Boris Fishman’s memoir Savage Feast opens in the middle of the night, on a train at the border of Czechoslovakia, as Fishman, then 9 years old, and his parents and grandparents attempt to make their way from Soviet Belarus to a new life in the United States. The story then drops back to the lives of Fishman’s Jewish grandparents, detailing how they survived in Stalin-era Belarus in Eastern Europe.

The author of two novels, Fishman lets his narrative move novelistically back and forth in time through key moments like his family’s emigration, their early days in Brooklyn and the recent past, when Fishman is uneasily tethered to his family’s foreignness. Fishman’s writing is brisk and vivid, and despite generations’ worth of trauma the family suffered, from pervasive anti-Semitism to the brutalities of World War II, his memoir is often funny.

Savage Feast is mostly a coming-of-age story, as the young adult Fishman tries to find his place—and love—in his adopted country. Throughout, we see him visiting his grandfather’s Brooklyn apartment, where he’s fed an array of traditional Russian dishes prepared by his grandfather’s home-health aide, Oksana. As his grandfather grows sicker, and as Fishman suffers through a protracted depression and failed relationships, these traditional dishes—borsch, cabbage dumplings, latkes, rabbit braised in sour cream, ukha (salmon soup)—remain a comforting constant, and Fishman learns from Oksana how to cook them. That’s where this book departs from other memoirs: Most chapters end with detailed recipes, adding a lovely, homey dimension.

In many ways, Aeham Ahmad is an ordinary man. The son of Palestinian refugees, he grew up in Yarmouk, home to 160,000 other Palestinians in Damascus. His father, a musician blind since childhood, bribed and wheedled young Ahmad into practicing the piano for hours at a time. His talent grew steadily, but only later did he develop a profound love for music.

Ahmad achieved his dreams at a young age. Still in his 20s, he and his father built a thriving business selling musical instruments and giving lessons. He married a strong, intelligent woman, and together they brought a sweet boy into the world. But in June of 2012, the Syrian civil war made its way to Yarmouk, and all those dreams crumbled beneath the weight of the bombs, mortars and bullets fired by both the Syrian Army and the different militias fighting against them.

In The Pianist from Syria, Ahmad tells the story of his family’s terrible deprivations during the civil war. His losses are profound, and it was truly miraculous that he and his family were finally able to escape to safety in Germany. Yet the true hero of this story is Ahmad’s music. Pushing his piano into the bomb-ruined streets of Yarmouk, Ahmad and his impromptu choirs sang out songs of protest, mourning and hope. He rejected the jingoism of both the Syrian government and the militias. Instead, his music illuminated the horrors of war, while celebrating the simple dreams of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. His songs were truly subversive, because they served no faction. Soon a YouTube and Facebook phenomenon, Ahmad became an increasingly marked man.

Written in an open, honest style, The Pianist from Syria is a testament to the resilience and beauty of ordinary people with simple dreams.

“Perhaps there is one book for every life,” writes author Katharine Smyth at the beginning of her debut, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf. For Smyth, that book is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and it’s the prism through which she examines the death of her beloved father and the surprising turns that grief can take.

Though it’s categorized as a memoir, what Smyth accomplishes defies the genre. Her story is an intimate exploration of the domestic drama that unfolded in her own family, in which she was the sole child of a larger-than-life alcoholic and a long-suffering mother who stood by his side. Smyth takes us through her childhood in New England, where summers on the coast were the backdrop to the special bond between daughter and dad, to the tumultuous home life of her teen years, to the rhythms and routines of hospital and hospice care during her father’s later years. In her intimate memoir, however, she also weaves in a biography of Woolf, literary analysis of Woolf’s masterpiece and meditations on the nature of marriage, family and loss. Readers with a passion for Woolf will find the reading experience enriching, but even those with a cursory knowledge of her work will be able to glean the major themes that resonate in Smyth’s interpretation of it.

