“I had always known that my grandparents sheltered Jewish children during the German occupation of the Netherlands,” Bart van Es writes in The Cut Out Girl. Growing up, van Es remembers hearing of a girl named Lien, who was taken in by his grandparents and hidden from the Nazis. She eventually became a member of the family, until a never-discussed rift severed the connection. In 2014, the senior member of van Es’ family died, setting him on a quest to find out what happened to Lien.

To tell this story, the Dutch-born van Es, who teaches Renaissance literature at the University of Oxford, alternates between the present and World War II. The narration of the war years has a novelistic feel and takes on the viewpoint of Lien as a child. This method works well to convey the trauma Lien felt after losing her parents. She was shuttled from town to town and family to family without explanation, and she endured deprivation and abuse. The present-day sections of the book describe van Es’ meetings with the 80-year-old Lien, his retracing of her hiding places and his research, which fills the gaps in her memory. The book also makes wonderful use of Lien’s childhood poesy book (a kind of autograph book) and family photos and mementos.

Van Es sets scenes well, contrasting the Netherlands of the 21st century—with its liberal outlook and high-tech industries—with the far more rural and traditional Netherlands of the 1940s. He also notes the country’s complicated role in the Holocaust: While the Dutch were often heroic in their efforts to hide or transport Jews, they were also frighteningly efficient in turning Jews in to Nazi authorities. And though Lien isn’t named as a co-author, her own voice and the story of her survival, not just of the war but also of the decades afterward, come through clearly.

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

Recent Wesleyan grad Beck Dorey-Stein swore she would spend no more than three months in Washington, D.C., a place she calls “an ego swamp of a city.” Then she lands a job as a White House stenographer, a position she didn’t even realize existed.

From the Corner of the Oval is Dorey-Stein’s effervescent memoir that recounts spending five wide-eyed years traveling the world on Air Force One, producing transcripts of President Barack Obama’s press conferences and speeches. She joins a team of D.C. insiders who hopscotch the globe, from Senegal to Tanzania to Stonehenge, all in service to their country and to the man they call POTUS.

“The people who make the president look good on these trips often look terrible and feel even worse,” Dorey-Stein writes. “It is degrading and embarrassing and awkward when a twenty-two-year-old advance person scolds you for disappearing to the bathroom, and when you’re so hungry you eat three bags of stale cookies in front of a vanful of trigger-happy photographers. Civility takes a backseat to survival as you chug water, throw elbows and down half a bottle of Advil. You work through the pain to keep up with the action. Ballets are full of bloody slippers.”

Yet the few chosen to serve the president also form intense bonds, and they get a front seat to history. Dorey-Stein and her colleagues bear witness to the White House response to the tragedy of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. She forms a tight band of friends within “the Bubble”—her name for the president’s cliquish traveling entourage—and she begins an ill-fated romance with a magnetic yet noncommittal senior staffer.

Dorey-Stein offers a generous, vivid portrait of what it’s like to work at the epicenter of power when your job is to stay out of the spotlight. She navigates heartbreak, career indecision and friendship like virtually every 20-something. But unlike other young women, she does it all in the shadow of the White House.

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

One late morning in August, Jonathan Santlofer discovers his wife, Joy, in their living room, gasping for breath. In a surreal flurry, Santlofer frantically dials 911 while urging his wife to hold on. Soon he’s standing against the living room wall watching his wife die, even as paramedics try to save her.

Joy’s death leaves her husband bereft, and Santlofer struggles to live with his grief, a process he details in his heart-rending, poignant memoir, The Widower’s Notebook.

Following Joy’s death, Santlofer spends many sleepless nights not only reliving her death but also recalling the many tender, angry, sad and joyous moments of more than 40 years of married life. On one of those sleepless nights, he writes with fits and starts in a notebook, trying to bring some peace to his restless mind. He also starts to draw pictures of Joy and their daughter, Dorie. “Drawing,” he writes, “has made it possible for me to stay close to Joy when she is no longer here . . . grief is chaotic; art is order.” In the pages of his notebook, Santlofer reflects on the importance of paying attention to the pain of grief: “Better to have painful memories than no memories at all.” He meditates on the many things he misses about Joy, as well as the stupid things that smart people say to grieving friends. Even after he releases Joy’s ashes, Santlofer shares the raggedness of his still-raw emotions, admitting that he’ll never stop crying.

Santlofer’s honesty, his focus on the moments that remind him of Joy and their life together, and his beautifully crafted, tender prose make for heartbreaking yet page-turning reading.

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

“It started,” Peter Mayle begins, “with a break in the weather.” After two weeks of a rainy Mediterranean vacation, Mayle and his wife, Jennie, set out to look for sun and explore Provence on their way home to England. They quickly fell in love with the beautiful region of southeastern France.

