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The Hold List: Best of the bestsellers

Feature by the editors of BookPage

At BookPage HQ, we look at books months before they’re published. So it’s always a delight when something we adored finally hits shelves, and everyone else falls just as head-over-heels in love with it as we did. Here are five recent blockbusters whose climbs up the charts made us cheer.

Mexican Gothic

I have long lamented the waning of the gothic novel. We as a society need more women running around crumbling hallways in giant ballgowns, gripping candelabras as they uncover hideous family secrets. Even if Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel doesn’t kick-start a whole new wave of romantically moody thrillers (though it certainly should), I’m delighted that its success catapulted its very deserving author onto the bestseller lists. Putting a unique and elegant stamp on a genre is Moreno-Garcia’s signature move. She’s written what she called a “fantasy of manners” with The Beautiful Ones and a Jazz Age coming-of-age novel that incorporated Mayan mythology in Gods of Jade and Shadow. So of course her gothic heroine isn’t a timid wallflower. Noemí Taboada is a headstrong and glamorous socialite whose foibles and inner demons make her as interesting as she is heroic. And the ending? Let’s just say it would blow Daphne du Maurier’s hair back. 

—Savanna, Associate Editor 

Just as I Am 

Perspective is a tricky thing to hold onto—the present moment with all its immediate concerns sure makes a lot of noise—but a thoughtful memoir of a long and well-lived life can help you find your center. Cicely Tyson’s autobiography came out earlier this year, two days before the author’s death, and quickly hit bestseller lists. It’s more than a recounting of Tyson’s life as a groundbreaking actor, producer and activist; it’s also an examination of how a person can use their gifts to make a difference and the mindset required to act on that goal. Co-written with Michelle Burford, a founding editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, the memoir is structured chronologically from Tyson’s childhood to later years, revealing how her rise as an actor led to a singular purpose: to use her art “as a force for good, as a place from which to display the full spectrum of our humanity.” Because, as she writes, art must “mirror the times and propel them forward.” 

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Catch and Kill 

The world has had more than its fair share of breaking news this past year, so it feels somewhat nostalgic to revisit newsworthy reporting from the bygone era of 2019. Ronan Farrow’s explosively investigated book Catch and Kill delivers on every one of its subtitle’s promises: “lies, spies and a conspiracy to protect predators.” As journalist Farrow began looking into decades of allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, ranging from verbal harassment to sexual abuse, his life began to get tricky. His employer, NBC, got more and more antsy about the story. He received a rash of threatening anonymous messages on Instagram. And through it all, he had the distinct feeling that he was being followed. This book’s pacing is breathless, the twists increasingly twisty. At times it reads like a spy thriller, except better—because by the end of this electric story, real women who have suffered in silence for years are finally heard, believed and vindicated. 

—Christy, Associate Editor 

The Poet X 

Once in a blue moon, a YA book earns universal critical acclaim and achieves great commercial success. The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel in verse, was one such book. It won just about every award that exists to honor YA literature, including the National Book Award and the Michael L. Printz Award, and spent more than 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. You’ll understand why as soon as you begin reading it. The story of Xiomara, a Dominican American teen who discovers the light of poetry burning within her and reckons with the forces in her life that would see it extinguished, will set your heart on fire. I especially recommend the audiobook for your first read, since Acevedo’s narration draws out the meter and musicality of her accessible, conversational verses. I’m usually wary of sweeping statements, but in this case, one is merited: The Poet X is a perfect book that everyone should read. 

—Stephanie, Associate Editor 

Beach Read 

I picked up Emily Henry’s Beach Read last spring, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. With no travel plans on the horizon, a vicarious getaway to the shores of Lake Michigan was appealing, and during what were repeatedly referred to as “uncertain times,” the anticipated beats of a rom-com sounded especially soothing. Why not read about two authors trying out each other’s genres to beat writer’s block, and reluctantly falling in love? Beach Read hit these marks and then surpassed them to become one of my favorite types of reading experiences: a diversion with depth. The screwball vibe and snappy dialogue I had been looking for are there on the page. But as Augustus and January slowly open up to one another, the lighter threads of the story are woven into an honest exploration of grief, trust and the healing power of art. It’s a connection-affirming, generous novel that deserves its status as a word-of-mouth bestseller. 

—Trisha, Publisher

Here are five recent blockbusters whose climbs up the charts made us cheer.

