It’s hard to believe that we’ve been without Pat Conroy’s lovable, gruff voice for three years now. When he died on March 4, 2016, we lost one of the last of a generation of Southern writers whose humorous, riveting, sad, terrifying and redemptive stories captured the ragged ways families fall in and out of love and hope. From his first novel, The Water Is Wide (which catapulted Conroy to a fame he never quite knew how to navigate), to Beach Music, his novels, like Thomas Wolfe’s glorious pageants, portray the struggle of finding home again and living in families whose steel-edged sentimentality prevents them from ever acknowledging the hard truths of abuse, failed love and violence.

The 2016 release of A Lowcountry Heart gave readers a chance to hear his entertaining voice as he regaled them with his reflections of the writing life. Now, in My Exaggerated Life, we get to hear Conroy’s voice again, unadorned and speaking plainly and cantankerously about his struggles and his triumphs in life. Between 2014 and 2016, Conroy spoke on the phone to biographer Katherine Clark—who co-wrote Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet with another Southern raconteur, Eugene Walter—every day for an hour or more; no topic was off limits. Clark weaves these conversations into a revealing biography structured by the places Conroy called home over the years: Beaufort, Atlanta, Rome, San Francisco and Fripp Island. Conroy admits his mistake in marrying Lenore Fleischer, his second wife, even as he rages over her taking away their daughter, Susannah, from him in the divorce. Conroy mourns the loss of Susannah—they never reconciled—deeply. He learns through therapy that he gets involved with people because he feels he needs to rescue them. He tells delightful stories about his years with his publisher, Nan Talese, and their work together.

Every page of My Exaggerated Life contains a gem from Conroy, despite the pain and vulnerability he shares through the book. His love of reading and writing fills the air that he breathes: “My deepest living is in the imagination of others, when I take that magic carpet ride of being a reader. . . . I think that’s why I want to write, to make others feel that way.” Welcome to Conroy’s magic carpet, and enjoy the ride.

How are families shaped by race, economics, genetics, love, jealousy and rifts? These are the questions Gregory Pardlo ponders in his highly anticipated memoir, Air Traffic. “In studying my family’s destruction, I am studying my own,” he writes in a raw, telling statement.

Pardlo enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in 2015, when his second book of poetry, Digest, won the Pulitzer Prize. Air Traffic is a narrative digest of his life and those of his family members, several of whom also experienced dramatic rises and falls. The poet delves deeply into a mosaic of memories, chronicling growing up black in Willingboro, New Jersey, in the 1970s and the battles he, his brother, father and other relatives have fought with depression, alcoholism and mental illness.

The Pardlos seemed firmly entrenched in middle-class security until August 5, 1981, when President Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, including Pardlo’s father. Gregory Sr. never quite recovered from the blow.

Meanwhile, during his teen years, the author’s “self-image was caught in a bitter custody battle between Alex. P. Keaton and Jimi Hendrix,” yet his adult years morph into a yo-yoing stream of failure and success.

The book’s powerful final chapter, “On Intervention,” offers a fascinating account of how Pardlo’s younger brother, Robbie, became the subject of the A&E reality show “Intervention” in 2010. Robbie shot to fame as a musician, once singing backup for Whitney Houston and forming the R&B trio City High, known for its Grammy-nominated hit, “What Would You Do?” Robbie’s drinking, however, caused his life to implode.

“Alcoholism was the Muzak of our familial dysfunction,” Pardlo explains. “Most of the time we didn’t even notice it.” Ironically, the intervention helped the author, not his brother, find his way to sobriety. However, Pardlo writes, “There can be no happily ever after for a recovering drunk like me.” That being said, Pardlo seems to be defying the odds, turning his pain into mesmerizing poetry and prose.

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

Life was an adventure for young Tyler Kane. By age 9, her family had lived in nine homes. By age 12, she began to understand why.

Her name wasn’t Kane after all, she learned, but Wetherall. Her family’s frequent moves to different continents weren’t adventures—they were hiding from authorities.

Wetherall and her siblings were the children of a fugitive. Their parents began to reveal the truth as it became inevitable. Wetherall would notice a black car following her outside of her mother’s house, and every visit to her father was shrouded in mystery.

On Wetherall’s 12th birthday, Scotland Yard finally caught up to her father. But even as her dad served prison time for his crimes, she remained unsure about what he had done that landed him there. Wetherall and her sister dreamed up potential scenarios. Surely it was more than tax evasion. But could their father have done something as serious as kill a person? And if he had, how would they react? Their father had shared literature that seemed designed to increase their empathy for people on the run—Les Misérables, for example. But The Fugitive was off limits. Had he done something they would be able to forgive?