The memoir is a quiet book; its private tragedies are the consequence of a slow physical and emotional decay at the hands of her father’s disease. Still, Smyth’s prose pulsates with intensity, and its lyrical qualities make it a moving one. Grief and its disconcerting effects take center stage. “It’s writers like Woolf, their refusal to give in to popular ideas about bereavement, who have helped me to accept the nature of this misery,” Smyth writes. With her first book, Smyth is able to give that comfort to a new generation of readers as well.

“My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter,” writes Stephanie Land in the opening line of her insightful, moving memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Land was planning on attending college and becoming a writer when she became pregnant with her daughter, Mia. After her short relationship with the baby’s father became abusive, Land found herself a single mother with virtually no support network. She depended on food stamps, childcare assistance, part-time work as a housecleaner and occasional charity from friends. When she took her first housecleaning job, she quickly realized, “They don’t pay me enough for this.”

Nonetheless, she persevered, despite the fact that black mold in her studio apartment repeatedly sickened both Mia and herself. “Poverty was like a stagnant pond of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go.” Land learns to appreciate what little she has while observing the lives within the homes she cleans, giving them nicknames like the Loving House, the Cat Lady’s House and the Porn House. She realizes that despite her clients’ relative wealth, “they did not seem to enjoy life any more than I did.”

Like Tara Westover in Educated, Land sees education as her salvation. Determined to break free from sickness, poverty and bad luck, she uses a combination of grants, loans and jump-off-the-cliff risk to ultimately pursue her dream of studying creative writing at the University of Montana. 

While books like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Alissa Quart’s Squeezed present heart-wrenching overviews of poverty in America, Land combines her raw, authentic voice and superb storytelling skills to create a firsthand account from the trenches. Readers will be left wanting to hear more from this talented new voice, and no doubt, she’s got more stories to tell.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, starred review, January 2019

Julie Yip-Williams always sensed that she was living on borrowed time. After she was born blind with cataracts in 1976 in Vietnam, her grandmother ordered her parents to take her to an herbalist to procure poison that would end Yip-Williams’ life. Thankfully, the herbalist refused. Yip-Williams went on to live an extraordinary life until she died of colon cancer at age 42 on March 19, 2018. Her book, The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After, is equally exceptional.

After immigrating to America as a child, Yip-Williams underwent surgery that restored partial sight. She later graduated from Harvard Law School, traveled the world alone, married, had two daughters and worked at a prestigious New York City law firm, only to be diagnosed with Stage IV cancer in 2013. Her exquisite, honest memoir about living with and dying of cancer is equal parts practical and philosophical.

Yip-Williams writes unflinchingly of learning to move forward with the disease. “Life can and does go on after an appalling diagnosis, even an incurable one,” she writes. She never sugarcoats, however. She purposefully aims “to depict the dark side of cancer and debunk the overly sweet, pink-ribbon facade of positivity and fanciful hope and rah-rah-rah nonsense spewed by cancer patients and others, which I have come to absolutely loathe.” She plans her death carefully, just as she planned her life, teaching her children not to be afraid, that death is part of life. In the last chapter she writes, “I have lived even as I am dying, and therein lies a certain beauty and wonder.”

Full of love, humor, insight and tragedy, her book resonates with wisdom. As her husband so aptly notes, “For the little girl born blind, she saw more clearly than any of us.”

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As explained by Octavio Solis, a distinguished Latino author who has written over 20 plays, a retablo is a small votive painting commonly associated with Latin American cultures. It’s usually painted on cheap, reused metal, and it tells the story of a near-disaster that was survived only by the grace of God. By commemorating the event, the retablo can transform that story of salvation into a myth. But memory is slippery, and retelling a story, even on a buckled sheet of metal, results in embellishments and refinements. Facts become murky as names are forgotten and events misremembered. Yet despite its imprecision, the retablo expresses a profound truth not only about its maker but also the world he or she lives in. As a result, the retablo itself becomes a part of the myth as well.

There is struggle here, but there is also redemption.

