As evidenced in her breakout How Should a Person Be and 2022’s Pure Color, Sheila Heti writes books that explode the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction. Alphabetical Diaries is a compellingly weird new experiment, this time in diary-keeping. Creating a nonlinear timeline, Heti organizes the sentences of 10 years of her journals alphabetically by the first letter of each sentence.

Given the constraints of the alphabetical form, the book nonetheless forms a coherent narrative with recurring themes: writing, money, sex, clothes and conversations with friends. Heti’s ambition and intelligence weave through many of these entries as she balances a desire for the peace necessary for writing with the restlessness of her desire for sex, love and travel. Just because her diary entries are nonlinear doesn’t mean they don’t tell a profoundly personal story about a glamorous young writer. Knowing this going in, the reader can relax and enjoy the ride. 

Daring and revealing, Alphabetical Diaries, which was first published in part in the New York Times, will appeal to anyone who has ever kept a diary and wondered “Why am I writing about the same things, again and again?” Each of Heti’s relationships, for example, repeats the patterns of the past. Her lovers and friends appear and reappear, as the reader gradually pieces together Heti’s intense relationships.

Lots of writers’ diaries are fascinating because they reveal the underside of the published books: the work and doubt and insecurity the writer faces from conception to publication. Alphabetical Diaries has put a glorious twist on the genre, highlighting a more circular and repetitive logic to diaristic writing. Only Heti could have written this book, the latest in an oeuvre that is marked by increasingly profound experiments in language and storytelling. Personal and profane, quietly and radically subversive, this unusual version of a writer’s diary offers readers an often-comic glimpse into experiments in prose. 

Intense and kaleidoscopic, Secrets of the Sun tells the story of author Mako Yoshikawa’s physicist father, Shoichi Yoshikawa. A brilliant researcher into nuclear fusion, a man with bipolar disorder, and a violently abusive father and husband, he does not have a story that can be approached linearly. His daughter’s choice to structure this book as a memoir in essays reflects her fragmentary knowledge of him, as well as her emotionally complex mission to understand the forces that shaped him. 

In the decades after Mako’s mother, an accomplished artist and author, “packed us up and fled his house under police protection,” Shoichi’s adult daughters negotiated partial estrangements from him. Mako learned of his death from natural causes the night before her wedding, to which Shoichi had not been invited. This memoir is particularly brilliant at capturing the grief, guilt and fear adult survivors of childhood abuse face when deciding how or whether to maintain a relationship with their abusive parent. The love beneath these more difficult emotions animated Mako’s pursuit of her father’s mysterious inner world.

The many facets of Shoichi’s personality emerge through these essays: his genius as a Princeton University physicist, his early optimism that he would be able to channel the power of the sun into usable energy here on Earth, his arrogance and resentment as funding for fusion research dried up, his love for cross-dressing, his experiences with racism as a Japanese immigrant living in 1960s Princeton, New Jersey, and his dangerous manic episodes. After his death, his former colleagues praised his brilliance and mourned the mental illness that destroyed his career. 

“My Father’s Women,” Yoshikawa’s award-winning 2012 essay published in The Missouri Review, forms the foundation of Secrets of the Sun. Unwinding her father’s relationships with women is one way that Yoshikawa seeks to understand him. “He’d been adored by wives, lovers, and girlfriends,” she writes. “Had my father ever loved anyone? I doubted it, but the truth was I didn’t know.” Perhaps the most important of these women is Mako herself, whose memoir seeks to understand, with love, a father devoted only to the stars. 

In 2018, Japanese writer Shoji Morimoto began renting himself out to his 300 Twitter followers, as long as the request involved doing nothing on his part. Within 10 months, his follower count ballooned to 100,000; now it’s over 400,000. Morimoto’s account of this effort (or lack thereof) is Rental Person Who Does Nothing. In it, he recounts some of the more than 4,000 times he’s been hired in his quest to fulfill his “wish to live without doing anything.”

After abandoning a corporate job he despised for freelance writing he soon concluded was simultaneously dull and stressful, he started the service he calls “Do Nothing Rental” as a means of assuaging his mid-30s angst. For a variety of reasons he outlines in the book, Morimoto decided not to charge his followers any money for fulfilling their requests, other than reimbursement for travel expenses, confessing that for now, at least, he’s living off his wife’s salary and savings.

Under the handle of @morimotoshoji, he fields requests—all of which require only passive involvement by his somewhat flexible definition—and then shares some of the best stories of his experiences on his feed. Rental Person Who Does Nothing details a variety of them, such as the time he accompanied a woman to the courthouse to file her divorce papers, the day he joined a man for 13 circuits of Tokyo by rail, and the conversation with a client who confessed that he had once been involved in the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, notorious for its nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. The tone throughout is consistently light and self-effacing. “I couldn’t do anything,” he writes, “so I started doing nothing.”

For all his wry humor, Morimoto makes some trenchant points about social and cultural issues like friendship, the elusiveness of human connection, artificial intelligence and the role of money. With the U.S. Surgeon General recently identifying an epidemic of loneliness in this country, one wonders whether a similar “do nothing” service might be valuable here.

