Love came quite late and unexpectedly for famed author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose many bestselling books include Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. And it came in the form of writer Bill Hayes, a man 30 years his junior, as Hayes poignantly chronicles in his memoir Insomniac City. Sacks himself had revealed his homosexuality in a book published just months before he died―On the Move: A Life―explaining that after 30 years of celibacy, he and Hayes were sharing their lives.

Insomniac City begins as an illuminating treatise on grief. In 2009, after Hayes' partner of 16 years died of sudden cardiac arrest, the 48-year-old decided to leave his San Francisco home and start life anew in New York City. There Hayes' and Sacks' writerly friendship developed into love, chronicled here in chapters interspersed with Hayes' journal entries. The result is an intimate look at what life was like with the lovable, brilliant Sacks, whose terminal cancer diagnosis didn't stop him from writing, learning and soaking up the world's delights, or saying things like: "Wouldn't it be nice if there were a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach?"

An adept writer, Hayes weaves many threads into his latest book. In addition to honoring Sacks, it's a delicately woven love letter to New York City, a city he came to cherish. Included are black and white photos of not only Sacks, but the cityscapes and people with whom Hayes crossed paths, some of whom he describes in passages reminiscent of Humans of New York. His many encounters range from an evening spent driving supermodel and actress Lauren Hutton home from a chamber orchestra concert to a chat with young man on the street smoking a joint laced with crack. Of Hutton, Sacks commented, "I don't know who that was, but she seems like a very remarkable person."

Despite being a book that begins with one lover's death and ends with another, Insomniac City overflows with moment after moment of unexpected wonder and joy. Sacks, for instance, composes a list of eight and a half reasons to be hopeful soon after learning that his death was imminent. Hayes tenderly chronicles Sacks' last months and days, sharing moments like these: "He reaches for my hand when we walk, not just to steady himself but to hold my hand."

Meredith Maran had been married to the woman of her dreams, living in a gentrifying Oakland, California, neighborhood and making a decent living as an author (of more than a dozen books) and freelance writer. But when her marriage slowly turned toxic and she suffered other personal and financial setbacks, Maran opted for the mother of all do-overs—moving to Los Angeles and taking a job at a clothing company where, at age 60, she became both employee and honorary mom to her younger co-workers. The New Old Me: My Late-Life Reinvention offers a bracing look at the joys and challenges of starting over as an older woman.

Maran starts out couch-surfing in L.A. and struggling to connect, but her writing career has given her a rich network of contacts that she mines like a pro for companionship and wise counsel. Once a fervent political activist, she now spends time in La-La Land supplementing companywide workout days with personal training sessions and exploring the world of nips, tucks and waxing fore and aft. Despite her hopes for reconciliation with her wife, their marriage ends in divorce and Maran begins exploring the world of online dating.

The copywriting job she moves south for borders on L.A. cliché, from nude weigh-ins with body-fat calipers to the rocket science employed to estimate driving distance from the office to anywhere else in town. These are some of the book’s funniest scenes, but the friends she makes at work become part of her tribe as well.

The observations here are sharp and witty; used to living under “the whip of freelance insecurity,” Maran awkwardly relaxes into a far better funded existence. No longer struggling to build a family, career or marriage, she delights in the freedom to have more fun, noting, “I’m not building anything anymore, except bone density if I’m lucky.”

The New Old Me is a smart, funny testament to the value of friendships old and new, and the ways they help us adapt to the inevitability of change.

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

By just about any measure, writer Yiyun Li has had a remarkable life. Born and raised in Beijing before China’s explosion of prosperity (her family had no phone until she was in college), Li had a talent in science that brought her to the U.S. for graduate studies in immunology, but she shifted her focus to writing and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. By age 37 she’d won multiple writing awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, and had a full life in California. Yet she recently spent two years in and out of hospitals for depression. She wrote Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, her first nonfiction work, during this difficult period.

This unconventional memoir tucks glimpses of Li’s youth in Beijing, her narcissistic mother, her quiet father and childhood friends into a variety of meditations on writing and writers. These eight essays consider essential questions: Why write? Why read? Why live? She considers the letters and journals of Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin, Ivan Turgenev and others, and she writes tenderly of her own friendship with the Irish writer William Trevor.