The 50 episodes in Solis’ memoir are like retablos because they are the true, if imprecise, myths that explain his life and his world. Set in the gritty border town of El Paso, where Solis spent his youth during the 1960s and ’70s, the stories of Retablos are as harsh and dry as the sunbaked land along the Rio Grande that he so vividly evokes. Unlike the figures in traditional retablos, the characters populating Solis’ memoir are far from saintly. Instead, he peoples his retablos with the bullies, immigration police, drug users and prostitutes of his hometown, as well as with the family that was at once a solace and a frustration. Solis is dogged by violence and poverty, and his family suffers greatly from the strain of living a life in which disaster can strike without notice or mercy. There is struggle here, but there is also redemption and reconciliation, joy and love.

These written retablos reconstruct Solis’ youth, with its dangers, juxtapositions and all-too-few victories. It is a distinctly Latino experience in a distinctly Latino world. But this story is universal—we all grow up, and we all need to reconcile who we are with who we were. Like the images he emulates, Solis’ stories transcend the limits of borders and time.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What do literature and film tell us about living and loving in later life? What is it like to experience life in its latter stages? These are the questions Susan Gubar began to answer during a year in which she and her second husband decided they must leave their beloved home of many years and downsize to an apartment.

Late-Life Love is a unique blend of memoir and literary commentary, with Gubar at the helm as an accomplished, bravely honest and mesmerizing guide. A retired professor at the University of Indiana, she is the co-author of the groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. She’s also shared her own cancer struggle in Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer.

The love of Gubar’s life is retired English professor Donald Gray, with whom she shares a “head-over-heals” romance with literature. She deems her “heals” typo apt, as they have both faced a variety of serious physical challenges: Don, 17 years her senior, fell and required knee surgery as she wrote this book, while she remains weakened by cancer. She’s jubilant to have survived well beyond her projected “expiration date” given at the time of diagnosis, thanks to an experimental drug.

Theirs is a cerebral household catering to a cavalcade of friends, children and grandchildren; readers will delight in being welcomed into the fold. Amid joys and concerns (a sick grandchild, an estranged friend), the author shares the many fears and second thoughts she and her husband have while trying to navigate their monumental transition.

Throughout, Gubar seamlessly weaves in lengthy discussions of a wide range of literature addressing late-life concerns, including works by Shakespeare, John Donne, Donald Hall, Colette, Gabriel García Márquez and Marilynne Robinson. Reading these analyses is like having a season ticket to a series of fascinating literary discussions. Gubar offers both realism and hope, concluding: “Late-life love may heat at a lower temperature, but it bubbles and rises.”

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, 12-year-old Casey Gerald gathers with family and friends as they wait for the world to end and for God to usher in a new world with Jesus’ return. As midnight passes and the world remains unchanged, Gerald slowly recognizes the yawning gap between the illusory “truths” he’s been told and the facts of this world. In his compulsively readable memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here, Gerald writes about coming into the light of reality in a world filled with deceit and loss, love and hope.

Growing up just outside Dallas, Texas, Gerald moves from one disappointment to another, struggling to make sense of his world and his family. His father, once a great football player, is an “inconvenience” of a father. After his mother disappears from his life with no explanation, Gerald and his sister live off their mother’s disability checks in a small apartment. A gifted athlete, Gerald achieves stardom as a high school football player and then wins a football scholarship to Yale, where he excels not only on the field but also in the classroom. During his years at Yale, he continues to struggle with the complexities of his identity as a gay black man, and he has difficulty envisioning a future for himself. Before the financial collapse of 2008, Gerald works on Wall Street, where he sees the fraud underlying the financial institutions’ operations. In the final and most compelling chapter of the book, Gerald riffs on the major moments of his life, sharing his current vision of working for free with local citizens on behalf of the common good.

Gerald’s staccato prose and peripatetic storytelling combine the cadences of the Bible with an urgency reminiscent of James Baldwin in this powerfully emotional memoir.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Nicole Chung has known she was adopted since she was old enough to understand the concept. It would be difficult to miss, anyway; she’s Korean-American and was raised by white parents in a lily-white Oregon town. Although Chung faced challenges as the only Asian person in her community, she was raised in a loving family who taught her that her birth parents made the difficult decision to give her up so she could have a better life.

“Everything I knew of my life began on the day I was adopted. It was as if I had simply sprung into being as the five-pound, chubby-cheeked two-month-old my parents picked up at the hospital,” she writes.

