He…
According to an article in the MIT Technology Review, by early 2019, more than 26 million people had added their DNA to the four leading commercial ancestry and health databases. That level of interest cries out for an in-depth examination of genealogy’s broad appeal, and Maud Newton gives us just that in Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, a thoughtful investigation of genetics and inheritance as viewed from the branches of her own family tree.
Speaking by FaceTime from her home in Queens, New York, the red-haired and bespectacled Newton is relaxed and cordial as she sits in front of a wall of glass-enclosed bookshelves. She speaks thoughtfully but with evident passion about a project that had its genesis some 15 years ago, when she started researching her family on Ancestry.com. But it wasn’t until 2010, when she received her 23andMe DNA test results, that her interest in the subject took off. Even then, she admits, she was “puzzled by my obsession with it. I wasn’t really sure exactly what I was trying to get at.”
A 2014 cover story for Harper’sMagazine on “America’s Ancestry Craze” led to a book contract and launched Newton, a writer and former book blogger who briefly practiced law before her literary career began, on a long and sometimes circuitous path through subjects like the heritability of trauma and the spiritual importance of ancestors in various cultures. “As a layperson, my ability to understand the deep science was limited,” she says, “but I really wanted to do my best.” The broad reading list reflected in her book ranges from ancients like Aristotle and Hippocrates to the work of contemporary writers such as Dani Shapiro and Alexander Chee.
At the core of Ancestor Trouble is Newton’s complex and often difficult family story. She describes her birth as a “kind of homegrown eugenics project,” writing that her parents “married not for love but because they believed they would have smart children together.” The union between her father, a Mississippi-born lawyer and unabashed racist, and her mother, a Texas native who later in life became a fundamentalist minister who conducted exorcisms in the family living room, lasted only 12 years but left Newton with a colorful, though at times painful, lineage to explore.
Among the most memorable characters in her family line are her maternal ninth great-grandmother, Mary Bliss Parsons, who faced multiple allegations of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts, and her maternal grandfather, Robert Bruce, who reportedly married 13 times. (So far, Newton has only been able to document 10 marriages, though she’s still searching.) Another is Charley, Robert’s father, who was accused of murdering a man in downtown Dallas with a hay hook in 1916. He died in a Texas mental hospital, but Newton became so engrossed in his story that she purchased a tombstone to mark his previously anonymous grave.
“As a layperson, my ability to understand the deep science was limited, but I really wanted to do my best.”
For Newton, the most problematic aspect of her ancestry concerns her family’s connections with slavery and with efforts to expel Indigenous peoples from their native lands. On her father’s side, that history hardly came as a surprise; he was, after all, obsessed with the Confederacy. But Newton was dismayed to discover that some of her mother’s ancestors also enslaved people and participated in genocide against Native Americans. “It was an unpleasant surprise, but ultimately a healthy and useful one,” Newton says, “to recognize that it wasn’t possible for me to divide my family into the part that enslaved people and that I didn’t relate to as much, and the part that I related to more that didn’t have this history. It was on all the sides.”
Though her family history is rife with material, Newton wanted to write a book that was more than a conventional family memoir. “The only way I wanted to write it was if I could . . . look at it through these different lenses, both through my own family history and in the larger historical, sociological, scientific, philosophical and religious history context,” she says.
That broad perspective magnified Newton’s reservations about online DNA research websites like the ones that launched her investigation. “I am very skeptical and very concerned about the data those sites are collecting and the lack of control we have over what is done with that data,” she says. “And I also continue to use both of those sites regularly. I objectively think they’re highly problematic, and on a personal level, I continue to be seduced by the tools that they offer.”
“Making it personal is the most powerful force we have for change.”