At times, this book feels like a quiet conversation with a wise friend who says confounding things. Still, Li’s writing is lovely, graceful yet plainspoken, and I underlined many passages, like this one: “Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one’s days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.” 

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

Grief, grit, love, loss, world travel and the deadly sting of a box jellyfish all have a place in Shannon Leone Fowler’s intensely personal and appealing memoir, Traveling with Ghosts. Bring along a world map, set aside everything you know about healing from heartbreaking loss, and have yourself an unforgettable read.

In 1999, Fowler was a 24-year-old Californian backpacker captivated by the sea, traveling, teaching scuba diving and training to become a marine biologist when she fell in love with Australian Sean Reilly in Barcelona. After working apart all over the world, they reunited and became engaged in China, where Reilly was teaching and Fowler was on break from studying the endangered Australian sea lion. To celebrate their future together, they visited an island off southeastern Thailand, Ko Pha Ngan—where there were no warnings about the box jellyfish in the waters near their cabana. One fatal encounter changed everything.

Feeling cruelly betrayed by the sea she planned to make her life’s work, newly pregnant and unhinged by grief, Fowler headed for war-torn Eastern Europe and then Israel. Traveling alone through Poland, Hungary, Bosnia, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria, Fowler kept her memories close while observing how survivors coped. In Sarajevo, the shell of their blasted National Library became a symbol of resilience. Poland, she wrote, “taught me—that real tragedies don’t need to be redeemed, they need to be remembered.” In Israel, she witnessed war’s carnage everywhere, while life (and war) went on.

Four months later, Fowler could face the sea again, but it would be another eight months before she could bring herself to touch it. Almost 15 years later, box jellyfish warnings in Thailand are still rare and the deaths still under-reported. But due to global warming, she warns, the most venomous marine life on the planet is spreading as water temperatures rise.

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

Anyone who reads the startling fiction of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has to wonder what sort of forces shaped her unusually vivid voice. The titles of her works alone—which include There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In and the bestselling There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby—are tip-offs that the pages within contain something out of the ordinary.


With the U.S. release of her memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, Petrushevskaya explores the eventful, turbulent childhood that shaped her worldview in spare, often darkly humorous vignettes, gracefully translated by Anna Summers. Born in 1938 into a family of Bolsheviks who were among those declared enemies of the state by Stalin, the author grew up in the shadow of exiled or murdered family members and endured a lengthy separation from her own mother, who left Petrushevskaya with relatives in the countryside in order to pursue an education in Moscow. But this was no idyll; Petrushevskaya “sported matchstick limbs and a swollen belly” due to malnourishment, and would go through their neighbors’ trash after dark, hoping to find scraps of food. She begged for money on the streets, had no toys and only one crayon (it was purple). These hardships are recounted without sentiment, but with feeling.

Yet there was joy in her childhood, too—her brilliant, educated grandmother knew the Russian classics by heart and would spend hours recounting them to the young Petrushevskaya, spurring her interest in storytelling. Many memories have a touch of the magic Petrushevskaya includes in her fiction, like a strange encounter with a beautiful lady she finds smoking alone in an isolated cabin. “How did a beauty like her end up in the middle of the woods? . . . She would have adopted me, I am sure, had I stayed in the woods.” 


Though Petrushevskaya’s hardscrabble childhood was hardly unique among Russians of her generation, her perspective on it is decidedly original. The Girl from the Metropol Hotel is a well-crafted glimpse into the past of one of Russia’s most intriguing writers.

Escaping the fallout of failed marriages and domestic abuse, on a weekend getaway Cara Brookins happened upon a stately home ravaged by Mother Nature. Her walk through the home’s crumbling remains became the impetus for a plan to build a new house for herself and her four children. Beyond financial necessity and the empowering prospects of tackling such a grandiose do-it-yourself project, Brookins hoped the home would help heal her fractured family.

Rise: How a House Built a Family takes readers along on a transformative journey. Brookins marks off the acre of land she has purchased with a bag of self-rising flour, then secures a bank loan. With the help of YouTube videos and a learn-as-you-go attitude, Brookins and her kids lay bricks, frame walls, integrate plumbing and build their dream. Brookins captures the process in rise and fall chapters: The rises highlight house construction, while the falls offer heart-rending memories of trauma inflicted by a schizophrenic ex-husband.

