Funny things start happening when Russian American author Alex Halberstadt begins digging into his family’s murky unhappiness in Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. Beginning with childhood memories of his parents’ troubled marriage and divorce, resentment toward his absent father and embarrassment over grandparents who made no effort to conceal their foreignness, Halberstadt twitches aside the dismissive curtain we tend to drape over the older members of our families.

What he finds is startling but ought to be familiar in its own way to each of us. “I was coming to see that all four of my grandparents had lived in a country and a time when the buffer between history and biography became nearly imperceptible,” writes Halberstadt. Distressingly, there is a grandfather who served as a bodyguard to Stalin, and who becomes known to Halberstadt as a fragile man who still wrestles with the truth of the atrocities he at least witnessed, if not perpetrated. His son, Halberstadt’s remote father, was a college student in Soviet Russia, liberal-minded, prone to seeking out contraband literature and music and ardently opposed to his own father and the KGB.

Halberstadt’s maternal grandparents have their own journey, different in nearly every way. Comically absent-minded and timid in old age, they are revived in Halberstadt’s research as young Eastern European Jews, each of whom barely escaped the Nazis with the clothes on their backs in their own separate, desperate flights, losing almost everyone they loved in the process.

As Halberstadt weaves his familial background out of several trips across Russia and Eastern Europe in a quest for information, a curious effect occurs. Time becomes less linear and seems to lie around us, piled in no particular order, like snow. The past is still present with us; nothing is truly left behind. What seems obvious is that the wounds that are inflicted upon us are alive and will continue to fester, infected, if not confronted. So too, however, does the good that survives: the love that struggles through dark and horrifying circumstances, while imperfect, grows and strengthens. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Alex Halberstadt and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

Any book about addiction is actually a book about feelings and the lengths that people who are suffering will go to not to feel them. Erin Khar’s memoir, Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me, is a compassionate account of her illness and will surely be the gold standard for women writing about heroin addiction.

Khar grew up with an economically privileged life of Kardashian-style excess in the Los Angeles ’burbs: horses, new cars and houses, shopping sprees. Emotionally, however, she was impoverished. She was repeatedly traumatized by sexual violence as a child and teen and verbally abused by her mom’s boyfriend: neither parent defended her or was present in any meaningful way. At 8 years old, the author experimented with self-obliteration, taking her grandma’s expired painkillers. By 13, she had tried heroin. When she eventually became addicted in her teen years during the ’90s (incidentally, at the height of “heroin chic” in fashion), her life shaped itself around scoring her next fix. “I wanted more than asleep,” she writes, describing her reason for shooting up. “I wanted to be comatose. I wanted my brain to stop, to completely stop.”

In lesser hands, Strung Out could read like a “poor little rich girl” tale. To be sure, there are moments in the book that are frustrating due to how out of line Khar's experience is with most Americans’ reality (she attends rehab with celebrities, and moves to Paris on a whim). But Khar possesses the necessary self-reflection to identify the points in her life—breakups, deaths, an abortion—where her shame and loneliness deepened and her addiction metastasized. She is also cognizant of and candid about how her parents’ wealth and passing as white (she is half Persian) contributed to her successful recovery.   

While heroin is considered a line that shouldn’t be crossed by many recreational drug users, Khar’s story of choosing to numb-out pain, and the coffin-like trap of shame, is relatable to everyone. Anyone who reads Strung Out will come away with a better understanding of opioid addiction, if not necessarily more empathy for it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Erin Khar and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

In 2011, Bess Kalb received a rambling voicemail from her beloved grandmother, Bobby Bell, reminiscing about how she would fly between Florida and New York every week to babysit Kalb as a baby while Kalb’s mother worked. “I was an old lady! But I loved you. And I’d sit there in their terrible apartment by the hospital and I’d watch you. We’d watch TV, we talked, it was fine. Every week for the first year of your life. Can you imagine? You started talking at nine months. You said ‘hi.’”

From that first word on, the dialogue between these two has never stopped, even though Bobby Bell died at age 90 in 2017. At her funeral, Kalb read a transcript of that voicemail as part of her eulogy, and afterward she decided to write a book about her grandmother’s life. However, Kalb, a comedy writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” put a unique spin on the project, using her grandmother’s voice to write the book in first-person. And kudos to Kalb, who pulls off this daring approach brilliantly, allowing readers to hear her grandmother’s inimitable voice in Nobody Will Tell You This but Me: A True (As Told to Me) Story.