NonfictionAudioMemoir

AMORALMAN

Review by Anna Zeitlin

A magician never reveals their tricks, but fortunately for us, Derek DelGaudio doesn’t consider himself a magician. A sleight-of-hand master whose hit one-man Broadway show, In & of Itself, is now a movie (streaming on Hulu), DelGaudio offers a memoir like no other in AMORALMAN: A True Story and Other Lies (5.5 hours), because no one has lived a life quite like his.

DelGaudio traces his interest in deception back to childhood, when he concealed his true self to avoid being bullied at school. As a teenager he wowed legendary magicians, winning their trust and gleaning what he could from their knowledge. DelGaudio eventually mastered card moves that even his mentor couldn’t pull off, and he began using his extraordinary skills to control a weekly high-stakes poker game.

As both author and narrator, DelGaudio is a captivating storyteller who brings the weight of his experiences to every moment as he grapples with morality and makes questionable decisions amid the dubious world of con artists. 

A magician never reveals their tricks, but fortunately for us, Derek DelGaudio doesn’t consider himself a magician.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Oh, does Lauren Hough have a story to tell. Born into an apocalyptic cult called the Family (also known as the Children of God), Hough grew up in group homes in Germany, Japan, Switzerland and elsewhere, often without enough food, and steeped in the strange prophecies of cult leader David Berg. Because of the Family’s theology, Hough had to smother her identity as a gay kid throughout her adolescence.

After high school, Hough joined the Air Force during the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era (1993–2011) and was stationed in South Carolina. This is where we first meet her in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing—in 1999, standing in her yard watching her new car burn. Someone, likely another airman, has set it on fire, but the sheriff thinks Hough is the prime suspect.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of the audiobook! Author Lauren Hough and actor-producer Cate Blanchett create a heartbreaking and intimate experience for listeners.

In the 11 linked essays that make up Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, Hough recounts these sorts of experiences, such as her last days in the Air Force, when she was more or less pushed out for being gay; her desperate search for a job and home; her work as a bouncer at a gay club in Washington, D.C.; her first romantic relationships with women; her stint in jail for an assault she may or may not have committed; and her years working as a cable guy. Beneath all her turmoil is the trauma of growing up in the Family—the sleep deprivation, the endless singing, chanting, praying and preparing for Armageddon, the proselytizing and selling posters on the street, all while trying to avoid adults’ and boys’ sexual advances, which the Family tacitly encouraged.

These essays are funny, profane and deceptively loose, as if Hough is talking to you late at night in a quiet bar. But they’re also well crafted and make unexpected connections among Hough’s disparate experiences, her search for identity and the larger culture. Most of all, Hough’s writing is about voice, and her distinctive style is what carries the reader through. By the collection’s end, you feel you know her, and you know she’s finding her own way through writing. Hough is a writer to watch.

The essays in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing are funny, profane and deceptively loose, as if Lauren Hough is talking to you late at night in a quiet bar.
NonfictionPop CultureMemoir

The Beauty of Living Twice

Review by Amy Scribner

It’s impossible to overstate just how famous Sharon Stone was in the 1990s. After the phenomenon of 1992’s Basic Instinct, the legendary beauty earned further acclaim for roles in Casino and The Muse and became one of the highest paid actors on the planet. As a result, her every move was scrutinized. She would have broken the internet—if that had been a thing back in 1996—when she wore a black turtleneck from the Gap to the Oscars.

In Stone’s generous new memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, she writes about it all, starting with her loving but fraught childhood in blue-collar Pennsylvania, where her family laughed hard and fought loudly. “They did a horrible, beautiful, awful, amazing job with us,” she writes of her parents. “They gave us their best. They gave us everything. All of it. The full Irish.”

Stone also reveals in this memoir that she and her sister were sexually abused by her maternal grandfather. That portion of the book is understandably vague and brief, but it’s clear this betrayal impacted the family irrevocably.

In fact, The Beauty of Living Twice alternates between vague summarization and incredibly personal recollections. Stone writes in detail about the massive stroke she suffered in 2001, which left her in financial and physical ruin that took years to recover from. She dishes on her experiences with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood and her philanthropic efforts around the world. But she only briefly talks about her experience of adopting three sons, one of whom became the subject of an acrimonious custody dispute with her ex-husband Phil Bronstein.

