There are few things in life more exhilarating than catching the just-right wave—watching the wall of water form and waiting for the perfect moment to push up on the board, shoot the curl and be transported. Rockaway, Diane Cardwell’s bracing memoir of the ways that surfing launched her into a new life, is as invigorating as waxing up your board and getting in the water.

In 2010, following her divorce, Cardwell finds herself shuffling listlessly through her life and work as a New York Times reporter. Casting about for an assignment, she heads out to Montauk, Long Island, and spies a group of surfers out in the shimmering surf. Although she’s never been athletic, she’s transfixed by this group of men and women, and soon she’s trekking out to Rockaway Beach from her apartment in Brooklyn to take lessons and join her newfound troop. As she rides the train home after one of her first lessons, she embraces the “righteous soreness from going all-out chasing after something that I’d decided, entirely on my own, I wanted to do. I was proud of myself for not chickening out, for not, as usual, letting the fear of failure stop me.”

Cardwell dives into surfing, alternating between fear of failure and dogged determination. As she gains more confidence and develops her own style, she eventually moves to Rockaway Beach, buys a little cottage and a board and thrives in her new neighborhood, mostly made up of surfers. When Hurricane Sandy hits in 2012, she rides it out in Rockaway with some of her friends, and they emerge as an even more tightknit community.

Cardwell’s moving story washes over the reader with its emotionally rich portrayal of the ragged ways we can embrace our vulnerabilities in order to overcome them.

Jane Austen mania has reached a fever pitch. Recently we’ve seen a television adaptation of her unfinished Sanditon and another film version of Emma. Writers both renowned and aspiring seem to write sequels or interpretations of Pride and Prejudice faster than fans can read them. It sometimes feels as if Austen, one of the greatest writers in the English canon, is valued more as source material for Regency romances than for her singular genius. Thankfully, this reductive tendency is nowhere in evidence in Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, by literary critic Rachel Cohen, whose first book, A Chance Meeting, was a delightful study of the intertwined lives of writers and artists. Cohen’s incisive new book explores her immersion into Austen’s work during a fraught period in her personal life. Ultimately a narrative about grief, loss and resurfacing, it also provides a deep dive into some of Austen’s most penetrating writing.

This candid memoir from an accomplished literary critic seeks answers to life’s greatest challenges through the novels of Jane Austen.

“Criticism and memoir have always been near neighbors,” Cohen observes. “The gift of a pronounced personal point of view leads to deeper readings, and to new ones.” Interestingly, Cohen was not always a rabid Austen aficionado. She read Austen in high school, then moved on. Later discovering that many writers she admired had written about Austen (most notably Virginia Woolf), Cohen returned to the English author’s work. But the intersection of two major events in Cohen’s life—the death of her beloved father and the birth of her first child—prompted a period when she began to read Austen exclusively. In the pages of five of Austen’s six novels (all but Northanger Abbey, generally regarded as inferior), Cohen found entry into the uncertainties of her life as she, in her own words, “[unfolded] Jane Austen’s novels like a map.”

Cohen learned much from Austen, as will the reader of this candid memoir. Close reading and rereading grant this seasoned critic new insights into her own life, drawn from the awakenings of Austen’s resilient heroines—Elizabeth, Emma, Elinor, Marianne, Fanny, Anne—as well as peripheral characters, both female and male. From the known facts of Austen’s life story, Cohen draws conclusions about the writer’s intentions, challenges and determination, gleaning lessons for her own very different experiences two centuries later.

As a memoir, Austen Years is uncompromising and engaging, and as literary criticism, it is assured and perceptive. If these two aspects never fully coalesce, for arguably Cohen has set herself an impossible task, the book is nonetheless an absorbing pleasure that will stimulate and augment the reading of Austen for fans old and new.

Family trauma—even inherited trauma—can take a tremendous toll on children. But as Bakari Sellers makes plain in My Vanishing Country, family trauma can also be a source of strength.