In the prologue, Bobby offers a running commentary on her own funeral, noting, “The worst part was the dirt.” Not surprisingly, given Kalb's chosen career, there are laughs galore throughout the book, as when Bobby gives fashion advice, career advice, boyfriend advice or says, “God knows I never wanted you to be a writer. But I knew you would. I told you, Bessie—you should be a teacher. Make a salary. Have the summers off to travel.”

Yet this account runs much deeper than a typical comedy routine. Kalb frequently shares the immense challenge of imagining her grandmother’s voice, writing, “It’s turned me into a riddle, a series of boxes to unlock, pages to riffle through in your mental filing cabinet. Bess, I’m not a riddle—I’m a corpse.”

Calling her book “a matrilineal love story,” Kalb describes the lives of several generations of women, starting with Bobby’s own mother, who immigrated to America alone at age 12 from Russia in the face of religious persecution. These many enthralling tales (along with family photographs) unfold in a carefully structured yet nonlinear fashion (think “This Is Us”). The result is lively and fascinating, funny yet poignant.

Kalb processes her own grief as she writes, sharing how she reacted in the days following her grandmother’s death. With heartbreaking honesty, she notes in her grandmother’s voice, “Ha. You can write all you want, but you’re still at a desk in a world where I don’t exist.”

In a bold stroke of literary bravura, Kalb has turned the formula for writing memoirs inside out, bringing her grandmother’s distinctive voice back to life and sharing it with a legion of lucky readers.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Bess Kalb, author of Nobody Will Tell You This but Me.

In her new memoir, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong, the award-winning writer and poetry editor of the New Republic, offers a fierce excavation of her experience as an Asian American woman living and working as a poet and artist. Historical traumas and cultural criticism combine and are woven through this erudite essay collection of family, art history, female relationships and racial awareness.

The child of Korean immigrants, Hong grew up in Los Angeles in a melancholic haze of shame, discord and repressed feelings. Through these essays, we learn that these repressed feelings are “minor feelings,” or the particular sensation of rejecting the forced optimism of white America because it doesn’t reflect your own reality. It’s hard to share in America’s optimism when your background and present life are filled with racism, vulnerability and trauma.

In her essay “United,” she says, “When I hear the phrase ‘Asians are next in line to be white,’ I replace the word ‘white’ with the word ‘disappear.’ Asians are next in line to disappear.” To her, the flattened perceptions of Asian identity do not match up with the real-life experience of living it. The racial animus she experiences from others, through a lifetime of overt racism and microaggressions, produces a precarious tug-of-war between the dangerous mythology of the law-abiding “model minority” and the myth of the untrustworthy “suspicious” Asian. This tension leads her to a state of self-hatred, but also to liberation as she faces these contradictions by writing through them.

In “Stand Up,” Hong watches and dissects the practiced art of Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy routines and recognizes the power of discomfort. While he makes fun of white people in the audience squirming in their chairs, he also obliquely makes fun of himself. While studying Pryor, Hong has a revelation in this simple question: Who am I writing for? As a writer writing for the sensibilities of the mainstream—what Hong calls the “tired ethnic narratives”—the desire to please white audiences is a hard habit to break. But meeting and living with uncompromising artists in college leads Hong to find her own uncompromising spirit through art and then poetry, which feeds her passion to raise her voice and continue.

The unyielding fervor of this eminently quotable book is sure to raise the visibility of the very textured and diverse Asian identity at a time when our fullness of reality is called for.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Cathy Park Hong and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

Parties. Dates. Friends. Jobs. Life.

Each of those terms is crossed out on the cover of Dolly Alderton’s memoir in favor of the simpler title, Everything I Know About Love. Love serves as an appropriate catch-all term for the experiences Alderton explores. But there are indeed plenty of parties, dates, friends, jobs and life detailed within the pages of this debut book.

Alderton is now a familiar name to many, thanks to a column in the Sunday Times, the pop culture and current affairs podcast “The High Low,” which she co-hosts, and her bylines in a variety of publications. But in the years her memoir describes, Alderton was just another fun-loving Londoner trying to make her way in the world.

Everything I Know About Love recounts Alderton’s mishaps—including a drunken evening when she thought she was in Oxford, not London—through essays, satirical emails and recipes. Alderton isn’t afraid to share unflattering moments or to laugh at herself, and readers may find solace in realizing they aren’t alone at the party.