Overall, the book reads like an oral history, as if someone were typing furiously while Stone reminisced about her exceptional life. (“Remind me to tell you about James Brown,” she writes late in the book. She does not, unfortunately, tell us about James Brown.) Somehow, this old Hollywood narrative style works, and Stone delivers a bighearted, wonderfully rambling story full of wisdom and humor.

It’s impossible to overstate just how famous Sharon Stone was in the 1990s, and in her generous new memoir, she writes about it all.
NonfictionMemoir

My Broken Language

Review by Kelly Blewett

Joyful, righteous, indignant, self-assured, exuberant: These are all words that could describe Quiara Alegría Hudes’ My Broken Language. The celebrated playwright calls her language broken, but in this extraordinary memoir she actually remakes language so that it speaks to her world—a world that takes as its point of origin a barrio in West Philadelphia where Hudes grew up surrounded by Perez women, whom she refers to as her own Mount Rushmore, her pantheon of goddesses. The women in her family laugh, cry, eat, dance and mourn, and they do it in a glorious blend of English and Spanish, in language made of flesh and motion. Hudes watches them from the stairs, eager to join in but uncertain exactly where she fits.

Like the best translators, Hudes occupies the in-between—in this case, in between the crowded and uproarious barrio, where life feels like an unfolding tragicomedy, and the staid suburbs, where her white father has settled into a routine life that offers plenty of picket fences but little space for complexity. Hudes’ narrative follows her life story, from living with both parents to traveling between them; from her growing bond with her extended Perez family to her trips back to her mother’s native country of Puerto Rico. Her delight in the musicians and artists of the Western canon leads her to Yale, where she realizes the infuriating limitations of that canon, and ultimately to Brown, where she dedicates herself to telling the story of her people, their bodies, their spirituality and their language. This is a book of bringing together dissonant stories, one that Hudes alone could write. 

Hudes’ first name is an invented endearment, a form of the verb querer, which means “to love.” Her mother had seen the name spelled Kiara or Ciara or Chiarras, but for her daughter she wanted that same sound with a deeper meaning, one that indicated that her daughter was beloved (Quiara) as well as a source of happiness (Alegría). There may be no better compliment to the author of this marvelous, one-of-a-kind memoir than to say she truly lives up to her name. With My Broken Language, she has invented a language of love and to-the-bone happiness to tell stories only a Perez woman could share.

Joyful, righteous, indignant, self-assured, exuberant: These are all words that could describe Quiara Alegría Hudes’ My Broken Language.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Girlhood

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Girlhood is a time of life that’s often idealized as innocent and safe. This, of course, speaks to our gendered expectations for the so-called fairer sex. But the truth about girls’ early lives is more complex. Girlhood can be exploited just as often as it is protected, and Melissa Febos brings these complications to the fore in Girlhood, a collection of seven memoiristic essays.

The author of Whip Smart, about her time working as a dominatrix, and Abandon Me, another essay collection, Febos is a dab hand at the memoir genre. The essays that compose Girlhood tell a story of Febos’ life that reaches back to her childhood on Cape Cod and her young adulthood in New York City to examine her internalized beliefs. While her route to making sense of her own life is usually circuitous, her thoughtfulness as she reaches toward a conclusion is a delight to follow.

Many of Febos’ girlhood experiences stemmed from her body developing maturely at a young age. She fearlessly interrogates her adolescent reaction to these changes and the attendant shame, voyeurism and almighty male gaze that subsumed her young life. Each essay is layered like a sfogliatelle: Recollections of a growing girl in a sexist culture lay upon her adult analyses and rich cultural references, from Greek myths to 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault. Sources listed at the book’s conclusion range widely from Black feminist and race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw to British art critic John Berger.

In one of the strongest essays, “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” Febos and her partner attend cuddle parties. Based on the belief that there is a primal need for human touch, a cuddle party is when strangers gather together to experience consensual, nonsexual touch. These parties prompt Febos to examine her history of accommodating and prioritizing men’s needs over her own.

Girlhood offers what some may view as a dark portrayal of young adulthood, in which opportunities for degradation are seemingly limitless. And some of Febos’ later-in-life experiences, such as heroin addiction and sex work, won’t be shared by every reader. But anyone raised as a girl will be able to relate to something in Girlhood, and those who weren’t will marvel at this book’s eye-opening, transformative perspective.