Sellers’ story is remarkable. When he was 22, he unseated a 26-year incumbent to become the youngest legislator in South Carolina. In that role, he championed policies addressing rural poverty, including access to health care and improved educational opportunities. He became a CNN political analyst in the wake of the mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, and today he is a successful attorney. These accomplishments required persistence and resilience.

In My Vanishing Country, Sellers beautifully evokes the South Carolina low country, the haunted landscape of his childhood, to explain how its backbreaking poverty and history of relentless racism molded him. But the greatest influence on his life was an event that occurred years before he was born, when his father, Cleveland Sellers, was imprisoned on trumped-up charges for his role in the Orangeburg Massacre.

The fact that many people have not heard of the Orangeburg Massacre is in itself an excellent reason to read My Vanishing Country. Sellers meticulously recounts how and why eight South Carolina highway patrol officers fired upon a crowd of black student protesters at South Carolina State University, killing three students and wounding 27 others. The massacre affected every member of the Sellers family, including the yet-unborn Bakari. Though they each still bear the painful effects of that event, their trauma has also become a source of power—the power to endure tragedy and achieve their goals.

My Vanishing Country is more than a memoir. It’s a loving celebration of a father’s gift of fortitude and determination to his son.

“We are last names only. We are numbers.” From the first page of this account of a mother from Guatemala being separated from her sons at the southern U.S. border, readers are drawn into the wrenching impact of American immigration policy on parents and children. 

The Book of Rosy chronicles the experiences of Rosayra Pablo Cruz, a shop owner, writer and mother of four. After the murder of her husband and a shooting attempt on her life, Cruz fled Guatemala in 2014, leaving her three oldest children behind with her mother. After gangs threatened to kidnap her eldest son, Yordy, she returned. Cruz made another attempt to flee in April 2018 with 15-year-old Yordy and Fernando, age 5.

Cruz describes making the 2,300-mile journey over eight days and nights, packed in the back of a truck with other refugees. In an ICE detention center in Arizona, officials separated her from Yordy and placed her with Fernando in a frigid cell. Within days, she was informed her sons would be sent to a different facility, a transfer that took place at 2 a.m. Yordy and Fernando ended up far away, placed with a Spanish-speaking foster mother in the Bronx. Eventually, the efforts of Immigrant Families Together, a group of activist mothers who raise money to post bond for detainees like Cruz, reunited her with her sons.

Interspersed with Cruz’s story is Julie Schwietert Collazo’s account of her 2018 decision, in response to the Trump administration’s family separation policy, to establish a grassroots group that would become Immigrant Families Together. The group has worked to reunite more than 80 families. 

Simultaneously published in Spanish and English, The Book of Rosy offers an unflinching look at conditions in U.S. detention centers and a sobering reminder of the power of policy to change the course of lives. 

Self-expression always happens in a cultural context. For writer and journalist Meredith Talusan, the journey to self-knowledge was long and very culturally influenced. 

Talusan was raised as a boy in an unstable home in the Philippines. As a person with albinism, her pale skin, blond hair and poor eyesight set her apart from her relatives, some of whom spoke Tagalog, some of whom spoke English. As she grew, she gained power through her intellect and self-awareness, earning top marks in school. Eventually she became aware that she harbored deep feelings for boys. Had Talusan stayed in the Philippines, she likely would have embraced the role of “bakla,” a playful, effeminate gay man.

Instead, Talusan’s nuclear family immigrated to California shortly before their home life imploded. In the face of her mother’s addictions and her father’s absence, Talusan buckled down, continued to excel academically and was admitted to Harvard. Here the memoir snaps into a different register, becoming less dreamy and more journalistic as Talusan recalls her intellectual and sexual awakening. Rail-thin and often assumed to be a white boy, Talusan finds a place for herself in Harvard’s gay community by identifying as a twink, a slang term for young gay men who are usually slim and clean-shaven. Talusan cultivates this persona by purchasing trendy outfits and hitting the gym. Eventually she begins dating a man she adores, but she feels incomplete.

