You might say New Orleans entered an existential crisis after Hurricane Katrina. People across the country weighed in on the city’s future: Should New Orleans rebuild? Or should it accept that life below sea level, on the coast, wasn’t meant to be?

Anne Gisleson and her fellow members of the Existential Crisis Reading Group could relate. In 2012, seven years after the storm, the New Orleanians banded together to read and discuss works that addressed life’s big questions. Together, they would process through the grief and uncertainty that so often accompany different phases of life.

For Gisleson, grief was not only civic but also deeply personal. In the group’s first month, her father died of cancer. Gisleson’s two youngest sisters, twins Rebecca and Rachel, died by suicide about 15 years earlier, 18 months apart. “Losing a sibling, especially in youth, is a particular blow, a lateral loss of shared history and DNA that lacerates your identity,” Gisleson writes. “Your old narrative is shattered. Your new narrative becomes shapeless, full of confusion and pain. Double that.”

The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading seamlessly melds together Gisleson’s story, New Orleans’ ongoing recovery and existential discovery. It also serves as something of a guide for readers wrestling with their own struggles, with an appendix of works cited for further exploration.

Through each month’s reading and discussion, Gisleson and her companions engage with big, sometimes bleak ideas. And no matter the grief that drew each of them to the group, they remain focused on a shared goal: living.

“This life is our cross,” one member says during the group’s interpretation of the Stations of the Cross (which they dubbed “The Way of the Crisis”). “Here we are together to engage and discuss, duke it out, support each other in our fight with this cross. Here we have gathered in our own ‘Fight Club.’”

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the winter of 2011, 81-year-old retired college professor and mathematician Jay Mendelsohn enrolled in Classics 125: The Odyssey of Homer, an undergraduate seminar taught by his son, Daniel, at Bard College. In this insightful, tender book, the younger Mendelsohn gracefully marries literary criticism and memoir to describe how that class launched an intellectual and personal journey that becomes one of profound discovery for both men.

Father and son are unlikely traveling companions as they embark on this odyssey. Daniel acknowledges an antipathy to the world of hard science to which his prickly father devoted his life, while Jay approaches Homer’s revered work with skepticism born of a conviction that Odysseus was something less than a real hero. “This is going to be a nightmare,” Daniel worries, after his father violates a pledge not to speak even before the first class session ends. But by the time the semester concludes and the Mendelsohns depart for a cruise that retraces Odysseus’ difficult homeward trek, they seem to have reached a well-earned truce, born of their deep engagement with the classic work and their respect for each other.

Daniel is an artful storyteller whose skills are equal to the task of weaving Homer’s poem into his own life. Most impressive are his transitions from scholarly consideration of “The Odyssey” to intimate stories of his family life, as when the class discussion of Odysseus’ reunion with his wife, Penelope, at the end of his 10-year voyage home from Troy flows effortlessly into a magical moment, witnessing Jay as he offers a heartbreakingly beautiful tribute to his wife of more than six decades. Daniel writes, “You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.” That’s only one of the many wise lessons to be gleaned from this lovely book.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“If I wanted to have children with anyone,” he’d said, “it would be with you.” If was the key word. If was the problem.

Heather Harpham and Brian fell for each other quickly, in a classic opposites-attract scenario. They were both creative professionals, but the obvious common ground ended there. She was as carefree as her California upbringing would suggest, and her disposition was well-suited to her career in theater. Brian, on the other hand, embodied the expectation of the East Coast elite. He preferred time inside, alone, left to his writing.

Their dreams were also at odds: Harpham always expected she would someday become a mother, but Brian had no interest in being a dad.

When Harpham learns she’s pregnant, that news appears to end the relationship. She flees New York, heartbroken but determined to raise their daughter alone. But within hours of Gracie’s birth, doctors realize something is wrong with the infant’s blood.

Gracie’s doctors are unable to pinpoint precisely what is wrong, but frequent blood transfusions help. Harpham doesn’t know what Brian wants, even when he meets their daughter six months after her birth.

Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After follows Harpham’s unexpected pregnancy and all that follows. It is filled with both pain and beauty, and she shares a clear-eyed view of messy relationships and the journey toward something that resembles joy. Harpham’s powerful memoir is the tale of two people struggling to save their daughter while trying to discern what their relationship to one another is all about. “We find happiness, if we find it at all, on accident,” Harpham writes. “We trip over it on our way somewhere else.” And by sharing her own experience, Harpham provides light for others’ paths.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The sheer immensity of India—its history, geography, politics and peoples—would be hard to condense under any circumstances, but author Sujatha Gidla, niece of the communist revolutionary hero and poet Satyamurthy, brilliantly narrows the scope by explaining the tumultuous events of 20th-century India through her own family’s strife-ridden lives. The result is Ants Among Elephants, an intense exploration of India’s caste system in all of its complexities, and the impact it continues to have in modern India.