Anyone raised as a girl will be able to relate to something in Girlhood, and those who weren’t will marvel at this book’s eye-opening, transformative perspective.
NonfictionMemoirEuropean History

Eva and Eve

Review by Alice Cary

After Julie Metz’s mother died in 2006, she mused, “I wish like hell I’d asked my mother more questions.” That’s a common regret of newly bereaved daughters, but this one had special urgency: Metz had just discovered “a vault of secrets” tucked away in her mother’s lingerie drawer. A small keepsake book contained childhood notes and souvenirs from Vienna, the Austrian city from which Metz’s mother, Eva, and grandparents were forced to flee in 1940. Their Jewish family had been wrenched apart two years earlier when Eva’s two older brothers were sent to London because a neighbor’s son, who had joined the Hitler Youth, had begun targeting them. By 1940, London was no longer an option for the rest of the family, so they headed to the United States. Once there, 12-year-old Eva changed her name to Eve and grew up to become a “steely, savvy” New Yorker, as well as a successful art director at Simon & Schuster.

Metz had known about this tragic saga from a young age, but her hunt for additional details after her mother’s death turned into an obsession that “felt like a séance, a conversation she and I never had when she was alive. A collaboration with a ghost.” The result is her intriguing memoir, Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind.

The author is no stranger to digging into the past. Metz’s 2009 memoir, Perfection, reexamined her marriage after she discovered that her recently deceased husband had been a serial adulterer. In Eva and Eve, her research leads her to Vienna, where she visits her mother’s childhood apartment and tours the factory her grandfather, Julius Singer, was forced to abandon. Singer invented an accordionlike paper used to dispense medicine that was manufactured on a “machine so complicated that the Nazis had kept Julius alive to run it.” These visits are fascinating as well as heartbreaking. As Metz retraces her mother’s journey to America, readers come to understand in a visceral, immediate way the hardships and terrors her family faced. 

Metz is a dogged, careful researcher, but at times she describes imagined scenes, with mixed success. Many of these passages vividly bring her ancestors to life, but a few seem like a stretch. Still, Metz is a compelling narrator who offers thoughtful reflections on how her family’s situation parallels today’s world. “I wondered about all the other Evas, children forced to leave their countries because of war and drought, riding the Bestia train through Mexico, or waiting in refugee camps in the Mideast and Europe,” she writes. “When those who have suffered persecution feel that they belong, that their lives truly matter, we will all live more truthful lives.”

After Julie Metz discovered “a vault of secrets” in her mother’s lingerie drawer, she went searching for information about her family's prewar life in Austria.
NonfictionMemoirHumor

Broken (in the best possible way)

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Bestselling author Jenny Lawson’s writing often elicits a range of emotional responses, from gasp-laughs to sympathetic murmurs to the particular type of groan that accompanies massive secondhand embarrassment.

Lawson, aka the Bloggess, believes “we are so much less alone if we learn to wear our imperfections proudly.” Her brand of sharing has created a community endlessly drawn to her hilarious confessions of foibles and fears; conversations with her loving yet exasperated husband, Victor; and chronicles of her experiences with mental and physical illness.

Broken (in the best possible way), Lawson’s fourth book, is a loop-de-loop of an emotional roller coaster that swoops from poetic to profane, madcap to moving and back again. She’s in fine form in this collection of essays, which offers support, humor and her take on society’s ills and wonders.

Years of frustration and righteous rage are channeled into the trenchant essay “An Open Letter to My Health Insurance Company,” in which Lawson shares what it’s like to rely on medication controlled by an impenetrable and uncaring health care system. She also confides that rheumatoid arthritis, which causes her feet to swell and then deflate, has resulted in “Six Times I’ve Lost My Shoes While Wearing Them.” Her poignant account of the times a shoe has taken “a ride in an elevator without me” is a thing of hilarious beauty. So, too, are a compilation of tweets about everyday mortification called “Awkwarding Brings Us Together,” as well as stories about the book editing process, an ill-fated kayaking trip and the time a (live) squirrel fell on her head.

Lawson’s more serious essays, especially her musings on her spotty memory and her family’s history of dementia, are sad and affecting. She writes with love and admiration about her grandmother, who “goes missing sometimes, lost in her own mind,” and shares her conviction that treatment for mental illness is getting slowly but surely better with every generation. To wit, her diary of transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment for depression is harrowing, edifying but also hopeful. After all, she writes, “Nothing lasts forever. The good and the bad.”