Wetherall’s captivating No Way Home is a reminder that our actions affect not only our own paths but also the lives of everyone close to us. Our stories are intertwined with our loved ones’ lives, no matter what distances—or steel bars—come between us.

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

The mind is a precious thing to lose. Dr. Barbara K. Lipska, the director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health, learned this terrifying truth firsthand. In January of 2015, a melanoma diagnosis turned her once nimble mind into a war zone. With alarming quickness, the metastatic melanoma in Lipska’s brain attacked her frontal lobe, the area of the brain responsible for behavior, personality, learning and voluntary movement. She began to transform into a distant stranger, experiencing symptoms that mimicked dementia and schizophrenia. Friends and family members wondered if this new version of their beloved mother, wife, friend and colleague would permanently replace the woman they once knew. Lipska waged a tough battle against her faulty brain, and remarkably, through radiation and immunotherapy, she recovered.

As a medical professional whose career revolves around analyzing the molecular and genetic structure of the brain, it seems a cruel trick of fate that Lipska was struck by a disease that affected her own brain function. In The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind, Lipska recounts her ordeal with equal parts raw honesty and clear-eyed conviction. Her brush with death changed her physically, mentally and emotionally, and lead to a realization that the tragedy of an unlived life should be feared more than death itself. Lipska writes, “I’ve become more aware of living. I try harder than ever to find meaning in ordinary things every day.” While this sentiment could seem trite in other memoirs, Lipska avoids sentimentality and doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that her descent into “madness” resulted in collateral damage among her loved ones; she was somewhat safe in the eye of the storm.

Lipska’s memoir makes clear that, in many ways, our brains are still a mystery.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, April 2018

In 1985, Jefferson County, Alabama, suffered a string of armed robberies. The robber would attack restaurant managers, take their cash, force them into the cooler and then shoot them in cold blood. Two managers died; the third survived and gave a description of the attacker to the police. Based on this identification, the sheriff’s department arrested Anthony Ray Hinton, an African-American man out on parole for auto theft.

But Hinton had an ironclad alibi: At the time of the third robbery, he was at work 15 miles away, with a security guard who noted Hinton’s whereabouts throughout his shift. Furthermore, Hinton took and passed a polygraph test. He was innocent. Yet the district attorney pursued Hinton’s conviction with the grim determination of the furies, aided in his dogged efforts by an incompetent defense attorney, a racist jury and a judge who ruled in the State’s favor at every turn. Hinton was eventually tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the two murders. He spent 30 years on death row before being released in 2015. Hinton tells his story in his harrowing, powerful memoir, The Sun Does Shine.

This book is filled with questions that infuriate. Why did the DA ignore the evidence of Hinton’s innocence? Why would the State ignore prosecutorial misconduct and refuse to consider new exonerating evidence? Why spend so much time, effort and money to execute a man for a murder he demonstrably did not commit?

Yet The Sun Does Shine is also filled with grace. Through his faith in God, the love of his friends and mother, his commitment to the other inmates on death row and the unstinting support of his appellate attorney (Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative), Hinton maintained his soul in a soulless world. His experience gives him a peerless moral authority on the death penalty, and he raises powerful questions about the practice. Hinton’s voice demands to be heard.

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

Poet Stephen Kuusisto faced a crisis when he lost his job as a poetry professor in upstate New York. Kuusisto has been legally blind since birth, and he now needed a new job—and a new way of navigating the world. It’s a journey he explores in Have Dog, Will Travel.

Growing up in the 1950s, Kuusisto’s parents taught him to never show others his blindness, to live actively and try to ignore his limitations. He writes, “My parents thought disabled kids were victims of a nearly unimaginable fate, a predatory darkness.” Incredibly, he rode a bike, marched in Boy Scout parades and read with books pressed against his face. But he also faced endless bullying and was forced to live in a carefully circumscribed world that he navigated by familiarity and step counting. “Faking sight is like being illiterate—you pretend to competence but live by guesswork,” he writes. Nearing 40, he finally decided to stop pretending.

Kuusisto met with a representative from the New York State Commission for the Blind, who was hardly encouraging and doubted Kuusisto would find work. He referred Kuusisto to a company that manufactured plastic lemons for lemon juice, saying they sometimes hired blind people.

Yet he did not let this less-than- heartening meeting deter him from seeking assistance. Enter Kuusisto’s first guide dog, a yellow Labrador named Corky. Their “arranged marriage” expanded Kuusisto’s world by literal leaps and bounds, and their relationship forms the heart of this enchanting, enlightening book. As Kuusisto describes, having a guide dog “doesn’t feel like driving a car. It’s not like running. Sometimes I think it’s a bit like swimming. A really long swim when you’re buoyant and fast.”

