“Human beings are storytelling creatures, craning to see the crumpled metal in the closed-off highway lane, working from the moment the traffic slows to construct a narrative from what’s left behind. But our tales, even the most tragic ones, hinge on specificity. The story of one drowned Syrian boy washed up in the surf keeps us awake at night with grief. The story of four million refugees streaming out of Syria seems more like a math problem.”

Margaret Renkl nestles that observation into “The Unpeaceable Kingdom,” an essay midway through Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. But it could serve as a thesis for her collection. 

Late Migrations is a collection of essays, some as short as a paragraph, that reconcile Renkl’s lived experience with the natural world around her. She resides in suburban Nashville, not a wilderness, and works at a desk, not in the outdoors. Even so, Renkl is so in touch with the birds and butterflies of her yard that one could mistake her for a trained naturalist. Indeed, she is known as a nature writer; as a New York Times contributing op-ed writer, she writes about flora and fauna, as well as the American South’s politics and culture. 

The essays that compose Late Migrations stand on their own, offering glimpses into loss and living as they toggle between Renkl’s past and present across the Southern U.S. Taken together, though, they create a narrative that depicts not only the migrations of winged creatures but also the lives of Renkl’s family. (Appropriately, Renkl’s reflections are punctuated with illustrations by her brother, Billy Renkl. The images are as captivating as the author’s contemplative yet powerful words.) 

As Renkl observes the lives around her, she notes that a “life cycle” could just as accurately be dubbed a “death cycle.” But the term we use is more reflective of the human approach to life, as evident throughout Renkl’s quiet, lovely observations.

She writes, “Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.”

A parentless child is an orphan. A spouse whose partner dies is a widow. But what, muses Jayson Greene, do you call a parent whose child has died? “It seems telling to me there is no word in our language for our situation,” he writes. “It is unspeakable, and by extension, we are not supposed to exist.”

Greene and his wife, Stacy, find themselves in this nameless state after their only child, Greta, dies at age 2. Greta was sitting on a bench with her grandmother when a brick fell from a nearby windowsill and struck her on the head. 

The couple quickly turn to one another for comfort; while some families are torn apart by such a tragedy, the Greenes find hope in working through their grief together. But grief is a tremendous thing, and mourning Greta is a gargantuan task.

Jayson and Stacy open themselves to healing possibilities outside of their norm. They didn’t think of themselves as the sort of people who would turn to a medium in times of grief, but she becomes part of their journey when the couple travels to the Kripalu Institute for a seminar called “From Grieving to Believing.” A grief expert at this retreat tells them, “Grief is a reflection of a connection that has been lost. . . . It is a reflection of that love you had for that individual.”

The Greenes find comfort in these words, and in the family and friends who rally around them. Even as they move forward—sometimes literally, like when they sell their home—the Greenes carry Greta’s memory and their pain.

“The act of grieving our daughter continues on, and on, and on,” Greene writes. “We have held our firstborn child’s corpse in our arms, and now there is no limit to what we can endure.”

Once More We Saw Stars isn’t about the tragedy that befell a family—although Greene recounts with exquisite detail how he felt in the tragic days that ended his daughter’s life. The memoir is instead a story of a couple who faced one of the worst things imaginable and still continued to choose life.

Racing across the Mongolian desert in a pony express-style horse race isn’t a challenge many folks would choose to tackle. But when British 19-year-old Lara Prior-Palmer stumbles across a website detailing this very thing, she impulsively decides to throw her hat in the ring.

The result is Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race, a stunning debut memoir detailing Prior-Palmer’s journey entering, competing in and ultimately winning the Mongol Derby, often dubbed “the world’s longest, toughest horse race.” It’s an extremely demanding test, not for the weak-spirited, requiring riders to change steeds 25 times through 14 different microclimates. In witty, open and revealing prose, Prior-Palmer details a slew of obstacles—from searing heat and pelting rain to food poisoning, uncooperative ponies and, most importantly, a lack of experience and preparation.