After the couple uprooted their lives and moved to Provence, Mayle wrote his beloved 1991 memoir, A Year in Provence. My Twenty-Five Years in Provence is the last volume of travel writing from Mayle, who died in France in January 2018, and it is a bittersweet pleasure.

It’s hard to believe that the initial print run of A Year in Provence was only 3,000 copies, as the book quickly became a sensation. For many readers, the aspiring novelist (his fiction never attained the popularity of his accounts of a delectable café lunch) put Provence on the map.

In this final memoir, Mayle returns to the beginning, recounting the couple’s early days house-hunting, learning the language and falling in love with the culture. This is France, so of course food and wine play a large part in his writing. But while Mayle can pen a mouthwatering description of bouillabaisse, what has always drawn readers to his writing are his loving portraits of people, community and the Provençal way of life.

“Lunch is taken very seriously in Provence,” Mayle discovered early on. So it’s fitting that as he makes his way home from the village market, basket piled high with warm bread, fragrant cheese, cherries, grapes and fresh eggs, Mayle’s last words to us are, “I must go. Lunch is calling.”

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

Life moves along a prescribed path for many people. You go to school, you graduate, you get a job. You fall in love, you get married, you have babies.

But what if you don’t?

That’s the question Glynnis MacNicol asked as she faced her 40th birthday. MacNicol had a lot going for her: She lived in New York City, a city she loved, and was a successful writer and co-founder of a successful company. She had great friends and loved her family and her role as an aunt.

It’s not that MacNicol took issue with being 40, single and childless. It’s that the rest of the world seemed to. “This is why people have babies . . . because it’s exhausting not to know what you’re supposed to do next,” MacNicol says to a friend who is contemplating her own reproductive choices. “A baby is basically a nonnegotiable map for the next two decades.”

By sharing her story in No One Tells You This, MacNicol gives implicit permission for other women to embrace the lives they’ve chosen. Or the lives that have chosen them, as the case may be. After all, MacNicol didn’t exactly plan to remain single. A series of not-so-good romantic choices made singleness appear inevitable. But she’s (mostly) happy with where she’s landed. When her family needs support, MacNicol returns to Canada. When she falls in love with a ranch out West, she rearranges her schedule to spend a month there.

“I was increasingly frustrated that some people seemed incapable of believing me when I said I was happy with my life,” she writes. “My life, I was learning, was sometimes even more confusing for women a few decades older than me to comprehend than it was for me.”

MacNicol spent the year following her 40th birthday exploring and embracing her meandering path. The result is a memoir that will help women of all ages and life circumstances understand the experience of today’s single-and-joyful woman.

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

Poet, essayist and children’s book author Donald Hall looks back over his richly textured 89 years of life in his latest memoir, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. Most of his reflections here are blithely inconsequential, keen observations about nature, career and relationships. They expound no end-of-life wisdom, detail no significant literary trends or feuds and offer no general assessment of the state of poetry today. But it is this very lack of utility—the knowledge that we need not underline or take notes—that makes the book such a joy to read.

This is not to suggest that the book lacks weight. Whether Hall is describing the passage of the seasons or mulling over the comforts of friendship, he is always worth hearing out. He is especially moving when writing about his love affair and home life with his second wife, Jane Kenyon, a respected poet in her own right. Among his “carnival of losses”—his mobility, old friends, an ancient tree in his front yard—her death in 1995 at the age of 47 looms largest.

It is a shrinking pool, to be sure, but English majors who came of age academically in the 1960s and ’70s will especially relish Hall’s recollections of other big-name poets, among them Theodore Roethke (“exuberant, loud, and funny”), Stephen Spender (“talked well on any subject other than poetry”), James Dickey (“the best liar I ever knew”) and T.S. Eliot (“spoke like a member of Parliament”). He met them all.

Many contemporary poets make their living as teachers, but Hall has made his mostly as a freelance writer, packaging and selling his verbal wares wherever he could. This collection of well-crafted bric-a-brac demonstrates that he’s still not inclined to let any of his words go to waste.

Editor’s Note: Donald Hall died on June 23, 2018.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, July 2018

As director of the African American Studies program at Princeton University, Nell Painter seemed to be at the pinnacle of her distinguished career. The renowned historian had written numerous books, including the bestseller The History of White People. But at age 64, Painter surprised everyone by leaving Princeton to take up something completely different: art school. The road was anything but easy, as she explains in her bold, brave account, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over.

Not satisfied with being what she calls a “Sunday painter,” she was determined to study art on a professional level. First she got a BFA at Rutgers University, then she earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Amid the tattoos, piercings and bright yellow hair of her fellow students, Painter’s fashion statement consisted of a white T-shirt, black pants and “sturdy” New Balance walking shoes. She was “an exotic in art school . . . a creature from another planet.” Her confidence was hardly boosted when a RISD teacher informed her that she would never be an artist. Adding to her turmoil were anguish and grief over the fact that Painter’s mother was dying on the West Coast, leaving her father depressed and needy, necessitating cross-country trips and interventions.