Newton’s comprehensive approach also led her to explore different ancestor veneration practices, such as Tomb-Sweeping Day in China and the Day of the Dead in Mexico. As she studied these rituals throughout history and the world, she came to realize that “we in the contemporary West who do not venerate ancestors or minister to them in the afterlife are the aberration, not the other way around.” That intriguing and moving investigation, she says, provided her with “a spiritual connection now, a healthy connection to my ancestors, including to some of the ancestors who were problematic when they died, with whom I had difficult relationships in life.” In the end, she says, “it’s less important or interesting whether there’s some objective reality to this feeling that I have of connection to my ancestors. What’s important to me is the healing potential that this inquiry can have.”
Readers will connect with many aspects of Newton’s vivid story, but there’s one—what she calls “acknowledgment genealogy”—that she hopes will especially resonate. This encompasses, as she puts it, “personal harms that we can acknowledge within our own family or larger harms that relate to the systemic problems that we’re facing now as a country. . . . If each of us can feel a little more comfortable coming forward and recognizing these harms and thinking about them and feeling about them in a larger context,” she says, “we’ll move a lot further along as a country toward the kind of conversations and healing that we need.” Newton believes this and brilliantly reflects it in Ancestor Trouble. After all, she says, “making it personal is the most powerful force we have for change.”
Maud Newton author photo credit: Maximus Clarke
The essayist and critic has penned a thoughtful investigation of genetics and inheritance as viewed from the branches of her own family tree.
When you examine the life of a hero, you almost always find a story more complex than the one you anticipated. The most common perception of Gordon Cooper is that he was a wise-cracking fighter jock who became an astronaut. His new autobiography, Leap of Faith, tells a different story.
Cooper’s father was a military pilot and an attorney; his mother was a teacher who also loved to fly. He was raised in rural Oklahoma during the Depression, but due to his father’s military career, he had an amazing list of acquaintances. As a child he had a crush on Amelia Earhart and swapped stories with Wiley Post; he was flying when most kids his age were learning to ride bikes.
Leap of Faith is full of fascinating anecdotes about the early days of the space program (yes, it’s true that while waiting for his Faith 7 Mercury capsule to be launched, the cocky and relaxed fighter jock actually fell asleep in his seat). Cooper is opinionated, frank, and has a great story to tell. The only problem is that people are going to remember this book for another reason entirely: Gordon Cooper believes in the existence of UFOs, and he devotes almost a third of the book to this subject.
As a trained aerospace engineer, a pilot, and an astronaut, he makes a good circumstantial case for UFOs. Cooper claims to have seen, and even chased, flying saucers as a jet pilot stationed along the Iron Curtain in the early 1950s. He also relates tales passed on to him from the brotherhood of pilots, and tells an X-Files-like story of disappearing UFO pictures.
After his retirement from NASA he gets involved with esoteric research, first with Disney, then on his own, and becomes acquainted with people of dubious credibility in his search for new technologies. Note to Col. Cooper: As the Amazing Randi would tell you, bending spoons is a trick, and if anyone uses this as an introduction, you should take anything they say thereafter with a grain of salt. To his credit, while he’s willing to listen to incredible stories, he always maintains some skepticism.
As a child of the ’60s, I remember how much the astronauts meant to me; Gordon Cooper was one of my heroes. After reading Leap of Faith, he still is.
James Neal Webb writes from Nashville.
When you examine the life of a hero, you almost always find a story more complex than the one you anticipated. The most common perception of Gordon Cooper is that he was a wise-cracking fighter jock who became an astronaut. His new autobiography, Leap of…
“My favorite book growing up was Harriet the Spy,” Erika Krouse says, speaking by phone from her home in Colorado. “It’s funny because that’s what I ended up doing. [Harriet] wanted to be a writer, and she wanted to be a spy, and I did too.”
In 2002, years after Krouse’s Harriet the Spy phase, she had a chance encounter with a corporate lawyer in a bookstore. At the time, she was a 33-year-old fiction writer working a series of temp jobs, but there was something about her face that had always made people, including this lawyer, confess their innermost secrets to her. After experiencing this phenomenon for himself, the attorney offered Krouse a job as a private investigator, and she accepted. As she writes in Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, “I wanted to help people and find things out, not necessarily in that order.”
