As a child, Cassie Chambers spent many nights with her grandparents and aunt deep in the mountains of Owsley County, Kentucky, because her young parents were university students who couldn’t afford day care. “I was at peace in this holler in the hills,” Chambers writes, describing the time she spent helping her family of tobacco sharecroppers while her parents earned degrees at Berea College.

Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains is a quietly moving, powerful memoir in which Chambers shares her family’s story while praising the fortitude, intelligence and strength of Appalachian women. Unlike Tara Westover’s parents in Educated, Chambers’ parents deeply understood education’s importance, imbuing Chambers with a fierce drive that led her to Yale College, the Yale School of Public Health, the London School of Economics and Harvard Law School. She recounts moments of homesickness and feeling like an outsider, such as when her mother expressed concern about her spending habits at Yale, and Chambers shamefully told her, “You don’t understand. Everyone has a Burberry scarf.” 

Ultimately, Chambers returned to Kentucky to practice law and help domestic violence survivors, often meeting clients in gas stations, Dairy Queens and other fast-food restaurants. She notes that this experience has been “a powerful reminder about the importance of telling women’s stories” and that “when given the right tools, support, and environment, these women are capable of changing the world.” Chambers has also ventured into politics since returning to Kentucky. She became the vice chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party, admitting that “after November 2016, I realized in a whole new way that elections mattered. It wasn’t enough to save the world one family at a time.”

Never didactic or dull, Chambers is particularly skillful at sharing her family’s narrative while weaving in facts and commentary about Appalachian sociology, education, health, economics and politics. Most of all, the author’s love and respect for her Granny (married at age 15 to a man she had known for a few months), mother (married at 18, the first in her family to graduate high school or college) and Aunt Ruth (an independent woman who married in her 40s) shine through, brightening each page like a welcoming front porch light.

In this age of political divisions, Hill Women offers a loving, luminous look at an often misunderstood and undervalued segment of our society.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Cassie Chambers, author of Hill Women.

Chances are, you know someone who has misgivings about technology. Perhaps this person quit Facebook or downgraded from a smartphone. In Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, these same misgivings are voiced by a former Silicon Valley foot soldier.

Anna Wiener, now a writer for The New Yorker, draws on her anxiety-addled experiences working at several startups during her mid-20s. Her bosses were very young, hoodie-clad men. They ran companies fattened up with venture capital, eager to “disrupt” something, anything. They were encouraged to “move fast and break things,” to “ask forgiveness, not permission.” Recklessness in the name of “optimization” was seen as noble. 

But Uncanny Valley is not a Devil Wears Prada-style takedown of any company or CEO. Instead, Wiener focuses on the startup climate as a whole—giving an insider’s view of San Francisco and the tech-​Manifest-Destiny-minded brogrammers who inhabit it.

She portrays tech as a field for people who want to be taken seriously, even though most of them have not yet proven themselves as good leaders or even good human beings. Wiener wonders how she came to earn a salary over $100,000 to essentially answer emails. Her questioning who earns that kind of money, and why, feels pertinent to the current political climate.

Wiener sipped the Kool-Aid but never quite drank it. She became skeptical about whether tech contributes positively to society, let alone fixes anything in it (which is often the stated goal). In each of her workplaces, she was one of only a few women, an experience she likens to “immersion therapy for internalized misogyny.” Surveillance of tech users was—and still is—rampant, and unchecked greed turns out to be a big elephant in the room. “What were we doing, anyway, helping people become billionaires?” she writes toward the book’s end. The reader will have long been wondering the same thing. 

Wiener’s eventual exit from startups is publishing’s gain: She is an extremely gifted writer and cultural critic. Uncanny Valley may be a defining memoir of the 2020s, and it’s one that will send a massive chill down your spine. 

Like many Europeans who lived through World War II, Françoise Frenkel led an eventful life. A Polish Jewish woman born in 1889, she studied literature in Paris. In 1921, she opened a French bookstore in Berlin. She returned to Paris in 1939, fleeing the Nazis. She made several attempts to escape to Switzerland and eventually succeeded. But if Frenkel hadn’t written a memoir, she would likely be completely unknown. Rien où poser sa tête (No Place to Lay One’s Head) was published in Switzerland in 1945, sold a few copies and quickly sank into collective forgetfulness. Then a copy was found in 2010 at a sale for a French charity, and it’s now republished as A Bookshop in Berlin.

It’s interesting the way a title can affect a reader’s perception of a book. The title No Place to Lay One’s Head draws attention to Frenkel’s personal hardships, to the terror and cruelty she encountered. There is plenty of suspense as Frenkel describes her brushes with disaster—but the title A Bookshop in Berlin instead emphasizes her improbable bookstore, illuminating a deeper truth about Frenkel’s experiences.