Born an untouchable in a slum of Andhra Pradesh, Gidla explains that the role of her caste is “to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy.” Mingling with those not in her caste is forbidden, and doing so can result in punishment. Untouchables live highly restricted lives, and their caste status affects nearly every aspect of their existence. When, at the age of 26, Gidla moves to America, “where people know only skin color,” she realizes that her caste is now invisible and “my stories, my family’s stories, are not stories of shame.”

The lives of Gidla’s uncles and parents convulsed as their country heaved with the changing times. Sweeping through it all with a broad but enlightening brush, Gidla pauses her tale to explore moments in time with vivid, grim details about the cruelties and injustices inflicted on her caste. Her father was forced to leave his starving children in order to support them, while her mother overcame prejudices to earn advanced degrees, only to become a teacher unable to hold a job. Satyamurthy inspired Gidla’s own activism before barely escaping with his life. Today Gidla works as a subway conductor in New York, telling these stories to ensure they will continue to matter.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The work Cree LeFavour has done—in therapy and in this stunning new memoir—rebuilds a damaged and fragmented self. But for most of Lights On, Rats Out, the reader races forward, worried that LeFavour and her therapist, called Dr. Kohl here, won’t be able to stop her self-destruction. Her chosen weapon is cigarettes, using them to inflict third-degree burns on her own body.

After a childhood in the hippie bohemia of Woody Park, Colorado, a post-college LeFavour pretends she’s just fine, despite the fact that her father abandoned the family to open a fabulous Napa Valley restaurant, leaving LeFavour and her sister in the alcoholic neglect of their mother. Living alone by age 13, she’s exposed to the over-sexualized 1970s without parental guidance. In her early 20s, LeFavour’s careful facade begins to crack: Isolation, binge eating and long hours of reading no longer keep her safe from her psychological demons.

Entering therapy with Dr. Kohl, LeFavour initially spirals into the compulsive rituals of self-harm. An institutionalization—vividly portrayed here—doesn’t appear to help. What does help, however, are the careful boundaries Dr. Kohl helps LeFavour gradually draw around herself. LeFavour’s portrayal of the dramatic exchanges between herself and Dr. Kohl is the best literary depiction of psychological transference I have ever read, including Freud’s Dora.

If all this sounds dramatic and intense, it is—and perhaps this memoir, with literary antecedents in Henry James and Sylvia Plath, isn’t for everyone. But LeFavour’s wry humor and whip-smart, bookish references create a brilliant portrait of a certain kind of young American: intelligent, sensitive and wounded.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You may not have heard of Stephen Westaby, but in the medical world, he's internationally renowned as a brilliant heart surgeon. Based in Oxford, England, he's a pioneer in artificial heart technology and recently retired from active surgery after more than four decades in the operating theater.

Westaby's highly readable Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table is part memoir, part how-to (perform open-heart surgery, that is) and part All Creatures Great and Small-style reflection, with stories throughout about cases he's encountered during his journey from eager medical student to seen-it-all senior physician.

Some vignettes tell of smashing successes, such as the chapter about Peter Houghton, the artificial heart recipient who lived for over seven years after becoming the first person to be given an artificial heart for permanent use rather than as a bridge to transplantation. Others recount tragic failures, such as the death of an 18-month-old patient followed almost immediately by his mother's suicide. Westaby relates these cases in a matter-of-fact tone—a tone that he makes clear is a necessary survival mechanism in a profession in which death is a constant companion.

The focus of this book is on the patients, and rightfully so, but Westaby allows us a few glimpses into the mind of a doctor at the top of the profession, “desperate to do some good.” He knows it's time to get out when not only is his hand gnarled from handling surgical instruments, but when he finds empathy taking over for that all-important objectivity. England's famed National Health Service is also a source of frustration, featuring countless bureaucratic battles and the necessity of relying on charitable funds for risky surgeries. But frustrations aside, Open Heart is a heart-tugger, and a fascinating read.

Jen Waite’s memoir of betrayal and infidelity has hit a cultural nerve. Offering up every woman’s nightmare, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing expands on the story Waite originally offered in viral blog posts: While she was in labor with her daughter, her husband was on the phone with his girlfriend. When she fled to her parents’ house in Maine to recover from the birth, her husband checked out new apartments with the woman Waite calls “Croella.” When she confronted her husband, he denied it all. And then, as Waite obsessively checked her husband’s email, phone records and social media, she discovered that he’d been a womanizing, pathological liar all along.