Jenny Lawson’s fourth book is a loop-de-loop of an emotional roller coaster that swoops from poetic to profane, madcap to moving and back again.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Blow Your House Down

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello. Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, Frangello’s raw, eloquent account of the demise of her marriage, is an exemplar of self-reflection, tinged with optimism about the power to recover one’s life from the depth of suffering.

Long before she reached her 18th wedding anniversary in 2011, Frangello was acutely aware of “the signs you are not living the right life for you, even if your life looks unfathomably pretty and privileged compared to where you come from or in other people’s eyes.” And so she began a long-distance emotional affair with a writer and rock musician whose novel she was publishing, culminating in a full-blown relationship she concealed from her husband for nearly three years.

Like many divorces, Frangello’s mutated from the early hope of relative amicability to the ugly reality of bitter conflict, as a husband who had trouble curbing his public displays of anger even in happier times set out to inflict maximum pain for her transgression. As the warfare escalated, Frangello faced the task of caring for her aging parents and underwent seven months of treatment for breast cancer.

Amid this account of Job-like affliction, Frangello never shirks responsibility for the breakup. Still, casting her ordeal in the form of a trial, she makes a passionate case from an ardently feminist perspective for the rightness of her decision to abandon her husband for “the man who rewired my heart” and pleads that her effort to rebuild her children’s trust be “judged by the courts of distance and hindsight.”

For all her undeniable current happiness, Frangello resists the urge to affix a happy ending to her story. Instead, she offers only a “vow to continue unfolding for as long as I breathe.” Considering all the heartbreak she has endured and the uncertainty of life she knows all too well, that modest hope seems entirely fitting.

There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello.
NonfictionAudioMemoir

Just as I Am

Review by Deborah Mason

The late Cicely Tyson was more than an actor; she was a titan who inspired, prodded and enthralled her audience. From her breakout role in the 1972 film Sounder to her Emmy-nominated turn in “How to Get Away With Murder,” Tyson played her characters with integrity, endowing each with humanity and dignity. But she was also a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, an activist and an artist, and the story of her life is as complex as it is compelling. 

In her memoir, Just as I Am (16 hours), Tyson lays out the whole of her life—including her turbulent relationship with her mother and her fraught marriage to musician Miles Davis—with unflinching honesty and hard-earned wisdom. In the foreword, actor Viola Davis describes her first meeting with Tyson with humor and love, and the relationship between the two groundbreaking artists is a joy to imagine. Award-winning audiobook narrator Robin Miles performs the majority of the book, bringing the same warmth and depth of characterization that she brought to the audiobooks for Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. But Tyson herself steals the show with her generous, funny and wise introduction, the many years apparent in her voice but the fire in her spirit still burning brightly. Listening to Just as I Am is a profound delight.

Robin Miles discusses the humbling and thrilling experience of narrating Just as I Am.

Narrator Robin Miles bringing the same warmth and depth of characterization to Cicely Tyson’s memoir as she did to Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.
NonfictionMemoir

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Searching for one’s identity can be a vertiginous experience, especially for an immigrant shuffling from one culture to another. In Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, Louis Chude-Sokei cannily captures this tumbling free fall through a variety of cultures as he negotiates what it means to be African in Jamaica and the United States.

Chude-Sokei was born in Biafra on July 6, 1967—just past midnight on the day that war was declared between Biafra and the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He learned early that his father, killed in the war, lived on in the country’s memory as a great Biafran hero. His mother—whom he heard referred to as the “Jackie O. of Nigeria,” in part because she always wore dark glasses—moved to the U.S. and sent the fatherless boy away to Jamaica, where he was raised by women and where his quest for a society among men began.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Louis Chude-Sokei shares his experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into his totally original memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way.

Chude-Sokei’s mother eventually brought him to the U.S., where they lived first in Washington, D.C., and then in Los Angeles. In California, he learned what it takes to survive in an unfamiliar culture. He also discovered his love of stories and the music of David Bowie, both of which helped him navigate the rough waters of adapting to a new neighborhood and trying to find himself. Chude-Sokei felt like he had fallen from space, an alien creature in a Black neighborhood that didn’t accept his accent, his Blackness or his love of science fiction and David Bowie. He began to understand the “prejudices and tensions” within Black America and the “pain and promise” of living within them.