As an elite college athlete, Jacqueline Alnes started experiencing mysterious, excruciating neurological episodes in which she could not speak, walk or see clearly. Finding no help from doctors and little support from her demanding running coach, Alnes was forced to quit the activity that her identity revolved around. Desperate for answers, she turned to an online community espousing the benefits of a fruit-based, raw food diet. She found herself drawn in, eschewing all other food piece by piece.

You’d be forgiven for suspecting that Alnes is about to pitch you on a life-changing wellness regimen that ends in health. But The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour is more intriguing. It’s a cautionary tale about falling prey to too-good-to-be-true solutions to complex medical issues.

Fruitarianism didn’t restore Alnes’ body to health; it led to disordered eating that gave her a sense of control when she felt powerless. This struggle is what makes The Fruit Cure a deeply compelling read: Alnes dives deep into the shame humans have felt about their imperfect bodies since ancient times. She poignantly conveys the ways in which doctors and charlatans alike have taken advantage of those desperate to meet a physical ideal or simply be released from pain and medical anxiety. “My desire for a cure,” Alnes writes, “outweighed my ability to think critically about the sources of my information.”

Alnes also explores a decidedly more modern concept: the nature of parasocial relationships, like the one she developed with the online fruitarian figureheads who called themselves Freelee and Durianrider. She obsessively watched their videos on social media, “a tilt-a-whirl of fruit-forward, anti-fat content.” Their cult of personality made it easier to believe outlandish claims, like that cooked food pollutes the body. The spell was eventually broken for Alnes when she stopped binging on social media and started reconnecting with family and friends. “The more I lived in the world, away from my screen,” she writes, “the voices saying eggs were chicken ‘menses’ and dairy was an animal ‘secretion’ grew quieter.”

Alnes, now an English professor, writes with honesty and a clear curiosity about how her own experience reflects larger societal trends. The Fruit Cure is a spellbinding reminder of how susceptible we are to quick fixes, and, ultimately, how our communities can save us.

In The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, Manjula Martin offers her mesmerizing, beautifully written account of living through and trying to come to terms with the harrowing impacts of the climate crisis.

Her memoir recounts the 2020 wildfires that surrounded her Northern California hillside home under the redwoods, causing her and her partner, Max, to evacuate. Martin’s writing is so immersive that readers will feel the stress of living through “two months of near nonstop emergency mindset,” as she scrolls fire maps, listens for warning sirens and sleeps with her phone, keys and go bag by her side.

In 2017, Martin and Max moved from San Francisco to a Sonoma County neighborhood of former vacation cabins that was “by all accounts, a fire trap.” But the land nurtured her in illness when a routine removal of a birth control device caused an abscess to form, resulting in astonishing, ongoing pain that eventually necessitated a hysterectomy. The land became a refuge that “helped me to heal to whatever extent I could be considered healed”—and she desperately fears losing this place.

Martin is uniquely positioned to write this book. She was born in Santa Cruz in the mid-1970s in a trailer next to a half-built geodesic dome nestled under the redwoods. Her parents were part of a community called the Land, devoted to yoga and the teachings of an Indian monk. She probes the many thorny issues of California’s land history and conservation efforts, especially those tied to colonialism, capitalism and white male supremacy. Lacing the memoir with a well-researched history of fires in the region, she shows again and again how colonizers and settlers lit the match and stoked the flames.

In the spirit of Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams, Martin’s knowledge of nature and the land illuminate every page. With The Last Fire Season, she joins the ranks of esteemed, provocative nature writers who use their own experiences to examine our past and our future. She concludes, “To inhabit the new shape of these cycles of damage and renewal would require new ways of being. . . . [A] constant state of reckoning with the beauty and pain of what we had done to our home.”

In his intimate, inspiring memoir, Soundtrack of Silence: Love, Loss, and a Playlist for Life, Matt Hay celebrates the power of music, technology, the brain and how the human spirit can be made invincible by love.

When Hay was in elementary school, he copied his classmates’ annual audio tests to hide the fact that he couldn’t hear the tone. He continued to cover up symptoms of hearing loss until he was a college sophomore, when a free checkup at the school’s medical center led to an MRI, which led to a diagnosis of a rare disorder. Hay had neurofibromatosis type 2, which meant that tumors were growing on the hearing nerves of his brain and eventually, he would be deaf. Hearing aids worked for a while, but surgeries were necessary to remove the tumors, one of which was growing at the base of his brain. Hay practiced lip reading and learned sign language with his future wife, Nora, preparing for the day his world would go silent, and still hoping it would never come.

Hay wanted to preserve the sounds that mattered most, the music that conjured up memories of his youth, coming of age and falling in love. He listened to his favorites: The Beatles’ “Blackbird,” Beck’s “Beautiful Way,” Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” over and over again, embedding them in his brain, training it to preserve and be stimulated by vibrational information that corresponded with memorable times. Together, Matt and Nora created a playlist that would become the soundtrack of his life.

And then it happened: At work one day, Hay’s hearing left him. He was 25. Research led him to try a new device, an auditory brainstem implant (ABI) then in use by only 200 people.

Hays tells his story in an endearingly plain, straightforward style. His fearless approach to an insidious disease is inspirational; his attention to the science of hearing and technical remedies is educational; and his ability to showcase his personal plight in order to raise awareness and thus further benefit research is true generosity. Soundtrack of Silence is a testament to the human spirit and the forces of love and science, all wrapped up in the universal power of music.