Her tale could be pulled from the pages of a Hollywood script, with its sweeping, scenic descriptions of the Mongolian steppe and the allies and fierce competitors who emerge among the unique cast of characters (like the skilled and highly trained Texan rider Devan, with her striking American accent and corporate sponsorships). In spite of being an amateur navigator and rider, who didn’t even bring enough food or clothing, Prior-Palmer makes her way with true grit and determination.

And we passionately cheer her on, especially when she muses that the race is “a live show of humans slowly falling to pieces.” Against all odds, she wins, becoming the first woman and youngest person ever to do so.

The ride is a learning experience for Prior-Palmer, one that helps her overcome fears of fleeing and teaches her to tap into her gut to make her way. As she says once she’s gotten her stride, “The race has got me going so fast I’ve lost hold of my ducking-out technique.” Rough Magic is a true page-turner, told in gorgeous, descriptive prose that readers will tear through like the ponies racing across the plain.

Anuradha Bhagwati has defined herself through acts of resistance. As the only child of prominent India-born academics, she was a dutiful daughter during her preteen years in Boston and New York, deferential to authority and always—as demanded—earning top grades. But in high school, her “good girl” stature began to erode—at least in her parents’ eyes. She developed a crush on a female classmate and, much to her father’s distaste, became “obsessed” with playing basketball. Then, while she was attending Yale, she became deeply involved with an older, black and marijuana-smoking boyfriend.

Her greatest cultural aberration, however, came in 1999 when she dropped out of graduate school at Columbia, where both her parents taught, and joined the Marines. She was 24. “I wanted trials. I wanted to be tested. I wanted something extreme,” she writes. That experience and its politically related aftermath are the main themes of this book. Even as she relished in and thrived on the physical agonies of Marine training, she came to abhor the Corps’ contradictory attitudes toward women—on the one hand, paternalistically forbidding them from combat and, on the other, viewing them as sexual playthings. She admits to being quite sexually active herself while in service—from hiring a female prostitute in Thailand to sleeping with “a small assortment of Marine men.”

Ultimately, Bhagwati fought the command structure over its indifference to sexual harassment—but with little success. She resigned from the Corps after five years with the rank of Captain. After that, Bhagwati became active in seeking better treatment of female veterans and demanding that women be allowed to serve in battle.

A thicket of conflicting impulses, Bhagwati still has contempt for the Marines while also excoriating herself for not having been a better one. Oddly enough, for someone so politically outspoken about gender and race, she says nothing about America’s military invasions of other countries.

What happens when a psychotherapist’s life falls apart? She finds her own therapist. But it turns out that beginning therapy, and then muddling through it, is just as hard for professionals as it is for the rest of us. 

In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, Los Angeles-based therapist Lori Gottlieb details her search for a therapist she doesn’t know but might begin to trust and the way her own defenses and blind spots trip her up as she tries to get over an unexpected breakup. As Gottlieb undertakes her own therapy journey, she continues to see her usual roster of patients, and she introduces us to four of them (identities disguised), each with their own array of quirks, longings and suffering. As Gottlieb’s patients proceed (often painfully) through their sessions, so does Gottlieb with her new therapist, Wendell. And we get to listen in through this unusual combination of memoir, self-help guide and therapy primer. 

Before Gottlieb trained as a therapist, she worked as a writer for TV shows like “E.R.” She’s also a columnist for The Atlantic and the author of Marry Him, and her varied background shows in her writing, which is warm, approachable and funny—a pleasure to read.

“I’ve always been drawn to stories—not just what happens, but how the story is told,” Gottlieb writes. In showing us how patients tell themselves what turns out to be just a part of their stories, she also gives us a satisfying set of narratives. As we watch Gottlieb and her patients learn to tell the rest of their own stories and move beyond their pain, we find some surprising insights and even a bit of wisdom. 