But as Chung entered adulthood, her curiosity about her birth family grew. She wanted to provide her future children with an understanding and history she lacked, so she set out to find her birth parents.

And the tale she’d been taught about her adoption quickly unraveled.

It is true that Chung was born severely premature to Korean parents, and her medical complications did create a challenge. But the details of her adoption weren’t nearly as straightforward—or as rosy—as her parents portrayed them.

Chung’s exploration of identity and adoption becomes even more complicated when her initial contact with her birth family coincides with her first pregnancy. As a result, her ideas of family begin to be reshaped by multiple forces.

As she wrestles with her identity as an adopted child and as the sole person of color in most of her childhood circles, Chung confronts universal questions: Who am I? How does that shape how I interact with the world? Chung’s origin story is messier than she’d hoped, but All You Can Ever Know is a tale told with empathy and grace.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Nicole Chung.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The calming repetition of putting one foot in front of the other innately lends itself to philosophical thought, particularly while experiencing the natural beauty of the great outdoors. In Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, John Kaag (American Philosophy: A Love Story) retraces the contemplative journeys through the Sils region of Switzerland he took as a 19-year-old and the return trip he made at 37 with his wife and young daughter in tow.

As a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, Kaag has the perfect resume for this type of introspective blend of memoir and biography. As a young man, he was drawn to the Swiss village of Sils-Maria because it was a favorite spot of 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Kaag cleverly connects Nietzsche’s musings with his own experiences both past and present, detailing how his understanding of Nietzsche has evolved and changed over the 17 years between his trips to Switzerland. He pairs breathtaking descriptions of the Sils region with Nietzsche’s fascinating personal history, providing a unique, engaging narrative.

Kaag delves deep into his own past and his path to a philosophical profession, revealing painful details about his absent father and his brush with an eating disorder. Ultimately, Kaag discovers that it is OK to get out of one’s comfort zone, make mistakes and learn from them—in Nietzsche’s words, to “become who you are.”

As Kaag notes, philosophers “have always thought on their feet,” citing examples of “great wanderer-thinkers” such as Jesus, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson and Thoreau. With Hiking with Nietzsche, Kaag can now add his own name to the list of thoughtful wanderers.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Khalida Brohi, named one of Forbes “30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs in Asia,” has an engrossing, important story to tell about her childhood in Pakistan. Her mother was 9 years old when she married Brohi’s father, who was 13, in an “exchange marriage.” Brohi, the oldest daughter of her parents’ eight children, was born in a tribal area of the country when her mother was 14. Born severely malnourished, she wasn’t expected to survive. Yet survive she did, and despite living in poverty and moving between rural areas, slums, towns and cities over the years, she describes her childhood as “joyous” in I Should Have Honor: A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan. 

That happiness was forever tarnished, however, in 1999. That year, Brohi’s uncle and two others strangled her 14-year old cousin, Khadija, in an “honor killing,” because Khadija ran away with her boyfriend, leaving behind the man she had been promised to as a young girl.

“The pain shoved me into a new reality,” Brohi writes. Luckily, her own parents had very different ideas than the rest of their family, and they refused to promise Brohi to anyone, in defiance of tribal custom. Her father explained that instead, his daughter’s job was to honor her family with good grades and an education. Brohi did just that, becoming a vocal advocate against honor killings, working to empower Pakistani women and to redefine the tribal definition of honor. That journey began when she was just 16 and has taken her around the world, despite death threats and even an office bombing.

She founded a nonprofit called Sughar Foundation (sughar means “skilled and confident woman” in Urdu), which focuses on the empowerment of women in rural Pakistan. Its goal is to put an end to exchange marriages, child marriages and honor killings while offering job training to women in traditional embroidery. The organization teaches women about their equal status and rights, and helps them launch their own businesses.

Writing in compelling, page-turning prose, Brohi shares a deeply felt, intimate portrait of what it means to be a global activist. There’s even a love story―one with a happy ending. Don’t miss I Should Have Honor, which deserves a legion of caring, activist readers.