Like a bookstore, Frenkel’s memoir contains not one story but many. There is, of course, her own odyssey to safety—but there’s also the heroic tale of M. and Mme. Marius, Frenkel’s friends and saviors; the comedy of the glamorous refugee who hoodwinked the Germans into saving her son; the tragedy of the young man accused of murdering his wife; the melodrama of hardened prison guards; and ultimately, a story of liberation and redemption. 

Until 2016, writer Clifford Thompson felt like an American first and foremost. Following Trump’s election, Thompson was shaken to see how differently his fellow Americans seemed to understand the world. He found himself reflecting on his American identity—where it came from, how it developed over time and what it means to be “rooted” in a certain set of experiences. 

For Thompson, that set of experiences includes the all-black neighborhood outside of D.C. where he spent his childhood; an undergraduate career at a predominantly white liberal arts college in Ohio; and an adulthood in New York, where he raises two daughters alongside his white wife. 

After the election, Thompson wanted to break out of his bubble and understand how others were rooted. He flew to other parts of the U.S. to interview Trump supporters and try to understand how they see Trump, themselves and the rest of the country, especially regarding race. What he heard and saw only confirmed his sense of division, even alienation. 

In What It Is, the reader experiences, via Thompson’s plaintive and disillusioned voice, the discomfort of personal recalibration. Thompson explores the world as it is and carefully thinks through how each of us can find our place within it.

This memoir is powerful, starting with the title. For a long time, the author’s identity was known to the public only as “Emily Doe”—the young woman who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, who at the time was a member of the Stanford University swim team.

Now Chanel Miller, a 27-year-old woman from California, identifies herself as Doe. In Know My Name, she introduces us to the person who got lost amid labels like “victim” and “survivor”—the person who’s also an artist, a writer, a sister, a daughter. She is more than this terrible thing that happened to her, yet it has shaped her life irrevocably.

In January 2015, Miller and her younger sister attended a frat party on the Stanford campus. During the party, Miller drank and blacked out. Later, two men on bicycles witnessed Turner assaulting her behind a dumpster outside. He ran away; they chased him down and called police. Miller woke up in a hospital bed, covered in abrasions, with her underwear missing. She eventually learned the details of her own assault from reading about it online.

Miller drags the reader through her hell as she lived it, from nurses inserting a camera inside her vagina to take photographs, to facing Turner’s lawyers in the courtroom as they tried to convince the jury that she’s an untrustworthy drunk. The time-consuming legal process is emotionally battering, and Miller’s pain emanates off the page. Turner served only 90 days in jail; most survivors of sexual assault never see their pepretators brought to any justice. “The real question we need to be asking is not, Why didn’t she report, the question is, Why would you?” she writes.

This memoir is a heavy one—but one hopes it will educate people about the terrorism of sexual violence and bring comfort to those still suffering in silence. Additionally, some memoirs based on real-life events are churned out quickly while the headlines are still hot—but this isn’t one of those books. Miller is a gifted writer and took her time sharing this story in her own voice.

In her victim impact statement, which went viral when published by BuzzFeed in June 2016, Miller wrote, “To girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you.” And with Know My Name, she has proven exactly that.

“Look, the most humane thing might be to put him down now.” That was the hoof expert’s verdict after one look at the traumatized, mistreated donkey Christopher McDougall and his family had just taken in. The donkey, which they named Sherman, had been rescued from a hoarder’s farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. 

Since relocating from the city, McDougall and his wife, Mika, had tried their hands at keeping chickens, a stray cat and a phone-book-munching goat named Lawrence. But an ailing donkey was a whole different story. And what a story Sherman turned out to be. 

McDougall, author of Born to Run, believes that “movement is big medicine.” And if movement-as-medicine works for people, why wouldn’t it work for a donkey? So McDougall concocts the idea of training Sherman to run in a world championship burro race in Colorado. With help from family and neighbors, including a young man named Zeke who’s been struggling with depression, “Team Sherman” sets out to fulfill a quest of healing.

Running With Sherman includes some wonderful photos of the endearing Sherman and his clan. And while you may not decide to take up burro racing yourself, McDougall’s inspiring story is not to be missed.

Queer history is both old and new. We have been gay since the dawn of time, but only recently have queer people really started to speak our own stories into the historical record. The novelty of this—as well as the precarious lives many LGBTQ people still live—raises its own questions: Which stories do we tell? Relative to established narrative forms, where and how do they fit? What about the bad parts?

“I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this,” Carmen Maria Machado writes at the beginning of her stunning new memoir, In the Dream House. “I speak into the silence.” The book describes the arc of a romantic relationship turned sour, controlling and claustrophobic, the house of its title becoming a place where Machado locks herself in the bathroom while her girlfriend tries to break down the door. 

To call it a memoir, though, is to give short shrift to the exquisite strangeness and formal innovation that Machado achieves. The author of Her Body and Other Parties—a National Book Award-nominated collection of stories combining elements of fable, fantasy, noir, erotic thriller, science fiction and fairy tale—Machado imports her fascination with genre into In the Dream House. Each of the book’s short chapters nods to some trope or narrative tradition that Machado is playing with—“American Gothic” or “Lesbian Pulp Novel.” This is a clever device, but it’s also a propulsive one, and occasionally leavening. One chapter is precisely one sentence long: “‘We can fuck,’ she says, ‘but we can’t fall in love.’” Its title is “Dream House as Famous Last Words.”