Nonetheless, Painter persevered, enjoying moments of absolute euphoria at having the time and freedom to paint, while also experiencing interludes of extreme self-doubt and loneliness. In the end, she triumphed by relying on what she calls her “old standbys: education and hard work.”

Painter concludes that “the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it,” but she was able to find her own artistic voice by incorporating both history and text into her work which, in a way, brought her career full circle.

Old in Art School is a fascinating memoir about Painter’s daring choice to follow a passion with courage and intellect, even when the odds seemed firmly stacked against her.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Nell Painter about Old in Art School.

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

Picture a tree. Perhaps you visualize it at a distance, as though observing a photograph. James Aldred, a professional climber who has been on payroll for National Geographic and the BBC, would likely conjure something much more intimate: the texture of the bark, the give of the branches. Aldred’s new book, The Man Who Climbs Trees, lets us see the trees alongside him. If you’ve ever marveled at the ecosystems housed by these majestic, ascending towers of life, you will enjoy nestling into the pages of this book.

Each of the 10 chapters focuses on a particular tree from around the world. Aldred’s descriptions are breathtaking. When climbing the “Tree of Life” in Costa Rica, he happened upon a 6-foot iguana, which he refers to as an “arboreal dragon.” When in Borneo, he paused midway up a tree, closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the rainforest. When he opens his eyes, the view “rushed at me from every direction, as if a veil had been lifted. The jungle was so much greater than the sum of its parts, and I was nothing more than an atom adrift within this overwhelming tide of energy.”

As this passage suggests, Aldred’s devotion to these natural spaces verges on spiritual. Aldred gives the reader a real sense of his embodied experience. He describes all varieties of bugs—ants, bees, wasps, spiders—and how they crawl on his skin as he scales the trees, as well as the sheer exhaustion of tossing a rope over an ever-higher target. He recalls incredible primates—gibbons, gorillas, howler monkeys and so forth—and envies their climbing expertise. He spies lumbering elephants, stealthy cats, colorful birds, graceful butterflies and determined tree frogs. Truly, Aldred offers a feast for the imagination, one that will draw you back to the landscapes that you’ve loved and pull you forward toward new ones. This wide-ranging and beautiful book, brought to life with expertise, affection and respect, is not to be missed.

Kelly Sundberg’s memoir of domestic violence brilliantly records the shock, physical and emotional pain and, perhaps most poignantly, the confusion of abuse. The same man who could proclaim his love for Sundberg and their young child was also capable of verbally and physically assaulting her.

As a young woman, Sundberg longed for safety, and she found it with her warm, funny husband, Caleb. But eventually, he became the man most likely to kill her as cycles of abuse, regret and reconciliation became shorter and more intense. This confusing experience (sometimes called “gaslighting”) is one reason why women stay with their abusers, especially if they have become isolated from friends and family.

Because of its subject matter, Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival might seem difficult to read, but Sundberg’s crystalline prose and insightful narration lighten the reading experience. Sundberg captures the slow, terrifying evolution of her relationship: how a few red flags and a frightening episode of rage snowballed into brutal physical violence. She is careful (maybe too careful?) to balance her portrait of Caleb’s abuse with his good qualities, and she does not engage in self-pity. She provides an important record of how anyone could find themselves in an abusive relationship and lends understanding to the reasons they stay—and how and why she eventually left.

Sundberg’s story is haunting, propulsive and, perhaps for some readers, familiar. Her wrenching memoir deserves to be read by a wide audience so that we can all learn to recognize the signs of domestic abuse.

But Sundberg is also a talented writer with many more stories to tell: about her childhood in Salmon, Idaho, her experiences as a forest ranger and her difficult relationship with her mother. These narratives, hinted at throughout Goodbye, Sweet Girl, suggest a rich terrain of material for Sundberg to mine in future stories. I, for one, look forward to hearing more from her.

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

Love is a complicated matter. That’s true for anyone, and it’s a concept Darnell L. Moore has wrestled with throughout his life.

Moore was born into tough circumstances as the child of two black teenagers in Camden, New Jersey. What his large and close family lacked financially, they made up for in love. But Moore struggled to love himself. He recognized his attraction to other men at a young age, and he found it abhorrent. Homosexuality didn’t fit with his idea of acceptable black masculinity. Moore pushed down his feelings with a tough attitude and attempted to hide from the world with a series of girlfriends and sexual encounters with women.

It didn’t work. When he was 14, neighborhood boys suspected him of being gay and attempted to set him on fire. The fire didn’t light, but the bullying left emotional scars.