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way is a compelling story of the challenges of living what feels like “life on Mars.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

In his totally original memoir, Louis Chude-Sokei captures the prejudices and tensions, pain and promise of being African in Jamaica and the United States.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Spilt Milk

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Courtney Zoffness’ young son was obsessed with police officers. The family lived two doors down from a New York Police Department precinct, and 4-year-old Leo became fixated on the small dramas that unfolded outside the station. Sometimes officers helped his family—jumping a car battery, for example. And sometimes, Leo watched police escort a recently arrested person into the station.

Zoffness wanted to explain big ideas to her son—systemic racism, a disproportionately high number of arrests of people of color, the ambiguity of the term “excessive force.” But how do you explain these concepts to a child? She reminded Leo that being a police officer is about helping people, as her father did as a volunteer with the auxiliary force. But Leo was more enchanted by the idea of handcuffing bad guys.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Courtney Zoffness shares her experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into her thoughtful memoir, Spilt Milk.

Throughout her debut essay collection, Spilt Milk, Zoffness applies thoughtful analysis to everyday situations like this one. In 10 essays, she explores inherited ideas (such as her father’s respect for police work) and inherited genetics (does her oldest son wrestle with anxiety because of Zoffness’ own childhood experience?).

In “Boy in Blue,” the essay about Leo’s police fascination, Zoffness recounts her family joining a protest in May 2020. They held signs proclaiming that Black Lives Matter and chanted their fury about police brutality. Leo, then 6, remained entranced by law enforcement, proclaiming, “You’re unarrested” in a misunderstanding of what officers actually say. “Dramatic play, experts say, helps children understand the power of language,” Zoffness writes. “We’ve yet to correct him. In Leo’s linguistic reality, freedom rules. Nobody suffers. Everyone is equal. Everyone is blameless.”

Elsewhere, Zoffness recalls how a writing student’s advances brought to mind a parade of assaults and unwelcome commentary from men. She also explores the rituals of her Jewish faith and the juxtaposition of science and astronomy.

Throughout Spilt Milk, Zoffness’ essays plait her life experiences with larger observations about society. In her layered storytelling, she brings empathy to every situation and often finds empathy for herself along the way. Spilt Milk is a generous, warm debut from an already prizewinning writer.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Throughout Spilt Milk, Courtney Zoffness uses layered storytelling to plait her life experiences with larger observations about society.
NonfictionMemoir

Speak, Okinawa

Review by Jessica Wakeman

The Japanese word sumimasen means “I’m sorry” as well as “thank you.” This concept perfectly describes Speak, Okinawa, a memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina.

Brina’s father was a privileged, white American soldier when he met her mother, a nightclub hostess in Okinawa, Japan, who longed to marry up and out of a difficult life. They did marry, then settled in upstate New York to chase the American dream. Although Brina and her mother were provided for by her father, neither woman felt entirely welcome in their largely white suburb. Her mom was isolated, linguistically as well as culturally, and struggled for years with her decision to leave her family in Okinawa for life in the U.S.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Elizabeth Miki Brina shares her experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into her moving memoir, Speak, Okinawa.

Although technically a memoir, Speak, Okinawa largely centers on the different mental health crises experienced by Brina’s parents. Her father is scarred by PTSD from his service in Vietnam, as well as by a toxically masculine pressure to protect his family. Her mother has developed alcoholism after growing up in poverty and then moving to a country that’s racist against her. The question that Brina strives to answer throughout the book is whether love can heal either of them. In this way, Speak, Okinawa reads like a deeply personal apology from Brina to her mother.

Speak, Okinawa blends Brina’s own narrative of being a confused young person finding her way with her parents’ stories about their lives and the history of Okinawa. For readers who are unfamiliar with Chinese-Japanese-Okinawan-American relations, the history of Okinawa, told in the first-person plural, is jarring in the most eye-opening way. The story is strongest when Brina connects the dots between the U.S. military’s colonization of Okinawa and her family’s, as well as her own, disrespect toward her mom.

Assimilation is often touted as a goal for immigrants in the U.S., but Brina shows how difficult it is for someone to assimilate when they’re already branded as an outcast—especially within their own family.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Elizabeth Miki Brina searches for whether love can heal a family traumatized by racism and colonization in her moving memoir, Speak, Okinawa.

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