Before long, Kuusisto is navigating the streets of New York City with Corky, experiencing a sense of freedom he’d never felt before. And in the years that followed, Corky not only liberated this poet but also ushered him back into the world, opening up his life in ways that he would never have imagined. Have Dog, Will Travel is an illuminating memoir of mobility, ability, delight and discovery.

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

Former Marine and current college writing instructor Matt Young relives his grueling Marine training and his three deployments to Iraq in this searing memoir. His months in the desert are a fever dream of fiendish insects, extreme temperatures, tedium and terror.

Young enlists in the Marines without much forethought, walking into a strip mall recruitment center after drunkenly crashing his car, drawn to the belief that “the only way to change is the self-flagellation achieved by signing up for war.” He leaves behind his “broken and distant” family and a young fiancée who is just heading off to college. He, at 18, is also just a kid.

For the most part, Young sidesteps any direct judgment of the war, but his writing makes clear the toll the war took on him personally. Young describes a tumbling Humvee that hits an improvised explosive device; a liquor-soaked 96-hour leave during which he struggles to talk to his family about anything other than combat; shooting dogs while on patrol, then being haunted by that act. “It’s important to remember our boredom and lack of sleep and anger and sadness and youth and misunderstanding and loneliness and hate,” Young writes.

And that is the uncompromising essence of Eat the Apple: Young is unflinching, even slightly removed as he examines the most brutally personal moments of his years in service. Sometimes he writes in the first person, sometimes in the second. He incorporates sketches of his body along with self-diagnoses of his physical and psychic pain, which are insightful rather than self-indulgent. And he pays tribute to those he served with, including those who came home broken or didn’t come home at all: “We didn’t die, but there are those who did, and regardless of who they were as men they should be remembered.”

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

Francisco Cantú’s quietly heartbreaking memoir The Line Becomes a River explores the reckless contours of the U.S.-Mexico border, a place Cantú first knew through memory (as the grandson of a migrant), then through higher learning (as he studied international relations in college), then through his profession (as a border patrol agent) and finally, through poetic recounting (as a witness to and chronicler of the border). The Line Becomes a River, comprised of journalistic dispatches and lyrical descriptions of troubling dreams and landscapes, is both intimate and unforgettable.

The memoir opens as Cantú enlists in the border patrol. His mother, part confidant and part prophet, warns him of the dangers of associating with the institution. She doesn’t understand Cantú’s attraction to the role; she is uneasy and fearful. Cantú, both brash and compassionate, argues in favor of the career: As a Spanish speaker, he can be of real service to the migrants; as someone curious about the border, he can finally peer into the everyday confrontations that unfold there.

But the everyday confrontations are horrible and mundane: a dead man’s body left to decompose overnight, dope hauls and the attendant paperwork, starry skyscapes that hang uneasily over enemies hiding from each other in dark mountains. Cantú is forever changed by this work, and while he becomes good at it, he finds he cannot see it through. Even after he leaves, he is haunted. He writes, “I often recognized the subtle mark left by the crossing of the border, an understanding of its physical and abstract dimensions, a lingering impression of its weight.” This memoir—already much acclaimed and the winner of the prestigious Whiting Award—helps readers see the border as Cantú does, a place full of ambiguity and danger, a place hidden in plain sight, a place Americans should try to see.

When John Lewis Mealer set out from the hollows of the Georgia Blue Ridge in 1892, it was to escape warring moonshiners and lawmen, and to find work in the exploding, inviting West. Young, unmarried and intent on making something of himself, he wanted a fresh start. Almost a century later, John’s grandson and author Bryan Mealer’s father, Bobby, left his steady but dead-end job at a chemical plant near Houston for the oil booms and busts of Big Spring, Texas, taking a big chance on oil with his mercurial cousin Grady. Married and the father of three, Bobby too was looking for a fresh start.

In between these familiar quests rolled a near-century full of heroes and heartbreaks, world wars and depressions, dust storms, droughts and drugs—all rigorously described in this sprawl of a story that entwines family and global history. God, like Texas oil, was a constant threat or promise; church was as all encompassing—and sometimes oppressive—as family. The Mealer men were wannabe kings, hoping to claim the throne that an oil boom promised—or to at least own their own land.

The Kings of Big Spring is a family tree that offers no shade for its errant members. Violent, luckless husbands; unfaithful, hapless wives; and abandoned, wayward children are plentiful here. Their tales are told with the straightforwardness of a seasoned journalist, though Mealer seems justifiably wary of some of them. Like the Mealers, Big Spring crashed and reinvented itself, again and again. Weather was an endless cycle of killing winds. Pestilence was a curse. The economy was dependent on vulnerable crops and volatile markets. Oil helped to power two world wars and the Korean conflict, then transformed itself via petrochemicals.

Mealer says of his family, “We drew our strength from the power of our own flesh and blood.” The same could be said of Texas history, then and now.