If this all sounds very metatextual, know that Machado has pulled off an amazing feat: a book that comments on its own existence and the silences it endeavors to fill; a work deeply informed by a sense of identity and community; and page after page of flawless, flaying, addictive prose. In the Dream House is astonishingly good.

Growing up means learning that our parents are not always content with their lives.

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur is a story of one daughter’s moral contortions to make her mother, Malabar, happy. Brodeur learned the full contours of her mother’s discontent by becoming embroiled in her extramarital affair.

Brodeur was only 14 when Malabar—a charming cookbook author wed to a wealthy man who soon fell ill after their marriage—divulged that she had taken a family friend, also married, as her lover. Brodeur kept their affair a secret from her stepfather, both families, her friends and, later, even her own spouse. Wild Game explores this secret’s impact on all of their lives, but primarily Brodeur’s own.

Brodeur knew her mother had suffered a tragic life due to parental abuse and the later death of a child. As Brodeur became personally invested in protecting the affair, she reveals herself to be an extraordinary case of the parentified child. Anyone with similar childhood circumstances will relate to the weightiness of filial duty depicted in Wild Game.

But Brodeur is also extraordinary for how, on the other side of this story, she has ended up basically OK. She’s married again, a parent herself and a lovely writer. (She is the former editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary magazine she launched with Francis Ford Coppola.) Her talent with words lies in her ability to make the reader feel deeply empathetic for Malabar, while at the same time abhorring her behavior as a parent. Mother and daughter are, certainly, a perpetrator and a victim. But the reader is liable to be convinced, as Broedur is, that her mother was very much a victim, too.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game.

Aarti Namdev Shahani’s career trajectory gives no hint that she grew up in a cockroach-infested apartment in Flushing or that her father did time in Rikers. This NPR correspondent graduated from an elite prep school in Manhattan and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her timely debut, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares, recounts her family’s gut-wrenching struggle to immigrate despite a broken system.

Shahani’s story fulfills what most call the American dream. Her parents emigrated from India to America (via Casablanca) over 40 years ago, full of hope that this new country would offer their growing family more than their war-torn home. “To migrate to America—to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans or the Sonoran Desert—is the boldest act of one’s life. You do it to be the hero of your own story,” writes Shahani of her parents’ epic journey.

After a rough start, conditions begin to improve for the family—albeit temporarily. When Shahani’s father, a hardworking entrepreneur, accidentally becomes entangled with the Cali drug cartel, his life becomes mired in legal and immigration woes. Teenage Shahani becomes her father’s greatest advocate, tenaciously following up with inept lawyers. While her high school classmates are having fun and going to movies, Shahani does legal work for her father’s case. She even begins writing letters to her father’s judge, a correspondence that spans years.

The author graciously avoids black-and-white answers to difficult questions. How can two members from the same family have such opposite experiences in America? What does it mean to make it? Who really belongs here? A worthy addition to immigration discourse, this book is a raw and engaging glimpse into the challenges immigrant families face that are either too traumatic or mundane to land on the news.

In 2017 Dan Kois, his wife and their two children did what many families secretly dream of doing: They packed up their belongings and spent a year living abroad. Their life in Arlington, Virginia, had come to feel like an endless rat race—Kois is an editor at Slate and his wife, Alia, a First Amendment attorney—leaving them feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. They asked themselves, “Could the two of us set aside our relentless quest to make sure our children had every material and educational advantage, and instead focus for twelve months on caring for all our hearts and souls?”

Kois shares the fascinating and frequently hilarious results in his admirably honest account of that year, How to Be a Family. In addition to Kois’ humorous, self-deprecating style, the book is particularly lively because Kois and his wife picked such diverse spots to live: the blustery coastal town of Wellington, New Zealand (their favorite spot); the bustling city of Delft in the Netherlands; tropical Samara, Costa Rica; and deep in the heartland of Hays, Kansas, where a friend of the family lived. (Yes, Kansas!)

Kois and company adored their friendly, welcoming neighborhood in New Zealand. The Dutch were not so affable (Kois calls them “mysterious and frustrating”), although the family loved the country’s reliance on bike transportation. Costa Rica was at times monotonous in its endless string of beautiful days, and occasionally the togetherness became too much, prompting Kois to write, “Thank God for cards” (as in card games). In Kansas, they found a wonderful sense of community, discovering that it was “a place where people could bloom.”

In the end, the family found their lives changed but not transformed, realizing that “a place never solves anything.” Nonetheless, their journey was an unforgettable adventure, allowing them the priceless gift of having time to pay more attention to each other.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Dan Kois, author of How to Be a Family.