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.

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.