Waite’s full-length memoir is like a car crash the reader can’t look away from. Yes, the husband is on the psychopathic spectrum; yes, he is incapable of empathy; and yes, he is a “bad man.” But this reader, at least, longed for a little more self-reflection on the part of the narrator. Her obsessive rifling through her husband’s email and phone records, Uber receipts and Netflix movies, is unhealthy and compulsive at the very least.

Waite’s marriage only occurred in 2014, so this is still fresh material. One wonders how she will continue to process this frightening story in the fullness of time. The resolution here indicates that Waite is now in training to become a therapist specializing in recovery from abusive relationships. Suspenseful and gripping, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing documents the dynamics of an abusive marriage and is sure to spark important conversations.

Get out that vintage bike—or imagine the one you always wished for—and join award-winning Sports Illustrated writer Steve Rushin on a wild ride through his ’70s boyhood in fast-growing Bloomington, Minnesota. Once the proud owner of his own Sting-Ray bike, Rushin was born just in time to watch the first man land on the moon. Sting-Ray Afternoons takes it from there in this fiercely funny memoir about family, sports, music, food and fads.

Rushin is the middle child of a frequently traveling, hardworking 3M salesman and a stay-at-home mom who somehow remained sane and mostly in control of four brawling boys and an unflappable daughter. A candid observer of his own troubles—sleepwalking, night terrors and sibling wars among them—Rushin adds wit with a comic’s timing to his tales. Meanwhile, the Sears Wish Book catalog promised grand Christmases, the new Weber grill delivered backyard barbecues, and the Vikings went down in Super Bowl defeat an ignominious four times. Pringles were pretty new, and who knew that their creator would someday ask to be cremated and buried in a Pringles can? Rushin is a wealth of such odd facts.

Mixing in more sports and popular trivia than any board game can provide, Rushin offers up a time capsule of the 1970s. The affection he bestows on his family—foibles and scars notwithstanding—colors the details of their times together. “Childhood disappears down a storm drain,” Rushin concludes. “It flows, then trickles, then vanishes. . . .” Sting-Ray Afternoons does its best to ensure the devil in those details lives on.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Naoki Higashida is a nonverbal, autistic young man whose first widely translated memoir, The Reason I Jump, written when he was 13, was received with acclaim and incredulity. Acclaim because it detailed the vivid inner life of someone who had, before his mother’s intervention with what they call an “alphabet grid” (a modified QWERTY keyboard), seemed unresponsive, and incredulity because it seemed impossible that someone who was genuinely autistic and working independently could compose such coherent and artful prose. Since writing The Reason I Jump, Higashida has become a celebrity in Japan and the second most widely translated Japanese author behind Haruki Murakami.

Higashida’s new collection—comprised of blog entries, poems, a short story and an interview—brings readers up to speed with the author, now in his early 20s. His thoughts on neurological diversity are riveting: “My brain has this habit of getting lost inside things. Finding the way in is easy, but—like being in a maze—finding your way out is a lot harder. I want to exit the maze right now, but I’m forced to stay inside it. This applies also to time and schedules. They constrain me.” Higashida’s accounts of thinking in images, feeling compelled to make repetitive movements and the difficulties and pleasures of communicating make this book totally captivating. Translator and bestselling author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) introduces the volume with an account of the dismay he felt when Higashida’s work was dismissed by critics as fraudulent. Mitchell points out that he has witnessed Higashida’s composing firsthand, and that, moreover, Higashida’s prose has changed the way he perceives—and interacts with—his own autistic son. Mitchell writes that bringing Higashida’s writing to a larger public has been the most important writing task of his life.

Readers will find this older Higashida not only eloquent and thoughtful, but also wise, measured and, most of all, kind.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 2000, Pia de Jong and her husband, Robbert Dijkgraaf, eagerly welcomed their third child, a daughter named Charlotte. Five years earlier, the couple had moved into a 17th-century brick canal house in Amsterdam. A sign above the door gave the construction date: 1632.

De Jong felt welcomed by the house—and the colorful cast of characters in the neighborhood: There’s a young, blonde prostitute doing business in the alley who can guess that de Jong is pregnant just by looking at her; Mackie, an angry man who watches over not only his aging mother, but the entire neighborhood; and across the canal is Rutger, an old, sick man who tells de Jong, “That house belongs to you. It was waiting all these years for you to move in. I should know. I’ve lived across from it all my life.”

When newborn Charlotte arrives, she is embraced by her parents and two older brothers, as well as by this odd, eccentric community. But it is clear from the first that something is wrong. The midwife finds an unusual bump on the baby’s skin that when touched turns blue. Charlotte has congenital myeloid leukemia. Informed that the prognosis is poor, de Jong and her husband, with the support of their compassionate oncologist, choose to actively watch and wait rather than subject Charlotte to potentially deadly chemotherapy.