There is a saying: If you remember the 1960s, you must not have been there. If you were, and went on to enjoy—or survive—their segue into the ’70s, Chris Rush’s mesmerizing memoir, The Light Years, may cause some fine flashbacks. But if you know those drug-addled days only by reputation and the sounds of their haze-spawned music, Rush’s detail-laden account of his turbulent adolescence will be quite an eye-opener.

The middle child of seven in a well-off New Jersey family that knew how to party, Rush was an artistic, sexually conflicted misfit. His alcoholic father loathed him, his mother protected him, and his older sister introduced him to marijuana and LSD by the time he was 12—“sacraments,” she called them, not to be confused with heroin or cocaine, which would come later. Rush remembers his acid trips with poetic clarity. Watching an American flag-clad Frisbee player at a party, he saw “stroboscopic trails” following him, “frame by frame by frame. I began to think of the awfulness of the [Vietnam] war, of dead bodies piled in the sun. Maybe the glitter-acid was coming on a little too strong.”

After his father threatened to kill him, Rush left the private school where he was peddling drugs and followed his sister out west—California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming—and into the business of storing and selling drugs. Living in “stash houses” and partaking of the inventory, Rush grew to love tripping in the wild of the mountains, adding hashish to his repertoire, spending months alone and sketching his drug-fueled fantasies. He came down into the hill towns to call his mother collect, to let her know he was alive and to be cautioned not to come home. Lovers and friends along the way seemed as lost as he was.

Today a celebrated Tucson artist, Rush recounts his troubled journey not as a cautionary tale but as a testament to a time when finding a place in the real world could be life-saving. For him, it was learning to bake a pie and sharing it with a friend. For his reader, this redeeming affirmation comes as both revelation and relief.

The initial phone call was a surprise. “Is this the restaurant critic of the New York Times?” a British voice asked. Ruth Reichl confirmed her identity, but the name of her caller meant nothing to her: James Truman, editorial director of magazine publishing company Condé Nast, was calling about Gourmet. The magazine had introduced an 8-year-old Reichl to the magic of food and its influence on the world. But she couldn’t imagine why Truman was calling. 

That phone call ultimately led Reichl to a role she’d never dreamed of: editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. Truman’s name was the first of many things she had to learn. During Reichl’s first visit to the office, an editor gushed that she’s great at the “teeosee.” Reichl, whose background was in newspapers, didn’t realize the editor was talking about the TOC, or table of contents. 

Save Me the Plums, Reichl’s memoir about her years at Gourmet, is filled with such endearing, revealing moments. Although she considered herself a writer, not a manager, Reichl reimagines the magazine that captured her youthful imagination. Alongside her talented staff, Reichl took the publication from a staid magazine that delivered the luxury readers expected (and no more) to a sometimes scintillating examination of not only food but also its impact.

Readers of her past memoirs will recognize Reichl’s lighthearted but dedicated approach to her work, as seen in Garlic and Sapphires. They’ll be welcomed by her big-hearted approach to the dinner table, as in Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples. And new readers will be equally delighted by Reichl’s account of an influential magazine, its final days and the many moments that illustrate the ways food can bring people together. 

As a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Megan K. Stack lived a life defined by her career. Like so many women before her, Stack was unprepared for the jolt of trading in that work for the work of motherhood. When she left her job to give birth to her son, Max, in Beijing, Stack realized her new reality.

“I’d slaved and slashed and elbowed to maintain that job, but in the end I’d let it go like a balloon, rolling in my mouth the rare flavor of a bold gamble,” she writes in Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home. 

Stack, whose previous book, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, had imagined quiet days of working on her novel while her newborn son slept, angelic and obedient, until she was ready for him to awaken. She had not imagined colic, hormones and sleep deprivation that was almost physically painful. To add insult to injury, her journalist husband, Tom, “had slipped easily back into his old life while I had been bombed back to some prehistoric version of myself. And I was angry that he had accepted this superior position, this lesser disruption, as sort of a birthright.”

