There are two ways to write about a dam bursting. You can begin at the exact moment the cresting waters rupture the wall and surge toward freedom—or you can start long before that, with the first drops of rain that eventually overrun the embankments. In Unfollow, Megan Phelps-Roper chooses the second approach to explain why she left the notorious Westboro Baptist Church.

One of the most surprising aspects of this remarkable book is how loving the Westboro Baptist Church was—at least to its members in good standing. Phelps-Roper’s childhood was idyllic in many ways. She was surrounded by caring, intelligent and passionate adults who adored her. By the age of 8, however, she was joining them in protesting against the LGBTQ community and being rewarded for spewing vile slogans. This strange juxtaposition defined her youth: Phelps-Roper went to school, shopped at the mall, ate popcorn at the movies—and then rushed out to picket the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq or to publicly pray for more children to be shot after Newtown. By the time she was in her 20s, Phelps-Roper was in charge of the church’s social media presence, using her formidable intellect to defend the reprehensible. And yet, throughout her book is an awareness that each incident contributed to the erosion of her faith in Westboro’s theology.

It’s ironic that the very qualities her family instilled in her—intellectual rigor, intimate knowledge of the Bible, courage in the face of fierce opposition—led to her inevitable departure. When she could no longer support either the church’s theology of hatred or its belief in its own infallibility, she renounced them. 

Phelps-Roper is a masterful writer. She writes movingly about the searing pain of separation from those she continues to love, and beautifully about how freeing herself from a theology of hate has given her life greater meaning and purpose. In a time of growing intolerance, Unfollow is essential reading.

In her memoir, Motherhood So White, Nefertiti Austin provides valuable firsthand insight into what it means to be a black single mother and to reject the constraints of societal expectations.

When Austin decided to adopt her son, August, a black boy placed in the California foster care system, she was met with criticism and disbelief, especially from her own family. They couldn’t understand why she wanted to legally adopt a stranger, an outsider. For many black people, adoption is a cultural custom reserved for white people, unless you had “a connection with that child, even a tenuous one.”

As a child, Austin’s grandparents provided stability and guidance while her parents drifted in and out of her life. Her own adoptive experience had shown her that families, especially black families, didn’t need to be limited to the traditional expectations of one mother and one father, or to the demands of the white gaze.

When she decided to become a mother at 36, Austin had to first become a foster parent, as decreed by California state law. This journey, which eventually resulted in adoption, was not without trials and tribulations. Not only did she face the daily challenges of newfound motherhood, she also had to contend with America’s legacy of systemic racism and discrimination, which renders black mothers either as invisible or as tropes in a dehumanizing narrative.

Austin’s memoir is a natural response to both the erasure of black mothers and the dismissive and demeaning misrepresentation of black motherhood. She relays her experiences with equal parts candor and consideration, careful not to paint communities or motherhood with broad brushstrokes as she dismantles the notion that all “real” families must look and act alike. Motherhood So White is a testament to the power of love as a radical act and an urgent call to reclaim motherhood from institutionalized whiteness.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Nefertiti Austin, author of Motherhood So White.

“My father used chess as his guide: Black begins with a disadvantage. You have to look farther ahead, work extra hard, rely on cunning, and assume everyone else is your opponent.” 

John Stanley Ford was proud of his position as the first black systems engineer at IBM. Founder Thomas J. Watson hired Stanley himself in 1946, extending an invitation that would shape the young accounting student’s life. Stanley invested his life in the job, often passing his computer knowledge along to his son, Clyde. But Stanley was passed over for promotion again and again. Although Stanley and his wife marched on Washington in the civil rights era, Stanley had internalized some of the racism around him. He believed he was inferior, and he saw his lack of advancement at IBM as confirmation.

Clyde resisted following the path his father had paved. He was more radical and refused to adjust himself to the white business world’s expectations. Even so, Clyde too ended up at IBM—sporting a wide-lapel suit and an afro. 

The Ford men ultimately took different paths, with Stanley spending his career at IBM and Clyde leaving to pursue other dreams. But his years at the company helped Clyde understand his father. After Clyde left IBM to become a chiropractor, he learned that his father—and many others—gave up their dreams for the financial security of IBM. 

In Think Black, Clyde blends personal experience with technological and racial history to reveal how these things influenced one another. This wide-ranging memoir includes complex details about software and hardware as well as an exploration of IBM’s ties to oppressive regimes. While his examination of the past can’t change his relationship with his father, Clyde Ford’s words powerfully honor his father’s dreams and contributions to the digital age.

