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.”

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.