Christa Parravani’s new memoir, Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood, traces the story of an unexpected pregnancy. Like most women who seek abortions, Parravani is already a mother, and due to tight finances and home stress, she does not want to add another child to her family. But in her new home state of West Virginia, access to the procedure is severely limited. Had she stayed in California, undoubtedly her life would have been different.

As the pregnancy progresses, Parravani’s husband returns to California to provide additional financial support. Parravani is left alone with two young daughters in West Virginia, where she runs out of grocery money, crawls up and down the stairs of her rented home and hides her struggles from colleagues. Her job as an English professor, the only stable work the family has, is a financial lifeline amid a frightening sea of debt.

Ultimately, Parravani is interested in how individual women make reproductive choices in the face of complex geographical, medical and financial circumstances. In tangible and heartbreaking ways, she illustrates how each of these things impacts both her already born daughters and her soon-to-arrive son. In particular, the medical care she receives in West Virginia makes this reviewer cringe.

Parravani carefully situates her narrative in the context of reproductive journalism and research, such as the recent Turnaway study, which examined the effects of unintended pregnancy on women’s lives over 10 years. What emerges is not simply a portrait of Parravani’s difficult marriage, painful health issues and stressful financial burdens, but a complex picture of the unsayable circumstances that shape one woman’s relationship to her body, to her choice to have children or not, and to the cost of that decision. In saying the unsayable, Parravani is unflinching and brave, offering a sometimes brutal yet undeniably powerful testimony of the mundane and tragic conditions that influence many abortion-seeking women. Parravani does love and want her children, yet the world in which she lives makes it difficult to receive them with open arms without a high personal cost.

Attentive readers of Meave Leakey’s masterful memoir, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, will learn a few details about her personal life. She was recruited by the great Louis Leakey for paleontological research in Africa in 1965, after sexism prevented her from working as a marine biologist. After completing her Ph.D., she returned to Kenya in 1969 for good. She fell in love with Louis’ son, Richard Leakey, despite his obnoxious reputation and the fact that he was then in an unhappy marriage. They had two daughters, who spent “field season” in remote areas of Kenya hunting fossils with their parents and their collaborators. After Richard was named the head of Kenya’s wildlife conservation department to end a rampage of elephant poaching, Meave became head of the field research operation and spent much of her life apart from him, especially as he became more involved in politics. Years later, long after Richard had lost his legs in a plane crash, she donated a kidney to him. And so on.

But the main and most illuminating parts of The Sediments of Time are about the tedious, painstaking years spent hunting for the fossilized remains of our species’ precursors. Drawing on field notes, interviews and research papers, Meave recounts the work that led to some of her and her team’s greatest discoveries. She demonstrates the astonishing amount of knowledge that can be gained, for example, through meticulous examination of something as seemingly unimportant as a prehistoric baby tooth. She writes of the shoestring budgets paleontologists operate on, the competition for research grants and the need for significant discoveries to maintain funding—and of the collaborative nature of the field’s efforts despite the competition for money. She also hails the positive impact of new communication and digital technologies in the field.

Best of all, Meave and her co-writer, her youngest daughter Samira Leakey, write clearly and compellingly about what these discoveries mean. In a fascinating chapter inspired by the birth of her grandchildren, Meave explores the advantages for our species of having parents who live long beyond childbearing years. Other chapters concern the development of our most distinguishing features: walking on two feet, the amazing mobility of our hands and the size of our brains. Some readers may find this all goes too deep into the sands of time, but many more will find it a thrilling account.

“His story. My story. . . . It’s our story,” writes David A. Robertson about his father, Don. And so it is in Black Water: Family, Legacy, and Blood Memory, a family history embedded in a memoir that shimmers with love and pain.

As a child born in 1935, Don didn’t have official Indigenous status, despite his heritage. He spent nine months of the year camping with his family on their trapline in the far north of Manitoba, Canada. Then the Family Allowances Act of 1945 changed their way of life. The act provided financial support for every child with a permanent address, so Don’s family was forced to give up their trapline, except for brief spring runs. Don went to a public school, where he had to abandon his native language, Swampy Cree. He later devoted his educational career to ensuring that Indigenous people’s languages and culture were respected and preserved, earning the government’s support as he established programs across Canada. Black Water begins and ends with the story of the Black Water traplines that meant sustenance, survival and community for generations of Swampy Cree.

Yet Don and his European Canadian wife decided not to tell their three children that they were “First Nations kids,” believing that knowledge of their Swampy Cree roots would be a burden for them. This decision left their son David feeling like a puzzle with a missing piece. As a teenager with dark skin, Robertson grew up far from a trapline, in a mostly white neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba, denying he was “Indian” and laughing along with racist jokes. When his parents separated, he spent 10 years without his father, except for weekends and golf games. Hurt, angry and increasingly anxious about everything, Robertson eventually confronted and reconciled with Don. With that came the revelation of his Cree heritage. Many journeys to Norway House along Lake Winnipeg followed, revealing his family’s roots, his “blood memory” and stories to be passed down to his own children.

Claiming one’s heritage, learning where “home” truly is, is an oft-told tale, but Robertson infuses his story with a wisdom that binds his own discoveries to the common experience of sharing family legacies with future generations. Memory is a gift we owe our children, he says. Listen to your own storytellers and hold them close while you can.