Fans of Natasha Trethewey’s poetry might think they’re already acquainted with the story of her mother’s death in 1985 at the hands of the poet’s stepfather. Most of Trethewey’s poetry collections shrewdly explore Gwendolyn Turnbough’s murder and Trethewey’s continual grappling with that grief. However, Trethewey’s seventh book and first memoir, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, is a new examination of the 35-year-old crime. It moves beyond simply recounting this loss to study the ways a mother’s death can shape a daughter’s relationship to memory.

Memorial Drive begins in Trethewey’s birthplace of Gulfport, Mississippi, where she spent her early years doted on by her mother and extended family while Trethewey’s father attended graduate school in New Orleans. After Turnbough’s first divorce, mother and daughter moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where Turnbough met and married Joel Grimmette Jr., an abusive, controlling man who would wreak havoc on his wife and step-daughter. Atlanta is also the place to which the memoir eventually returns when, 20 years later, Trethewey finds herself back at the site of her greatest tragedy and face-to-face with its lingering artifacts.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Natasha Trethewey reveals the ways in which her mother’s death shaped her into the artist she is today.

Like her earlier collections, Memorial Drive is written with a poet’s keen ear for language and Trethewey’s knack for historical detail and retrospection. Using descriptions of photographs, dreamscapes, memories of historical events (such as Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974) and even transcripts of the final phone calls between Turnbough and Grimmette, Trethewey builds a narrative that asks: How does one get intimately close to violence and still survive? Memorial Drive proves that the answer is neither simple nor singular, and memory is only one of the avenues we travel in our quest to remember those we’ve lost. The lives of our departed loved ones take on different weight and meaning as we live on without them.

As Trethewey herself stated in an interview with BookPage, “The memory of my living mother grows every day; it continues to grow.” Memorial Drive is the story of that memory, and of a daughter’s deepening love, which has survived long after her mother’s death.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Love audiobooks? Check out Memorial Drive and other nonfiction audiobook picks.

“My social media would tell you I was a working comedian with hobbies, love, a close family, and important opinions on trending topics,” author Sara Schaefer confides in her powerful memoir, Grand. “But inside, there was this impossibly tight knot, hissing at me, suffocating me, sucking the joy out of almost everything I did.”

Schaefer is a successful comedian who has worked for Jimmy Fallon and hosted a talk show on MTV with fellow comedian Nikki Glaser. In Grand, she toggles between her childhood in Midlothian, Virginia, and a 40th-birthday Grand Canyon rafting trip with her younger sister. 

For most of her early years, Schaefer and her three siblings lived a privileged life as the children of a lawyer and a stay-at-home mom. Her parents both drove Porsches. Her mom’s closet was “a jungle of textures: beads, suede, fur, silk.” Their Christmases featured mountains of presents. But after Schaefer and her siblings learned that their dad had misappropriated his clients’ funds, their family’s opulent lifestyle was replaced by low-paying jobs as they rebuilt their lives and repaid their debts. 

The rafting trip is a way for Schaefer to face her fears, both literally (she is afraid of water) and spiritually (she hasn’t fully grieved the death of her mom a decade earlier). Schaefer and her sister travel through Class VIII rapids and learn how to check their campsite for scorpions before bedtime. All the while, Schaefer’s writing is radiant, whether she’s describing the wonder of the Grand Canyon or her early years as a stand-up comedian in New York City. She tells her story with a generosity that never lapses into sentimentality.

“The sound of the rushing river canceled out all the other sounds,” she writes of her first night sleeping in the canyon. “I thanked the universe for this moment, made peace with my demons, and finally became one with nature. I fell into a deep, soul-restoring sleep. Just kidding—I tossed and turned and cussed for six hours straight.” The melding of humor and pain makes Grand a fresh and engaging read. It is a wise, funny acknowledgment that we are not always in control—and that growth is most likely to happen when we let go.

Inferno is a memoir of Catherine Cho’s harrowing journey through postpartum psychosis. Postpartum depression and psychosis exist in some of the most taboo corners of the haunted space assigned to mental health, conjuring headlines of drowned children and marring the virtuous, sunny, false picture of new motherhood. Cho’s story begins with a loving husband, a smooth pregnancy and only moderately overbearing new grandparents. But one morning, time and self began to unspool amid paranoid fantasies, and soon Cho’s husband is visiting her in the hospital, pleading with her to eat, trying to connect in any small way and finding that he cannot. 