But the heart of the story is Alderton’s bonds with her friends. These women support her when she needs help paying for cab fare, and they encourage her to chase a freelance writing career. They’re her chosen family, and they’re the people she rallies alongside during their own heartaches and tragedies.

Everything I Know About Love is a vivid retelling of a woman’s growth from neophyte to independent adult, and the depth of the essays increases as Alderton’s own life experience increases. This memoir, already a bestseller in England and translated into 20 languages, is sure to remind others that it’s OK—even normal—to stumble on your way through life.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Dolly Alderton and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

When his mother was dying, critic Philip Kennicott drew comfort from repeatedly listening to Bach’s “Chaconne,” a violin solo. The “condensed and obsessive” feeling of the Chaconne complemented his feelings of fear and claustrophobia. After his mother passed, Kennicott put the recording away. But the experience stirred him to return to another canonical work by Bach. Learning to play the “Goldberg Variations,” a set of 27 short pieces that take roughly 40 minutes to play by piano or harpsichord, became a goal of Kennicott’s life, a Sisyphean task.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Philip Kennicott and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

Spanning nearly a decade, Kennicott’s engrossing memoir, Counterpoint, explores his impressions of his mother, his musical development and eventual retreat from the piano, his determination to test himself against the music at this juncture of his life and his encyclopedic knowledge of Bach. There are also soaring descriptions of Bach’s music and the “extraordinary pleasure” that comes from playing it well. Kennicott writes, “On good days . . . the fast passages will feel elegant and infallible, the motion of the fingers both automatic and deliberate, the skips and jumps sure-footed.” One gathers an impression of both Kennicott and, more generally, the devotion that challenging music requires.

Counterpoint offers deep and pleasurable ruminations on how our obsessions—musical and artistic—can contribute to an inner life that is both satisfying and difficult to share. Kennicott wonders at the inner life of his mother and questions why her world, once infused with interests and ambition, seemed to contract as she aged. His ambivalence about his mother, his struggle to progress in the “Goldberg Variations” and his rueful reflections on his musical education are tender vulnerabilities generously shared. But it is Kennicott’s intimate insights into the towering music of Bach, and to the way music speaks to all our lives as we approach our inevitable deaths, that make this book an unforgettable triumph.

Children of the Land, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s powerful, poetically infused memoir, adds a soul-searing voice to the canon of contemporary immigration narratives.

It’s an old tale for Castillo, the journeys over the border repeating down through his family’s generations. Undocumented himself as he crosses over the desert into California as a child, temporarily blind from the stress, he is like his parents, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. Heading north, then as now, is to save loved ones from poverty and crime, to secure a chance to begin again, even though it often means leaving others behind and never being accepted where they land.

When Castillo is still a child, his father is deported and banned from the U.S. for 10 years. His mother resists following her abusive husband and tries to support her children with the low-paying work that many people who lack documentation must hold in order to stay invisible. When her children are grown, she tries to go home to Mexico, but it’s yet another journey fraught with complications. Castillo continues his own daunting border crossings as a DACA graduate student and, finally, as an adult clutching his hard-won green card. His interview with an immigration official is nerve-wracking for the reader; later, when it’s his father’s turn, we hold our breath all over again.

Castillo grows up riddled with the shame of his family’s invisibility. He cannot even talk about his family’s past, for fear of revealing his fragile hold in the U.S. He struggles to belong in a country with a long history of ambivalence about immigrants (as any visitor to Ellis Island can attest), while his family’s Mexican home lies literally in ruins. A 1917 practice of delousing naked migrants with chemical showers has given way to physical examinations, blood work and vaccinations—which cost the person immigrating hundreds of dollars. Being detained means sleeping on cement with shoes for a pillow. Asylum seekers wear ankle monitors for months so that their whereabouts can be tracked. Applying for permanent residence can take years and thousands of dollars more. Still, they come, seeking a better life.

Children of the Land shines a light on the true story of an immigrant’s plight and serves as witness to the power of hope.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

Writer Fenton Johnson is a self-proclaimed solitary—unpartnered, living alone, at home with his inner life. In At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, Johnson elegantly blends memoir, philosophical musings and literary inquiry as he explores how other writers and artists have faced the challenge of “solving” loneliness by converting it into solitude. Looking at what it takes to live outside “coupledom” in a culture that values marriage and family above much else, he ponders the usefulness of the solitary and seeks answers in the lives and work of some who chose to live and create their art outside the parameters of what society deems “normal.”

