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.

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.