Through another friendship with romantic undertones, Talusan realizes what’s missing—she wants the freedom to express her feminine gender identity—and her life changes again. She navigates what gender transition and passing mean for her, ultimately finding yet another cultural identity and means of self-expression.

At each step of her journey, Talusan interrogates the complex intersection of who she feels herself to be and how others perceive her. Through this fearless self-awareness, Talusan demonstrates her intellect, creativity, sexuality and, most of all, a true dedication to expressing her inner self. For anyone who has wondered how their identity is impacted by the ways others see them, Fairest is an extraordinary story of one woman’s self-reckoning.

Each memoirist chooses flashpoints to segment her life: jobs, elections, romantic relationships, rehab stints. In the memoir Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, Jennifer Finney Boylan selects beloved canines as her narrative device and shares the life lessons they imparted in life and death. Yet the heart of the book is about learning self-love and learning to love others well in turn. For someone like Boylan who struggled with her gender identity for most of her life, those victories were hard-won.

Boylan is a contributing New York Times opinion writer, and she has detailed her life’s complex journey in other memoirs. (She is best known for her 2003 bestseller She’s Not There). In Good Boy, she writes about looking to her father for clues on masculinity in a ’70s suburban boyhood. As an adult, she imitated manhood as best she could but wanted desperately to unveil herself and be truly seen. She writes, “When women would say Je t’aime or its equivalent, my first reaction was to think, ‘Yeah, well. That’s only because you don’t know me well enough.’” It was not until her 40s (married to a woman, with two kids) that Boylan came out publicly as trans and learned that she could be loved for exactly who she is. The path was not easy, yet she injects warmth, humor and spirituality into its retelling.

Despite the book’s title, the family’s dogs have not all been “good.” There’s been peeing, jumping, humping and general canine destruction. But people are not “good” all the time either, and Good Boy will be relatable to those who believe dogs can teach us about unconditional love—or at least patient understanding. Though pet stories can veer into the saccharine, rest assured that this memoir does not. Frankly, some dogs don’t seem to have liked Boylan that much (which, as a teen, provided a valuable life lesson about facing unrequited romantic love).

Though it’s a great book for dog lovers, Good Boy isn’t a feel-good story about the unbreakable bond between human and beast. It’s a chronicle about the enduring messiness of humans, and how we’re worthy of love anyway.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jennifer Finney Boylan talks about life, death, self-acceptance and, of course, dogs.

Svenja O’Donnell was never particularly close to her grandmother, Inge, whom she describes as an “aloof, somewhat selfish woman.” Unexpectedly, though, when O’Donnell visited the East Prussian town where her grandmother grew up, Inge suddenly announced during a phone call, “I have so much to tell you.” Thus began what the author calls a “decade of discoveries” into the secrets that lay at her “family’s heart, unspoken, undisturbed, unsuspected for years.” At one point, her normally reticent grandmother even began hearing the voices of her dead friends and family in the form of “waking dreams.” The past had come back to haunt her.

As a seasoned print and television journalist and a former political correspondent, O’Donnell was well-equipped to track down her family’s buried truths. In Inge’s War: A German Woman’s Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler, she lets events unfold chronologically while seamlessly interspersing conversations with her mother and grandmother, both natives of Germany, with her own research and travel to important family landmarks in Europe.

In the midst of World War II, Inge became a young, unmarried mother while her beloved boyfriend was off fighting the war; his father forbade them to marry. Later, as the Russian Army approached, Inge, her toddler (the author’s mother) and her elderly parents escaped just in time to Denmark, where, as Germans, they weren’t well received. The tale of their flight is harrowing, and O’Donnell provides thoughtful commentary every step of the way, observing, “Silence has always dominated women’s experience of war.” She notes that German children like her mother had “to bear the weight of an identity that made them pariahs at birth” and that she herself remembers feeling uneasy during a school trip to a war museum in Normandy, as she was the only half-German student in her class.