In How We Fight for Our Lives, award-winning poet Saeed Jones (Prelude to Bruise) weaves a series of stinging, memorable vignettes into a powerful coming-of-age memoir. This intimate book, which details his experiences growing up black and gay in the American South, is a required and distinctly singular read.

Through flowing metaphors and dialogue, rich language and deeply personal family stories, we learn about Jones’ struggle for his identity—why he built a suit of invisible armor to protect himself when no one else would. Jones writes, “If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.” Almost every passage feels like a fresh, raw wound, ready to leave a scar.

Each vignette represents a different stage in Jones’ blossoming life, and together they create a kaleidoscope of the difficulties that can stem from hiding oneself from the world. We travel with him as the child of a single mother in Lewisville, Texas, to his strained teenage relationship with his religious grandmother in Memphis, Tennessee, to destructive sexual experiences with friends, lovers and strangers, to his life in college and beyond, where he has yet to accept himself as a full person, rather than as a performer who needs to be interesting enough to entertain a crowd. Jones recognizes his desire to wear a mask early on, but it’s difficult to remove the mask once he has the chance.

Jones knows that accepting himself in a racist and homophobic world is an act of radical self-love, and this devastating memoir illustrates why such an act is worth the long struggle.

Winning the Pulitizer Prize in 2003 for her book about genocide made Samantha Power a public figure. But joining Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, becoming his White House advisor on human rights and serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations made her career front-page news. Power’s new memoir is a record of this impressive life.

Readers need not be foreign policy wonks to read The Education of an Idealist, but wonks will find the most to chew on here. Power writes in-depth about her attempts to influence foreign policy from both the outside and the inside—first covering the Balkan war as a journalist, then as a government official during the crises in Darfur, Libya and Syria. Much of what she has seen is heartbreaking.

Born in Ireland, Power immigrated to the United States as a child after her parents’ divorce. She writes of the lifelong emotional toll of her father’s alcoholism and young death, of her panic attacks and seeking help at Al-Anon meetings and in therapy. Candor from someone of her stature regarding such personal matters is refreshing, and Power draws directly from her own journals throughout the memoir.

She reveals how campaigns, governments and diplomacy operate behind closed doors—the pale, male upper echelons of how the world works. In her political work, Power is often the only woman in the room, and she doesn’t sugarcoat her experiences with sexism at both the White House and the U.N.

But neither does Power gloss over any professional mistakes and regrets, or any missteps made by President Obama. Perhaps because she has no political ambitions of her own, she is free to write what she really thinks (diplomatically, of course).

The Education of an Idealist is Power’s life story, but it also feels like peering through a time capsule into a period when America showed more compassion for refugees and the disadvantaged. But, ever the idealist, Power also clearly hopes that this book will convince readers that, when there is injustice in the world, America has the moral imperative to do something.

In 1988, when she was 8 years old, Dina Nayeri and her younger brother fled Iran with their mother, a doctor, who had received death threats from the government’s moral minders because of her activism as a Christian convert. They went first to Dubai, then were refugees in Italy before being granted asylum in the U.S. and arriving in Oklahoma.

In her well-received second novel, Refuge, Nayeri wrote a fictionalized account of her experiences. In The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, her first work of nonfiction, Nayeri offers a searing, nuanced and complex account of her life as a refugee and of the experiences of other more recent refugees from Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. The stories are terrifying, disheartening, sometimes uplifting and definitely worth reading and meditating on.

One of the most illuminating sections of the book is called “Camp.” In 2017, seeking to revisit her own experiences of exile, Nayeri volunteered in a refugee camp in Greece, where she served and talked to many refugees. It wasn’t all bleak. “People think of a refugee camp as a purgatory, a liminal space without shape or color. And it is that. But we kept our instinct for joy,” she writes. Still, it was a place of soul-destroying indignity and waiting. Refugees aren’t allowed to work. They’re not welcome at local schools. Young men entertain themselves by fighting.

Then there are the government bureaucracies that certify some refugees’ stories as “believable” enough for asylum and others not so much. Through her narrative, Nayeri makes vividly clear the Catch-22 of the process, especially for those asylum-seekers who are poorer, less educated and more desperate. 

Nayeri is not really an ungrateful refugee, as her title suggests. She writes about how as a youth she was driven to excel in order to escape her identity as a refugee. She went to Princeton, Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But, as she points out, refugees are expected to be grateful in ways that deny their experience of loss, of leaving a place or a family they deeply love. In Oklahoma, for example, Nayeri realized that her education in Iran had been far better and more rigorous than her classes in the local school. Yet she was expected to say everything here was better. It wasn’t.