Enter Xiao Li, the first in a series of nannies, cooks and cleaners who help Stack find equilibrium. But like most women who hire help, Stack felt a deep uneasiness that she couldn’t do it all herself. And while Stack paid Xiao Li a good wage, it was for work that took Xiao Li away from her own young daughter. Xiao Li later admits she would sometimes pretend Max was her own baby to take away the sting of separation. It’s an uncomfortable truth that moms who work need help and that help mostly comes from lower-income women. That transaction comes at a price beyond money.

Furthermore, dads seem to navigate these issues without the noose of guilt, and Tom is no exception. He comes across as a bit of a schmuck, complaining about the quality of Xiao Li’s cooking and insisting that he can’t take even half a day off so Stack can finish a draft.

When the family moves to India for Tom’s job, Stack is in charge of setting up the household and finding help while again pregnant. In Delhi, Stack truly becomes aware of the hardships facing the women she employs: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty. She delves into their stories with searing honesty and self-reflection. 

Women’s Work is a brave book, an unflinching examination of privilege and the tradeoffs all women make in the name of family. 

A timely, educational blend of neuroscience and memoir, Judith Grisel’s Never Enough tackles the devastating problem of addiction. Current statistics speak to a dire state of affairs: Nearly 16 percent of the U.S. population over the age of 12 fits the criteria for substance abuse disorder. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has declared our current opioid epidemic to be a public health emergency. Drawing from her own experience as a recovering drug addict, Grisel is uniquely positioned to study the neuroscience of addiction. She understands both the allure of drugs and the devastation they leave in their wake. Indeed, it seems that the way she has managed to stay sober for over 25 years is to make the study of addiction her life’s work. Now a professor and scientist, Grisel is a compassionate and empathetic guide to the hard science behind drug use.

Chapter by chapter, Grisel examines the effects of different drugs on the human brain: alcohol, marijuana, stimulants, tranquilizers and psychedelics. Unfortunately for users, most of these operate by the “opponent process theory,” the idea that any stimulus to the brain will eventually be neutralized into its opposite. Simply put, the high gives way to the low. The brain adjusts to the dosage, and the withdrawal lasts longer than the desired effect, creating a vicious cycle of dependency and diminishing returns.

How is it that some people can enjoy a drink and stop, while addicts can never have enough of their chosen substances? The answer involves genetics, environmental and social context and significant exposure to drugs, particularly during adolescence as the brain is developing. There are no easy solutions to the problems of addiction, but Grisel suggests that knowledge and kindness can go a long way.

Author Pat Conroy was larger than life, and his work vividly described the dark shadows and bright corners of family life in the South. Like William Faulkner and James Dickey, Conroy told sprawling tales about himself, his family and his friends. He was a lovable, irascible rapscallion and a raconteur who never met a story he couldn’t tell with humor, relish and gusto. Since Conroy’s death in 2016, several books have followed: A Lowcountry Life: Reflections on a Writing Life, a posthumous collection of his own writings; My Exaggerated Life, an oral biography by Katherine Clark; and Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy, a collection of fond memories. 

Michael Mewshaw’s The Lost Prince joins in this flood of memories, offering an intimate, affectionate and candid portrait of his friendship with Conroy. While Mewshaw was living in Rome in the 1980s, Conroy called him one day out of the blue, looking for the companionship of another American writer in Rome. When the two first met, they discovered their shared love of basketball, their similarly dysfunctional families and their fear of flying. Over the next decade, Mewshaw and Conroy and their families were almost inseparable, enjoying parties with well-known literary figures such as Gore Vidal and William Styron. However, after a seismic event in the mid-1990s, the lights went out in their relationship, and the two never reconciled.

In a letter to Mewshaw in 2003, Conroy asked him to write about “you and me and what happened.” In The Lost Prince, Mewshaw lovingly, colorfully and splendidly does just that.