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.

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.