In No Ashes in the Fire, writer and Black Lives Matter leader Moore recounts decades of running from his true self. His lyrical reflection reveals a teenage boy in search of his family story—and a young man who ran from it.

“As long as I wasn’t a clone of my dad, I thought, there was no need for her to complain,” he writes of his emotionally manipulative relationships with women. “I hadn’t yet realized I was his son, his likeness, an ellipsis extending his presence into the world.”

Moore describes years of self-loathing and the drugs, then religiosity, he used to mask his desires. He faces his biases against certain people, such as black femme men, and in doing so he realizes—and invites the reader to recognize—that justice means freedom and equality for all.

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

Poet Karen Auvinen’s memoir, Rough Beauty, opens on a beautiful March morning, when Auvinen, out delivering the mail on her rural Colorado route, notices the deep blue of the sky, the signs of early spring and smoke from a fire—a fire that turns out to be her own house burning. She’d recently settled outside the Rocky Mountain town of Jamestown, but now, Auvinen can only watch as firefighters work to contain the fire, which destroys everything she owns.

Auvinen then drops back to detail her difficult adolescence: an abusive dad, an impassive mom, a peripatetic childhood. But she dispatches with her youth quickly, focusing instead on the years that followed the devastating fire and describing life at the edge of the wilderness. “Up on the mountain, summer was easy,” she writes. “The world was green and glorious. Aspens clacked in the breeze and hummingbirds whirred across meadows gone crazy with wildflowers. Mornings dawned open and wide blue, but by noon, the sky blackened and thunder rumbled.”

As she describes her patchwork of jobs, her friends and a relationship gone bad, Auvinen paints a picture of quirky Jamestown, home to 300. She works part-time as a cook at Jamestown’s Mercantile Café and tries to help her aging mother, who has begun a slow decline. Auvinen isn’t afraid to show her own prickly character or her loneliness. But the heart of this memoir is her relationship with her rescue dog, Elvis, a Husky mix with a penchant for wandering. As Elvis nears the end of his life, Auvinen finds a new (human) relationship and her own happy ending.

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

The threat of mortality has a peculiar way of amplifying a person’s regrets. The Electric Woman, an honest and emotionally vulnerable memoir by Tessa Fontaine, chronicles the author’s relationship with her mother, who suffered a massive stroke that left her a shadow of her former self.

Inspired by her mother’s lust for life, Fontaine decides to challenge herself and conquer her fears. She says of her mother, “She’s a yes person, a woman of adventure. When I begin to doubt that I can pull this off, I stop and think of her.” On a whim, the author accepts an invitation to join a traveling circus. Although she essentially bluffs her way into a job, Fontaine quickly finds herself fully immersed in the rag-tag carnival lifestyle. She is drawn to this world of illusions and the carnival workers’ ability to seamlessly transform onstage. Fontaine takes up the acts of escape artist, snake charmer and “Electric Woman,” an act during which she lights bulbs with her tongue.

Fontaine partially frames her memoir as an anthropological investigation. She is a stranger in a strange land, observing the various characters that comprise the circus. Yet despite her misgivings, she finds a genuine camaraderie with her carnival co-workers. Throughout the circus narrative, Fontaine soberly recounts hospital visits with her mother in the Bay Area, her obvious love for her mother permeating each interaction like perfume.

In this memoir that seamlessly balances grief, loss and wild-eyed determination, Fontaine makes a compelling case for using fear as an unexpected gift.

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

In Maker of Patterns, Freeman Dyson weaves a quilt sewn from the colorful memories of the early years of his life. The Princeton physicist emeritus stitches together the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and the professional and personal triumphs and failures of his early life in this collection of letters, written mostly to his family from 1941-1978. He interweaves his later reflections between the letters, commenting on various events or figures he’s described in the letters.

In most of the letters, Dyson describes his day-to-day life, but he also reflects on his love of languages, literature and history and his evolving work in physics as he moves from Trinity College in Cambridge, England, to Cornell and eventually to Princeton. Zelig-like, Dyson witnesses many of the most momentous events of the 20th century, from the end of World War II and the hydrogen bomb to the civil rights movement and the Apollo moon landing. The most interesting aspects of his letters are his observations about figures such as Robert Oppenheimer—“unreceptive to new ideas in general”—theologian and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr—who had a “reputation for being gloomy”—and physicist Edward Teller—“he seems to do physics for fun rather than for glory”—among others. Dyson also chronicles his two marriages, admitting that he thinks he’s a better father than a husband, as well as his growing work in atomic physics as he tries to apply his theories to nuclear problems. His final reflection looks to the future, and he warns that pure science is best “driven by intellectual curiosity, but applied science needs also to be driven by ethics.” Dyson is hopeful that his granddaughter and her generation will have a chance to make this happen.

Maker of Patterns reveals a glimpse into the keenly curious mind and the passionate life of one of our greatest scientists and public figures.