Nayeri is neither a journalist nor a polemicist. She’s a storyteller who invites our moral engagement. She doesn’t write directly about the situation at the U.S. southern border, but an engaged reader will certainly infer the stark human costs of our current official attitudes and policies.

“When I describe the act of cave diving to most people, they think I have a death wish,” notes Jill Heinerth, who has spent over 30 years diving all over the world, often into deep, pitch-dark, narrow and, yes, highly dangerous places. She has explored, filmed and photographed remote underwater regions for National Geographic, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other institutions, and she’s not only an outspoken environmental advocate but also the Explorer-in-Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

So it’s hardly a surprise that the journeys she describes in Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver make for exciting, edge-of-your-seat reading. Not only is Heinerth’s memoir thoughtfully structured and adrenaline-filled, but it also offers a fascinating account of exactly how one becomes a renowned, record-setting adventurer.

As a girl growing up in Canada, Heinerth decided she wanted to learn to dive as soon as she saw Jacques Cousteau on TV. That’s despite the fact that one of her earliest memories is of nearly drowning and that she failed her first swimming lesson—because she was, of course, so busy floating and gazing intently at the underwater world that she didn’t bother to attempt any strokes. As a young woman, she sold a successful advertising business in Toronto and bought a ticket to the Cayman Islands in hopes of becoming a diver, shocking family and friends. 

Her wild gamble paid off, and Heinerth has spent the rest of her life “swimming through the veins of Mother Earth,” as she calls it, delighting in the wonders of ice-filled caves beneath Siberia’s Ural Mountains and lava tubes inside a Spanish volcano.

Such wonders and achievements have not come without dramatic, dire sacrifices, particularly as a woman in a testosterone-heavy field. A number of close friends have perished in diving accidents; she has repeatedly helped with the heartbreaking task of body recovery. After she suffered a severe case of the bends, a doctor advised Heinerth to “never dive again,” which she ignored. She narrowly escaped death several times amid the caves and crevices of an Antarctic Circle iceberg, all while suffering a leaky glove in the icy 28–degree waters, just one-tenth of a degree away from the freezing point of salt water. After her narrow escape, she commented, “The cave tried to keep us today.” Hours later, as she and her team were preparing to dive yet again, they watched the iceberg completely collapse, which would have meant certain death had they been in the water. 

There’s never a dull moment in Into the Planet, which bursts with full-throttle exuberance for the highs, and sometimes even the lows, of being a pioneering, modern-day explorer. As Heinerth concludes, “When we transcend the fear of failure and terror of the unknown, we are all capable of great things, personally and as a society.”

Alexandra Fuller writes to untangle a knot—usually a knot in her own lived experience. 

“Everyone in my family hates the books I write, they ask me to stop, but I can’t look away. ‘Write novels,’ Dad begged, but real life never stops coming at me, and it pours from my pen more easily than fiction,” she writes. “It’s not only the old adage to write what I know, but also to write what I love. And it’s the artist’s impulse to turn again and again to the same subject until the subject gives up its secrets.”

That’s how the bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight explains why she repeatedly returns to her youth spent in central and southern Africa and her ongoing family ties to the land.

In Travel Light, Move Fast, Fuller focuses her gaze on her father, Tim. She and her mother are by Tim’s side for his sudden demise in a Hungarian hospital. After his death, the pair returns with Tim’s ashes to the Fuller family farm in Africa, where Fuller attempts to help her mom resettle after losing her chaotic, iconic partner of half a century.

Tim Fuller was British, and his family lamented his move to Africa. “Tim Fuller went to Africa and lost everything,” or so went his family lore. But Tim found the life he desired: a woman who would tolerate and even celebrate his flamboyant ways, freedom to travel the land, a family and eventually—at his wife’s urging—a farm of his own.

Fuller carefully picks away at the tangle of her grief by exploring her dad’s life, gliding between her own experience in the present and his raucous past. Travel Light, Move Fast is a sensitive, meticulously wrought portrait of one family’s sometimes-challenging dynamics, set against an unforgiving African backdrop. Fuller’s beautiful prose juxtaposes the grieving process with the lessons she learned from the man whose adventures shaped her.

Maureen Stanton’s childhood started out fairly idyllic. She grew up in a New England town in the 1960s as the third of seven children, living on a cul-de-sac, gathering around the piano and dancing to her father’s music, playing kickball and flashlight tag with the neighborhood gang and taking family trips to the beach. Nonetheless, Stanton’s mother often liked to remind her rowdy brood of the omnipresent state prison in their Massachusetts town, warning, “If you don’t behave, I’ll put you in Walpole Prison!”