In Cho’s hands, the story of her psychosis is also one of her growing up and knitting together her sense of self, even as that self is coming ferociously undone. The Korean fairy tales of her grandparents intermingle with the classical mythology loved by her father. Together, these stories suggest meanings to her that she can’t quite discern. The identities of her ancestors, herself and her son become mutable and bleed into one another. She feels overcome with love for her husband, convinced they have entered hell and she must save him. Cho seems to experience time as a divine being might, skidding back and forth and in between, realities crisscrossing and intertwining. There is a sublime quality to this temporal movement. Her illness looms large and mythic, even in its terror.

Those grandiose episodes flatten into periods of lucidity when Cho returns to herself in the ward and moves through her days without information, without contact with her family, carefully negotiating her relationships with the other patients. Even in these moments of clarity, postpartum psychosis treads around her edges like an animal, pressing a soft muzzle with hidden sharp teeth into her mind.

Though Cho dwells apprehensively on the intertwining of love and pain in the Korean culture of her upbringing, it’s the resilient thread of devotion in her life—to her husband, her family, the curious memory of her son—that laces through the pain and draws her back into the world. Cho’s expression of her experience of madness is poetic, and like much good poetry, it points its finger to the lies in our so-called reality: that our health system is healthy; that our expectations of motherhood are rational.

The most venerable resident of Crooked Path, New York, is also its only resident. Duchess Goldblatt, beloved social media presence, award-winning author and sponsor of the Duchess Goldblatt dog (and cat) show, expands her reach beyond 280 characters in her tell-all memoir Becoming Duchess Goldblatt. Well, almost all.

The pseudonymous writer behind the Duchess remains unknown in this memoir, but we might think of her as the Duchess’s ghostwriter. After losing a marriage, a job, a house and a circle of friends, this writer became a vessel for the voice of the Duchess, who was fond of dictating loving tweets in the middle of the night. The Duchess’ wit and charm went on to attract a real community, which includes the singer Lyle Lovett, in the otherwise dismal social media landscape.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt documents the rise of the Duchess, her friendship with Lyle Lovett and the influence of the writer’s good-hearted father on the Duchess’s kindness and whimsy. As a memoir, the story doesn’t shy away from the darker side of the writer’s life—especially the experience of growing up with an older brother who was mentally ill. It also questions the ethics of memoir, of telling family stories that reveal other people’s secrets or bad behavior. Anonymity allows the writer to tell her story through the Duchess, while also preserving the family’s privacy.

Most importantly though, the Duchess is a light shining in the darkness, a beacon for troubled souls scrolling through their phones in the wee hours of the morning. Her presence has uplifted her human avatar, even as it heartens Her Grace’s ever-growing audience of “loons” and “rascals.” She might be an invention of social media, but—as the Duchess would say—her love is real.

At a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bookstore several years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Gail Caldwell paused her reading to say, “There’s a lot of heart and soul in this room, and I would like to share the evening with you.” Sitting with her memoir Bright Precious Thing feels like an invitation into her own heart and soul. With a breath-catching, lyrical grace, yet enough focus to avoid sentiment, Caldwell lays down the path her life has taken. She credits the women’s movement with inspiring her evolution from rebellious Texan teenager to acclaimed Boston Globe critic. The friends and lovers she spent time with along the way are vividly here as well, for better and for worse. Date rape, an abortion and a long love affair with alcohol run right alongside the things that have sustained and inspired her.

What makes Caldwell’s memoir so much more than a skillful retelling is the way she balances her long past with visits from her present-day neighbor’s child, Tyler. When they meet, the 5-year-old falls in love with Caldwell’s beloved Samoyed dog, Tula. Over the years, that love comes to encapsulate all three of them—the writer helping along the little girl’s imagination, Tyler flashing the fearless self-awareness she seems to have been born with, and Tula blessing them both with her steadfast company. Caldwell calls it “a mutual learning society.” The child reminds Caldwell of “the innocence of forward motion,” and she tries to give Tyler “a palette for all that hope.”

For Caldwell, that palette got its beginnings in the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which “delivered” her from the “traditional paths” of marriage and motherhood. Diving into the past, alternating with sprints into the present, she observes herself as a writer, swimmer, rower, dog lover and friend. She can see the totality of her experiences from her perch much better as she nears 70, and they compose a “bright, precious thing . . . my life.”

One night in October 1990, a young Lacy Crawford took a phone call at her dorm, surprised to hear an older boy pleading for her to come help him. Crawford was mystified but convinced there must be a reason, so she slipped across her boarding school campus and met the boy at his dorm window. When she climbed inside, she was confronted by the boy and his roommate, both stripped down to their underwear. That night would haunt her for decades to come.

In Notes on a Silencing, Crawford emphasizes that the sexual assault she experienced was not unusual. “It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time,” she writes. “First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me.” She describes St. Paul’s as a lauded, sometimes lonely place where privileged teens were obsessed with their academic futures. (The author, when faced with the possibility of not returning for her senior year, pleaded with her parents: But what about Princeton?)