That moment in the bookstore launched Krouse’s five-year investigative career, which included work on a landmark Title IX case involving college football players and recruits who raped fellow students at a party. For legal reasons, Krouse changed their names in the book. “I was committed to keeping the survivors safe,” she explains, “but the funny thing is, I also had to disguise the perpetrators, even though they didn’t deserve it, because some of that could have splashed back at the survivors.” The only concrete details she provides are that, at the time of the case, she was living “in the Front Range foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, in a small city that hosted a university and a swarm of tech startups.” It’s enough information for readers to connect the dots with a quick internet search.
“It’s the most famous case that no one’s ever heard of,” Krouse says. “There have been whole books about Title IX sexual assault that don’t mention this case, which is amazing to me because it was the first college case like this.” Krouse’s sleuthing helped reveal that the football team had used alcohol and sex as recruiting tools. The school eventually reached a settlement in 2007, with one victim receiving $2.5 million and another receiving $350,000.
At the time, Krouse didn’t fully appreciate the enormity of her involvement. “I’ve been thinking about this recently,” she says. “How many times in your life do you get an opportunity to save someone when they need it or work on something that’s important? That’s not ordinary life, right? Ordinary life—you’re just trying to pay the bills and get groceries and get here and get there. So when these opportunities do come up, it is actually an extraordinary circumstance. And a lucky one. A very, very lucky one.”
“How many times in your life do you get an opportunity to save someone when they need it?”
Throughout the memoir, Krouse also writes about her own childhood experiences of sexual abuse by a man she calls X. “I would have preferred to use his identity,” she says, “but in some ways, it was freeing not to—in that, this is a person who doesn’t even get to have a name.” Another benefit of this approach was that she didn’t have to address any of the psychological factors that may have contributed to his crimes. “I could just focus on the functionality of this person, which is that he was a perpetrator,” she says, “and not have to spend a lot of time humanizing someone who dehumanized me.”
At first, Krouse didn’t plan to address her own victimization in the book. “I generally don’t talk about my history, even with friends,” she says. She didn’t even discuss it while working on the sexual assault case. But as Tell Me Everything began to take shape, she decided, “I’m writing about all of these very brave women. For me not to even talk about my own past would be cowardly.”
Krouse knew her personal history would make investigating a sexual assault case tricky. “In some ways, I think I might have been able to be more strategic had I had more distance from the topic of sexual violence,” she says. “But in other ways, I think I was able to understand the people I was talking to on a deeper level. I don’t know what the balance is.”
“I think there’s some strength to planting your flag in the sand and saying, ‘This is me, and here I am. Deal with it.’”
Since she had no prior detective experience, Krouse learned on the job. Luckily, she says, fiction writers are uniquely qualified to be PIs. “We love the narrative. And we think, ‘Oh, wow. That moment back when they were 4 years old contributed to this completely unrelated thing.’ We like the web, and the way we figure out the next clue, so to speak, is never in a linear way. It’s always roundabout.”
Krouse’s chops as a writer, plus her talent for making strangers spill their guts, gave her an edge, but there was still plenty of trial and error. She readily admits, with a laugh, that as an Aries, her modus operandi tends to be “ready, fire, aim.” But this approach worked. “I don’t think there’s a way to prep in advance because so much is fluid,” she says. “I definitely had no idea what I was doing, and that feeling turned out to be an asset because we were in new legal territory. Nobody had done a case like this, ever.”
Krouse says she never imagined that she’d write a book about sexual assault until suddenly, she was doing it. The process has been healing—“but not in a warm bath and candles kind of way,” she says. “I think there’s some strength to planting your flag in the sand and saying, ‘This is me, and here I am. Deal with it.’”