Stanton’s family life took an abrupt turn one spring night just before she turned 12, when her parents announced, out of the blue, that they were separating. Money became tight, and Stanton’s mother returned to school to become a nurse. Before her mother achieved that goal, however, she started shoplifting. Stanton’s own life unraveled from that point, as she so eloquently describes in her mesmerizing memoir, Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood.

Stanton’s account is an informative, intelligent read for anyone, young or old, trying to make sense of teenage rebellion. She spent most of her teen years high on angel dust, taking every drug available, including crystal meth, cocaine and acid. Teenage mischief became self-destructive and even criminal as she and her friends went on vandalism sprees.

Thankfully, this is a tale of redemption. By the end of high school, Stanton got a job, began counseling and rediscovered her love of learning. She realized that her parents’ divorce had broken her heart and that by suppressing her anger and sorrow, “I’d been inventing someone who was not me; no wonder I did not like that girl.” Decades later, as an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Stanton muses, “When I hear about so many people addicted to opiates now, I wonder if that would have been me.” Body Leaping Backward is a well-told, insightful memoir that could hardly be more relevant today.

There’s a jagged longing that animates the relationship between daughters and mothers. A daughter’s desire to please and be loved often cascades into enduring joy or peripatetic bitterness, while a mother’s desire to be loved and emulated often pours into exultant pride or raging resentment. Elissa Altman’s haltingly poignant Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing captures with clear-eyed candor the ways that Altman struggles to love her mother despite her mother’s insistence on creating Altman in her own image.

Altman’s mother, Rita, is a lifelong Manhattanite who buys makeup from Saks or Bloomingdale’s to assuage her loneliness and preserve her image of herself as a beautiful woman who once appeared on television. Rita’s marriage to Altman’s father ended in divorce because she felt like he could never provide for her material needs, and she continues to search for men who can. Rita wants a daughter who resembles her, so she tries to dress her only daughter elegantly and buys her cosmetics that will emphasize her beauty. Altman’s tomboyish approach to life disappoints her mother, and as Altman grows older, she eventually moves out of the city to Connecticut to live with her wife.

The circles of love, longing and loathing widen, punctuated by Rita’s daily calls to her daughter, calling forth Altman’s own anger, regret and love. As Altman so gracefully describes it, “My mother and I have been burning for half a century. . . . We bob and weave; we love and we loathe; we shout and whisper, and the next morning we do it all over again.” When her mother falls and becomes fully dependent on her, Altman feels the rush of “can’t-live-with-her-can’t-not-take-care-of-her” wash over her as she shuttles to Manhattan to care for her mother, who continues to be dissatisfied with her daughter and her daughter’s chosen life.

The beauty of Motherland lies in its embrace of the raggedness of relationships and in its candid acknowledgment that sometimes resolution and reconciliation simply elude us. But that longing for reconciliation itself functions as a form of resolution.

Haben Girma was born deafblind in California, to refugee parents forced to flee war-torn Eritrea. While her mother and father struggled to cope as immigrants, Girma simply yearned to belong—“a deafblind girl in a sighted, hearing world.” As her vision and hearing continued to fade and her parents grew increasingly cautious, Girma fought for her independence. Against their wishes, she went to Mali to help build a schoolhouse, left home for college in Portland, Oregon, and moved across the country for Harvard Law School. Along the way, she found new ways to manage her disabilities, through technology, teamwork and self-education that included a “blindness boot camp.” Today Girma speaks from a global stage, advocating for improved access to education and services for disabled people. In her often hilarious and utterly inspiring memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, she shares her trials and triumphs.

Things get off to a riveting start when, at the age of 7, Girma is left alone on a plane after her father is forcibly taken off the aircraft. She cannot hear what the flight attendant is saying, and her vision is limited to a few feet. Her terror is palpable. Later there is a confrontation with a bull she cannot see, learning to salsa dance in Mali to music she cannot hear with a partner who is but a blur, and more—much more. Yet by the book’s conclusion, she has graduated from Harvard Law School and become an internationally acclaimed advocate for accessibility, lauded for her work by President Obama at the White House in 2015. 

While Girma’s narrative almost ends there (she adds a brief epilogue to bring her enthralled reader up to date), her mission continues. “A Brief Guide to Increasing Access for People with Disabilities” includes specific advice for the workplace and wisdom that comes from her own experiences of exclusion. “Disability,” Girma notes, “is part of the human experience.” Inclusion improves the world for everyone, she says, and she intends to make it happen.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Haben Girma.