Johnson grew up Catholic in rural Kentucky, down the road from the monastery where the Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton sequestered himself. But this book moves beyond religious traditions as Johnson seeks the expression of the spiritual through art. He turns to some of the most notable solitaries of the American canon—Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau—to mine their work for guidance in the ways of solitude, discovering that each in their own way “lost the self to find the self.” 

Some solitaries, like Whitman, and later Henry James and Zora Neale Hurston, lived public-facing lives, while others, like Dickinson, were virtual hermits. Eudora Welty returned from the crush of New York to her quiet childhood home in Mississippi, creating a life of the imagination that was enviably rich. The great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but increasingly took shelter from the public arena. Johnson also looks at the lives and work of musical genius Nina Simone, beloved street photographer Bill Cunningham and painter Paul Cézanne to parse how they achieved their humanist visions while embracing solitude. 

Johnson concludes that these outlier writers and artists (and he proudly counts himself in their company) “understood commitment as well as or better than any marriage vow. . . . Their lifelong selfless practice rooted itself in their fecund, uneasy difference: their queerness and their solitude. These writers and artists took unbreakable vows to their art.” Through this art, Johnson finds, they show us that the solitude that many fear is an illusion.

Somewhat counterintuitively in a book about solitude, Johnson is a congenial and companionable guide, ushering us through the thicket of loneliness and into the clearing of solitude. He writes with grace, insight and humility. At the Center of All Beauty has great appeal even for those who may not fashion themselves as solitaries but who nonetheless crave more contemplation and self-awareness in their lives.

In the author’s note of this fascinating memoir, Ginger Gaffney lets readers know exactly what’s to come. The dialogue is drawn from memory, and yes, she’s made some character composites of the more than 50 residents at the alternative prison ranch where she volunteered during the year and a half the book covers. But some of the most compelling characters here don’t speak in words: They are horses. And in Gaffney’s book, they come alive.

Gaffney has been a horse trainer for more than 20 years. In 2013, she was called to help with a small herd of aggressive horses at an alternative prison ranch near where she lives in New Mexico. In Half Broke, Gaffney alternates reports of her visits to the ranch with flashbacks about her own circuitous path to fulfillment and success.

The ranch’s residents are former addicts and felons; few have any knowledge of livestock. Gaffney focuses on healing—for both humans and horses—and recounts in vivid prose many of their successes. A wary mare named Luna with a dangerous injury finally lets the team close enough to treat her. The inmates slowly gain confidence, and we cheer when troubled Eliza blossoms, or when Randy is motivated to lose enough weight to be able to ride.

Things don’t always go smoothly, and Gaffney doesn’t shy away from setbacks when trouble strikes. But the horses never disappoint—whether it’s loyal Moo, spirited Rootbeer or damaged Luna, willing to trust and give humans another chance. Let’s hope there are more horse stories to come from Gaffney’s talented pen.

An engaging, literary take on language and its role in the diaspora of a scattered family, The Magical Language of Others speaks from—and to—the heart. 

When E.J. Koh is 14, her father lands a lucrative three-year contract with a Korean company in Seoul. Her mother goes with him to Korea, leaving Koh and her older brother essentially on their own in California. Their mother writes letters in Korean, her native language, dotted with attempts at English. Koh has yet to learn Korean and cannot write back. She can only blur and stain the indecipherable text with her tears.

The distance between mother and daughter grows. Visits to and from her parents are sparse and awkward. Her father, who seems to know only how to work hard, keeps renewing his company contract until, seven years later, he accepts that his American daughter can have no future in Korea, and he and Koh’s mother return. 

By then, Koh has learned her father’s native language, Japanese, while studying at a school in Japan, a country that once despised the Korean people. She learns about her grandmother’s traumatic years in Japan during World War II, adding another layer to her understanding of language and her complex family history.

Throughout this slim memoir, fraught with differences in culture, custom and, most of all, language, runs a thread of familial love and pain, a back-and-forth that, given Koh’s eloquence, needs no translation. It will take her years to translate her mother’s letters and decide if she was abandoned or if, as she tells a fellow resident at a New Hampshire artist colony, “my parents set me free. They gave me my freedom.”