Crawford, a novelist, uses her storytelling skill to illuminate the myriad ways female students were taught that their desires and bodies were less valuable than—even subject to—those of their male peers. She’d had other sexual experiences as a teenager, a fact her teachers later used against her. When she began to experience physical ailments because of her assault, Crawford was certain it was a result of “what she had done.” She was so wrecked by the experience that she saw herself, not the boys, as the one to blame.

Crawford’s detailed account of her assault and its aftermath relies on an indelible memory as well as careful research. Medical reports and other documentation help her piece together the school’s reaction when she revisits it decades later, after other victims began holding the school accountable.

Notes on a Silencing is a ghastly account, beautifully told, of a teenage girl learning that people in power often value reputation above all else.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Love audiobooks? Check out Notes on a Silencing and other nonfiction audiobook picks.

The memoir of a gay New York playwright who grew up in a conservative Jewish community in Brooklyn might sound a bit niche, but David Adjmi’s Lot Six ushers readers into fundamental questions of identity, community and belonging. The writing is vibrant, edgy, scenic and exciting. The figures of Adjmi’s childhood—such as Howie, a brilliant outcast who befriends him in elementary school—come off the page as though the reader is meeting them in person. Adjmi also emerges as a sensitive and faithful—and funny!—narrator who is keen to notice his own reactions to particular moments and perceptive about how his early experiences fostered a kaleidoscopic inner life that informed both the formation of his identity and the art he would later make.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: David Adjmi tells the story of how eight years, four editors, a case of shingles and a self-guided crash-course in editing led, at last, to one of the best memoirs of the year.

From his adoration of the gruesome musical Sweeney Todd to his alienation from the popular children at his elementary school, Adjmi moves on to chronicle his adolescent and high school years. He leaves behind the cultural and social confines of his community by attending an art school with only one friend from his neighborhood. Adjmi becomes almost ethnographically obsessed with observing the behavior of his peers—and he goes through some changes of his own, too, growing his hair into dreadlocks and attending a college in California against his counselor’s advice that the East Coast Sarah Lawrence might be a better fit. (He eventually transfers.)

Adjmi had always been a competent student, but his passions alight when he realizes he wants to write plays. His entrance to the cloistered, insulated world of New York theater showcases both his brilliance and his increasing contrariness. As Adjmi realizes who he is, he finds it harder to fill his teachers’ perceptions of what he should be. Ultimately—and fittingly—his first major professional success is a mashup of his own favorite plays and his memories of growing up queer in his Syrian Jewish community.

In all, Lot Six is about finding out who you really are and learning to, as Nietzsche famously wrote, “amor fati” (love your fate).

In The Madwoman and the Roomba, Sandra Tsing Loh chronicles her 55th year, which feels “like living a disorganized twenty-five-year-old’s life in a malfunctioning eighty-five-year-old’s body.” As with her previous books The Madwoman in the Volvo and Mother on Fire, Loh finds comedy in the indignities and absurdities of contemporary life. These books make up a comic memoir in three parts: In the earlier books, Loh adjusted to motherhood and went through a rocky divorce, and this time, Loh is happily divorced and happily post-menopausal.

But she’s still recording her life with let-it-all-hang-out charm. She recalls her embarrassing claustrophobic freakout at the March for Science, and she tries to unleash her inner midlife goddess while parenting two teenagers. In the essay “Home Self-Care,” Loh writes, “The time has come. I can deny it no longer. My three-story 1906 Craftsman house has become a haunted-house-like eyesore.” She describes her efforts to improve her terrible front yard, hire a painter, understand her malfunctioning high-tech fridge and follow her new cookbook’s recipes.

Loh’s tone is breezy and self-deprecating—it’s like having a glass of wine or a long phone call with your witty, goofy friend. Because the narrative is loosely structured, you can read straight through or just dip into an essay when the mood strikes.

Something Loh doesn’t mention in The Madwoman and the Roomba is that she’s a Renaissance woman. She hosts two podcasts—the public radio podcast “The Loh Down on Science” (she holds a B.S. in physics from Cal Tech) and “The Loh Life,” her takes on life, family and pop culture. She’s performed in one-woman shows based on her writing, and she’s had bit parts in the TV show “The Office” and other productions. She’s also won a Pushcart Prize, published a novel and five other nonfiction books, and she’s written musical scores for an Oscar-winning documentary. I wish that Loh had riffed on her amazing jumble of a creative life, and how switching genres works, or doesn’t work, for her. But maybe that’s a wish for Loh to write another book.