With a novelist’s sense of story and characters, de Jong paints a vivid picture of Charlotte’s first year. Even when we don’t see the neighbors, we feel their concern cradling the family, and especially this small, brave baby, who keeps fighting—and eventually goes into remission.

Several cases of spontaneous remission have occurred, and “watchful waiting” is now a standard protocol for this type of leukemia. The subject of this inspiring, heartfelt memoir is now a healthy teenager living with her family in Princeton, New Jersey.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In old Latvia, Inara Verzemnieks tells us, people believed that the dead returned home once a year to see how everyone was doing. The living couldn’t see them, but they felt their presence, maybe even talked to them. It was a source of great comfort.

After decades of upheaval and migration, the traditional beliefs have gone underground. But Verzemnieks, the Latvian-American granddaughter of a refugee, understands their value and finds her own comfort through the personal journey she recounts in Among the Living and the Dead.

Verzemnieks’ grandmother Livija fled Riga, Latvia, with her two children during World War II, making her way to a displaced persons camp in Germany. She was joined there by her war-wounded husband. After much struggle, they were resettled in the United States. As the family adjusted, Livija’s relatives overseas in Latvia were undergoing their own torment: They were exiled by the Soviets to Siberia for years, returning only to find that they had lost their ancestral farm.

Verzemnieks was raised largely by her beloved grandparents, who existed somewhere between the U.S. and their memories of rural childhoods. After her grandmother’s death, Verzemnieks visited Livija’s sister in the old village in an attempt to unravel family mysteries.

Verzemnieks is an exquisite writer who weaves together tales of old Latvia and her own discoveries in lyrical prose. Slowly, carefully, she coaxes her great-aunt into talking about Siberia. She learns more about her grandparents, though troubling uncertainties remain.

Her descriptions of the years on the “war roads” and in the displaced persons camps are particularly heartbreaking. It becomes evident that her father, outwardly a successful professional, was permanently affected by an early childhood of deprivation and fear. But the revelations also bring understanding. The dead and the living mingle and reconnect.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A skeleton in your family closet can be challenging enough to exhume and investigate. But try researching your genealogy and solving an ancient murder while you simultaneously serve as historian, tourist, travel guide and of course, since it is Italy, food critic. Helene Stapinski does all that in Murder in Matera, bringing to life the customs, passions and people—dead and alive—of Southern Italy. With refreshing wit and endearing respect for the generations of shoulders she stands on, Stapinski has resurrected her great-great-grandmother, Vita Gallitelli, and follows her tragic journey from Matera, Italy, to Jersey City.

Gallitelli died in Jersey City in 1915, but her infamy as a “loose woman” and alleged murderer lived on in stories told by Stapinski’s mother. Her family was further blemished by the bad behavior of modern relatives, such as a cousin who rigged bingo games to enrich his mother and Grandpa Beansie, a former inmate. These facts led the author to fear that her own children might inherit a tendency toward crime, with the help of a genetic defect possibly passed down from Gallitelli. She needed to know the truth about her great-great grandmother, and so began a 10-year, trans-Atlantic research project. Did Gallitelli in fact kill someone, and if she did, why? Was she a “puttana” who slept around, scandalizing her Italian hometown? Why did she become one of thousands of emigrates fleeing their homeland in the 19th century, and what happened to one of her children on that miserable ocean crossing to New York?

Such questions drove Stapinski to leave her own family behind in America and seek answers in Matera. The truth lay deep in the oral and documented history of the poverty-stricken province and, when the truth is revealed at last, it changes everything, including her perspectives on family, marriage, motherhood and, above all, the destiny-changing courage of immigrants like Vita Gallitelli.

We all recall one momentous event in our lives that dramatically altered our direction and violently shook our sense of self, shaping us in myriad ways. In his absorbing and lovely The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered, Benjamin Taylor recalls such an event, using it as the tantalizing entry point to his memories of growing up gay and Jewish in Texas.

Early on the morning of November 22, 1963, 11-year-old Taylor gets to shake President John F. Kennedy’s hand in Fort Worth, Texas. Later that day, he hears the news that Kennedy has been assassinated. In achingly gorgeous prose, Taylor reflects on the incongruity of these two moments, which leads to childhood remembrances of making and losing friends, his discovery of a love of politics and playwriting, and his halting lessons in the ways that families sometimes fall apart. He writes about his family with a clear-eyed vision: “The hue and cry at our house was against disorder, bedevilment, despair.”

In this memoir, Taylor pulls his family and his young life from the shores of forgetting, and he tells us he’s heaped up this “monument because my family—Annette, Sol, Tommy, Robby too—have vanished and I cannot allow oblivion to own them altogether.” Although his memoir sometimes moves confusingly between 1963 and 1964 and the present, Taylor nevertheless captivates with his vibrant recollections of immense moments and the life that grew out of them.