Headshot of Erika Krouse courtesy of the author
Meet the fiction writer who unexpectedly became a private investigator and helped crack a landmark sexual assault case.
Old fans and new readers alike will be delighted with Pulitzer Prize nominee Frederick Buechner’s latest book, The Eyes of the Heart. In this extraordinarily moving and beautifully written memoir, Buechner reflects on life, faith, friendship, and family. He speaks with the ghosts of those he has loved and lost to help make sense of his life and of whatever life may lie beyond this one. Buechner writes candidly of his privileged but troubled childhood, his lifelong search for the essence of his father who killed himself at age 38, and of his stormy relationship with his self-centered and distant mother.
Now entering his 70th year, Buechner also deals with the losses that inevitably accompany old age in his case, the deaths of his only brother and his old friend, poet James Merrill.
Among the joys of later life he counts his grandchildren, and in one touching scene, describes the first time he saw his young grandson, who was living in Switzerland. Dinah, his mother, had him in her arms as she came down the stairs to show him to us, and I went up the stairs to meet him halfway. He had flaxen hair and serene blue eyes. He looked straight at me and gave a faint smile. I thought of how, only a few months old, he was on his way down into the world and I, sixty-seven years old, on my way out of it. I thought of how when I am out of it altogether, he will carry my genes into times and places beyond my power to imagine and how he was now one of the few for whom such is the mystery of kinship I would lay down my life in ten seconds flat if it took that to save his. Though very personal, Buechner’s story is universal and his viewpoint optimistic. Even in the pain that is part of the human condition, there is an underlying joy and love and the belief that, ultimately, no one is ever lost. Nothing is lost. This poignant, insightful work is sure to resonate in the heart of every reader.
Helen Harrison writes from Little Rock, Arkansas.
Old fans and new readers alike will be delighted with Pulitzer Prize nominee Frederick Buechner's latest book, The Eyes of the Heart. In this extraordinarily moving and beautifully written memoir, Buechner reflects on life, faith, friendship, and family. He speaks with the ghosts of those…
Actor and rapper Will Smith considered himself a coward for many years. As a boy, he was scared of his abusive, perfectionist dad from whom he wished he could protect his mom. He discovered that performing, both musically and as an actor, mitigated the risk of vulnerability with the chance to gain everything. His onstage humor, charm and originality won him worldwide fame and love—but also cost him. In Will (16.5 hours), Smith tells his incredible true story of rising, falling and discovering himself.
In the same way he studies his TV and film characters, Smith analyzes himself through vivid, theatrical anecdotes and stark metaphors. Rickety basement stairs become a descent into hell, and a game of Monopoly turns into a contest between success and death. Through his clear narration, Smith becomes not just a character but also himself, and the listener can easily “get” him.
As Smith relates his story of learning how to move beyond simply surviving to thriving, his delivery is spot on, with masterful imitations of family members, friends and colleagues. Musical interludes and background music create a soundscape from which epiphanies burst brilliantly. Smith’s autobiography is a hero myth for readers seeking self-awareness.
Will Smith’s autobiography is a hero myth for readers seeking self-awareness.
In her early 20s, Meghan O’Rourke began to experience an array of symptoms—fatigue, joint pain, brain fog, hives, fever, a sensation of electric shocks along her legs and arms—that neither doctors nor bloodwork could connect to a diagnosis. When one doctor suggested that O’Rourke might have an autoimmune disease, a condition in which the immune system begins to turn on the body, O’Rourke recalled her practical Irish aunts who lived with rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s disease and ulcerative colitis, all autoimmune diseases. As O’Rourke entered her 30s, her symptoms grew worse, despite seeing multiple specialists. She found herself barely able to leave her apartment, let alone have the baby she’d been hoping for.