Even so, O’Donnell makes no excuses for anyone, noting that many Germans conveniently hid behind the phrase “I did not know” when it came to the realities of the Holocaust. As she notes, the goal of her investigation was “to learn the truth of my family’s story, to recognize in its shifts, its hopes and its flaws, the hybridity that shaped my own identity.”

Mission accomplished—with Inge’s War, O’Donnell has created a story that reads like a novel filled with fascinating history and excellent detective work.

With the success of her novel, Sweetbitter, which spawned a television series, it might seem like Stephanie Danler has led a charmed life. Anyone who reads her fierce, unsparing memoir, Stray, however, will be quickly disabused of that notion.

From a rental house in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon where some members of Fleetwood Mac may have once lived, Danler ranges over the whole of her life as the daughter of two parents who failed in the most essential task: providing their offspring with a safe and loving home. Danler’s mother’s alcoholism is complicated by her near death from a brain aneurysm in her 40s, forcing Danler to confront her obligation to care for someone who repudiates her attempts at care. Her father, who abandoned Danler when she was 3 years old and later brought her into his Colorado home when she was 16, spirals toward ruin in the grip of an addiction to crystal meth, his life a cloud of lies and neglect. Out of this “veritable sea of alcoholism and narcissism,” Danler is flung ashore, ill-prepared for the demands of adulthood.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Stephanie Danler talks to BookPage about returning to California, making peace with a painful past and taking the leap from fiction to memoir.

As if the struggles of her parents’ illnesses and addictions aren’t painful enough, in the wake of her own short-lived first marriage, Danler also finds herself in a destructive affair with a married man she nicknames the “Monster.” As she oscillates between the seemingly irresistible pull of her desire and her understanding of the toxicity of that relationship, she simultaneously draws closer to another man she calls the “Love Interest,” whose self–imposed mission is to introduce her to some of the bleaker features of Los Angeles’ landscape, like a lake that’s turned into a dust bowl, “yet another god forsaken place.”

In Danler’s evocation of California’s complicated history and the darkness that lurks under its sunny exterior, Stray brings to mind the work of Joan Didion, and her frank portrayal of the nightmare of addiction is akin to Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. But in its painful candor and hard-earned wisdom, Stray is every bit its own vivid creation.

With Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, Phuc Tran has written the great punk rock immigrant story. Or should that be the definitive refugee punk rock story? Or a story about how punk rock and great books helped a Vietnamese kid in small-town America fit in by standing out? Whatever order we put the words in, Tran’s book is my pick for the best, the funniest and the most heartfelt memoir of the year.

Currently a high school Latin teacher and a tattoo artist, Tran honed his unique blend of intellectual misfittery in blue-collar Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where his family settled after evacuating Saigon in 1975. Tran and his brother, initially the only Vietnamese kids in school, learned to punch first when dealing with racist bullies on the playground and in the streets. Star Wars, skateboards and punk rock later offered Tran a haven where friendships were formed through shared mixtapes and band T-shirts.

Code-switching between hardcore shows and life at home with his Vietnamese-speaking parents was not easy. With grace and clarity, Tran writes pivotal scenes involving the sometimes violent disconnect between his traumatized refugee parents and their Americanized children—a testament to the sensitivity and balance he brings to his exploration of generational and cultural conflict.

While it might seem ironic, literature and punk subculture equally teach Tran about universal themes like existentialism, displacement, alienation and community. Hilariously, quite a few of Tran’s high school literary choices are occasioned by his love of Morrissey and the Smiths. As someone who also had a poster of Victorian bad boy Oscar Wilde on her high school bedroom wall (next to the Smiths poster), this rings so true as to be uncanny.

Sigh, Gone filters the archetypal high school misfit story through the lens of immigration and assimilation, building it into a larger narrative about the ways music and books can bring us together, even when the larger world threatens to tear us apart.