Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, is an expert on how we use words to both reveal and hide ourselves from the people who mean the most to us. Her work grows from a love of words that came from her father, Eli Tannen. While her mother, Dorothy, was difficult and often manipulative, Tannen’s father was witty, intellectual and loving. Yet despite (or maybe because of) their close relationship, there were frustrating gaps in his story, which Tannen wanted to fill. Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey From World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow is her account of not only his extraordinary life but also her search for the truth behind his family, his work and his marriage.

Eli’s greatest joy was found in words. Raised in a Hasidic family in Warsaw, Poland, he arrived in America in 1920 at the age of 12 with little or no English. Within three years, he was fluent and had become a voracious reader. Upon his death at the age of 97, he bequeathed his daughter a tsunami of letters, journals, poems, interviews and handmade cards, all filled with his words. With all this source material, one would be forgiven for thinking that all Dr. Tannen had to do was transcribe it and arrange it in chronological order. However, instead of a neat road map, these relics were like pieces from different puzzles. Tannen had to evaluate and organize them in order to create meaning out of them.

As a result, Finding My Father is a beautifully constructed patchwork that Tannen has pieced together from her father’s words. A pattern emerges that reveals not one Eli but several frequently contradictory Elis: Eli the son, Eli the lover, Eli the husband, Eli the father, Eli the activist, Eli the friend. Somehow, all of these Elis add up to the singular and extraordinary Eli Tannen. Finding this Eli allows Tannen to see herself, her family and most especially her mother in a new and conciliatory light. Memory doesn’t only reconstruct the past, Tannen reminds us; it can also forge a new present.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics is a beautifully crafted, unblinkingly honest, often darkly funny lament for a loving family that never was. The author’s mother was a cruel and abusive narcissist, her father an enabler and Laveau-Harvie and her younger sister the casualties of their parents’ twisted way of inhabiting the world.

Their family home is in Okotoks, a rural area in Alberta, Canada, where an enormous ancient boulder called the Okotoks Erratic “dominates the landscape, roped off and isolated, the danger it presents to anyone palpable and documented on the signs posted around it.” Laveau-Harvie describes Okotoks and the Rocky Mountains that soar above it with wonder and grace. She movingly conveys the ways in which the landscape offered her solace as a child and inspires resolve as an adult. But to survive the trauma of her early years, she first had to leave—moving to France and eventually settling in faraway Australia. “When I could, I took to fleeing ever farther, a moving target working at making herself fainter in the cross hairs, while my sister stood her ground, solid in appearance and stern, modeling her life like play dough. Neither strategy was successful,” she writes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Vicki Laveau-Harvie discusses the long and winding path to publishing her stunning first book.

In 2006, Laveau-Harvie received a fateful phone call at her home in Sydney: Her elderly mother had broken her hip and was in the hospital, leaving her father alone in her parents' grand mansion. He was also, the author learned, timorous and frail as a result of his wife starving and isolating him. After being estranged from their parents for nearly 20 years, the sisters traveled to Okotoks in an effort to protect their father and procure the appropriate care for their mother.

Their six-year journey of navigating endless health care bureaucracy while revisiting familial pain makes for an engrossing and fascinating read, one that moves with the ebbs and flows of Laveau-Harvie’s supressed, impressionistic memories. She writes, “My past is not merely faded, or camouflaged under the dust of years. It’s not there, and I know a blessing in disguise when I see one.” Through this protective, gauzy “fog” beams the author’s light: an unflinching and empathetic memoir of the collision between past trauma and new outrage, dotted with precious moments of rueful levity and fleeting beauty.

Sara Seager has a hard time connecting with people. Despite a meaningful relationship with her father, she often feels a bit removed from others, a bit challenged by social norms. Instead, Seager feels at home when she’s gazing upward. The night sky has held her attention since she was a child and a babysitter took her and her siblings camping several hours away from their Toronto home. When she saw the stars, Seager was certain she’d discovered a new world.

As an adult, this continuing desire to discover new worlds propelled Seager’s professional life, but she remained less gifted in social relationships. So she was surprised when she found a connection with Mike, a fellow member of the Wilderness Canoe Association in Toronto. As the pair paddled the Humber River, Seager realized they were in sync. Off the water, their interests seemed divergent—he was an editor, she was an astrophysicist—but they complemented each other. He understood the day-to-day concerns of living, while she dreamed of grand possibilities. 

When Seager and Mike moved to Massachusetts for her academic career, she found herself torn between two loves: the stars and her growing family. Seager’s work as an astrophysicist was demanding, and Mike supported her stargazing. But when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Seager recognized the personal cost of searching the universe for planets that could sustain life. After Mike died, she was left to reconcile her thirst for discovery with her grief and the concerns that occupy everyday life.

In The Smallest Lights in the Universe, Seager shares a passion for the universe so deep that even this reviewer, a physics dunce, could grasp why she would spend her life gazing toward other planets. Analytical yet lyrical, Seager’s memoir is an examination of the parallels between searching for new life in the multiverse and starting over with a new life on Earth—the sort of connection only an astrophysicist might make.

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.