O’Rourke is the author of three collections of poetry and a memoir, The Long Goodbye. In The Invisible Kingdom, she chronicles her long search for healing, layering in extensive reporting on the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune disease and the way our medical system fails to see ailments that aren’t readily diagnosable or easily treated. Likewise, she notes that autoimmune diseases are far more likely to affect women, and women, in turn, are more likely to be told that their symptoms are all in their heads. “Of the nearly one hundred women I interviewed, all of whom were eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or other concrete illness, more than 90 percent had been encouraged to seek treatment for anxiety or depression by doctors who told them nothing physical was wrong with them,” she writes.
O’Rourke examines her own experience with a lucid but compassionate lens, and she brings that same mix of analysis and compassion to the book’s reporting. It’s a delicate balancing act to write about a long journey of misery without being tedious or repetitive. She pulls it off by adding lyrical imagery and the words of other writers, such as Alice James and Susan Sontag, to her descriptions of suffering, the peculiar treatments she found herself undergoing, and the effect her quest for healing had on her marriage. And yes, the book reaches a happy, though not uncomplicated, ending.
While it’s especially useful for those who have personally encountered chronic illness, The Invisible Kingdom will add to everyone’s understanding of disease and health. Ultimately it offers a fresh image of what good medicine could look like: doctors understanding each patient as a whole person, not just as a collection of parts.
With a mix of analysis and compassion, Meghan O’Rourke chronicles the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune disease alongside her own long search for healing.
“I loved secrets, even terrible ones,” writes Erika Krouse in her debut memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation. “Especially terrible ones. When people told me things, I felt happy. The more they didn’t want to tell me that secret, the happier I felt when they did.” When a lawyer unexpectedly offered the fiction writer a job as a PI in 2002, she found herself investigating members of a Colorado university football team who had raped their female classmates. Unbeknownst to the lawyer, Krouse had also experienced sexual abuse from the ages of 4 to 7 by a man she calls X. Krouse explores both the legal case and her own emotional minefield in compelling, precise prose.
For legal reasons, and to protect the victims, Krouse changes some identifying details about those involved with the case and never names the university, although a few well-placed clues allow readers to deduce the specifics. Thanks to Krouse’s sleuthing, one victim received a $2.5 million settlement in 2007 and another received $350,000. The football team, she discovered, had a history of institutionalized misogyny and had been using drugs, alcohol and sex as recruiting tools. After these revelations, the team’s coach was suspended and later fired.
With utmost care and consideration for the victims, some of whom chose not to come forward, Krouse gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the complications of pursuing a Title IX case. Her narrative voice is engaging, and she effortlessly relates legal complexities in succinct, easy-to-follow passages. As a result, learning how Krouse and her legal team patiently unraveled the scope of the university’s involvement reads like a detective novel. Particularly riveting are the scenes in which Krouse speaks with various witnesses, often in bars or restaurants, trying to parse out what happened on the night of that ill-fated party. Instead of fancy surveillance equipment, Krouse relies on the lure of free beer and nachos, noting, “Alcohol made football players arrogant enough to tell the truth; it made women sad and angry enough to trust me.”
Alongside the story of her investigative work, Krouse explores her personal life: falling in love with an acupuncturist, reflecting on her childhood and navigating difficult family relationships. Her mother refused to address Krouse’s sexual abuse even after Krouse was an adult, and their relationship remains a live grenade throughout the book.
Both the true crime and memoir components of Krouse’s book are extremely successful, and her reflections on the injured party’s difficult choice to make their pain public are crisp and on point. “Maybe I . . . was splashing around in other people’s pain just to avoid drowning in my own,” she writes. “Maybe I was only trying to help them because nobody helped me.” Tell Me Everything is a memorable, highly personal account of a landmark legal case, as well as a thoughtful examination of the long-lasting damage of sexual assault.
Erika Krouse’s memorable, highly personal account of a landmark Title IX case reads like a compelling detective novel.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
A decade and a half in the making, The Antidote brings together undertold history of 1930s America and the fantastical vision that made Swamplandia! so remarkable.