In this voice-driven memoir, Dawn Davies tells her story in a fragmented way, moving through time in great leaps—childhood, young adulthood, single parenthood, post-divorce love, baffled-but-game mother of the bride. An early essay recalls her childhood spent trying to feel at home but getting uprooted repeatedly: As soon as she gets the hang of upstate New York, she’s uprooted to Florida, starting over while her parents’ marriage disintegrates. An essay about her young adulthood begins like a short story: “Once, when I was twenty, I went on a date with a man I met at the Army Navy store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” This date goes terribly wrong, but in a most unexpected way. She also recounts a difficult pregnancy through the lens of an interminable dinner party, punctuated by her awful morning sickness and others’ drunkenness.

Some of these essays are harrowing, describing intractable medical ailments, sudden poverty, a husband who bails out. But Davies is also a funny and vivid writer. In a lighter essay she imagines the men she might have slept with, a strangely compelling list that includes Doc Holliday, John Irving and Jon Hamm. She also does a funny takedown of the bizarre realm of soccer moms, implicating herself and her own fixation on her little athletes.

These essays surprise, illuminating odd corners of parenthood. Perhaps most surprising is the heartbreaking title essay, which examines the rigors of parenting a child through multiple medical emergencies and mental illness, but she intersperses these episodes with sections in which she imagines herself as a mother of an ancient Spartan warrior, asking a parent’s most difficult questions. But because the book’s previous essays have very little to say about her son’s difficulties, this essay, late in the book, comes as a shock. Still, Davies’ voice is compelling, and one worth following.

Jennifer McGaha and her husband, David, were living the American dream in North Carolina: big house, private school for their kids—and debt. Mountains of debt. David, an accountant, shielded Jennifer from just how dire the situation was. But when the government came knocking for a staggering amount of back taxes, Jennifer and David had no choice but to foreclose on their dream home and move to a family-owned cabin in an Appalachian holler.

“Cabin” might actually be a charitable description for the barely inhabitable place in which they find themselves. Abandoned for years, the leaky structure is overrun with mice, snakes and other critters. Deep in the mountains, the surrounding area is starkly beautiful but dark and damp from a nearby waterfall.

The shell-shocked couple sets about making the house into a home and learning how to live off the land. Still reeling, Jennifer flees when a temporary teaching job materializes at a college in Illinois, where she faces her crushing (if unfair) disappointment at David’s inability to rescue their finances. “On the one hand, you know you and your husband are having trouble paying the bills,” she writes. “On the other hand, you believe this is not actually a problem, that the money is there somewhere and your husband just needs to look harder to find it. And when the money doesn’t materialize, you are astounded, your fantasy world obliterated.”

She returns at the end of the semester determined to make life in Appalachian North Carolina work. Enter chickens, then goats, as Jennifer and David work to produce their own food. While the first half of the book finds the author in a state of paralysis, the second half reveals her efforts to first reconcile herself to and then find simple pleasures in her new life. She learns to make cheese and soap, to help a goat give birth, to forgive her husband and herself.

Flat Broke with Two Goats is a brave book written in beautifully unflinching detail. McGaha lays bare the flaws in her marriage, the poor choices that led them to rock bottom and how they found their way to a new definition of home.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, February 2018

This stunning, poetic memoir from Terese Marie Mailhot burns like hot coal. I read it in a single feverish session, completely absorbed and transported by Mailhot’s powerful and original voice. Mailhot’s story—which extends from an impoverished childhood on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia through foster care, teenage motherhood and mental illness—could seem a painful litany of misfortune were it not for the transformative alchemy of her art.

Sherman Alexie, in his introduction to this memoir, calls Heart Berries “an Iliad for the indigenous,” and recognizes Mailhot as a striking new voice in First Nation writing. The strength of her writing comes from Mailhot’s fearless embrace of emotional darkness and in her depiction of the psychic cost of living in a white man’s world. For example, after Mailhot’s mother has an intense epistolary love affair with convicted murderer Salvador Agron, her words and memories are used by the musician Paul Simon for his musical The Capeman, in which her character is reduced to an “Indian hippie chick.” Mailhot herself falls in precipitous love with her writing teacher, a passion that initially lands her in a mental ward.

Although diagnosed with bipolar II, post-traumatic stress disorder and an eating disorder, Mailhot links her illness to something she calls “Indian sick,” which is as historical as it is individual. There is “something feminine and ancestral” in her illness, which requires an acknowledgment of the generational trauma of First Nation people. Storytelling, Mailhot feels, is a first step toward healing both the individual and her people.

Situating her physical and psychic pain in context with a multigenerational focus, Mailhot crafts an intensely moving story about mothers and what they pass down to their children.

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