While building a five-bedroom house may not be for everyone, all readers can find inspiration in Brookins’ endeavor. In an age when few adolescents would forgo extracurricular activities, endure exhausting manual labor and accept a tool belt for Christmas, her young crew pitches in for the greater good of the family.

Perhaps 15-year-old Drew says it best when he admonishes his sister, “You built your own damn house, you can do anything.”

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

The five stages of grief are a well-known reaction to loss, but Stéphane Gerson added a sixth when his 8-year-old son, Owen, died in a commercial rafting accident on Utah’s Green River: He decided to write about it, “in expiation, in homage, in remembrance.” The resulting book, Disaster Falls, is an excruciating read—and an invaluable emotional resource.

Few of us, fortunately, experience a loss comparable to that of Gerson and his wife, Alison, and surviving son, Julian. But as Gerson makes clear, no one wakes up in the morning anticipating disaster. Seemingly inconsequential decisions can have far-reaching ramifications, sometimes resulting in death. So it was with Owen, who was in a small craft known as a ducky with his father when it flipped.

The decision to take an 8-year-old through Class III rapids can and undoubtedly will be debated by parents who read Disaster Falls, but what of the countless other decisions we make? What constitutes crossing the line when it comes to protecting our children or letting them stretch their world? Or is there not really a line but a kaleidoscope of random, inexplicable occurrences?

Gerson, a cultural historian and professor of French studies at New York University, writes unflinchingly of the accident, its immediate aftermath and its effect on him and his family. If you wonder how couples stay together—or break apart—after a devastating loss, his insights are illuminating. And how should you respond to a family that’s going through such a tragedy? Gerson’s reactions to well-meaning attempts at connection might surprise you.

Not so surprisingly, a legal battle emerges toward the end of the book, bringing with it some of Gerson’s most powerful writing. For the Gersons, as with all families, the journey continues along life’s never-ending river.

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

At first glance, life seems idyllic for golden-haired sisters Sheila and Maxine, daughters of privilege growing up in the 1940s and ’50s on a large estate near Johannesburg, South Africa. As Sheila Kohler notes in Once We Were Sisters, their family homestead was complete with “an army of servants,” swimming pool, tennis court and nine-hole golf course. While leaning on each other for love, laughter and support, the sisters studied in France, went to finishing school in Italy, married, bought homes in several countries and had children.

Sheila’s world was shattered in 1979 when Maxine, mother of six children, was killed in a car accident at age 39. Maxine’s husband Carl, a protégé of famed heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard, had driven their car off a deserted road and into a lamppost. Kohler believes the act was murder.

Maxine had confessed repeatedly that her husband beat her “Black-and-blue!” and during a visit in Sardinia, admitted that she was afraid to go home. To her eternal regret, Sheila advised her sister to return to her children.

Maxine’s death propelled Sheila into a life of writing: an MFA at Columbia followed by award-winning short stories, nine novels and her riveting new memoir.

“In story after story,” Kohler writes, “I conjure up my sister in various disguises, as well as other figures from our past. Her bright image leads me onward like a candle in the night. Again and again in various forms and shapes I write her story, colored by my own feelings of love and guilt.”

Kohler is a thoughtful, lyrical writer who shares memories of her colorful life in artfully arranged chapters that intersperse past and present in careful layers, exploring myriad family secrets hidden beneath a gilded, guarded exterior. Her soul-searching memoir remains skillfully lean while evoking lush images of life with her beloved sister. Throughout the narrative, Kohler ponders her sister’s fate, asking tough questions and concluding, “I am still looking for the answers.”

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, February 2017

Depressed, suffering from premenstrual dysphoric disorder and wrought with pain from a frozen shoulder, Ayelet Waldman was on a steady diet of antidepressants, estrogen patches and sleeping pills. Yet her pain and wild mood swings persisted. Her four children and husband (writer Michael Chabon) were the targets of most of her wrath.

“I found myself in a state of seemingly perpetual irritability,” she writes. “I seethed, I turned that fury on the people around me, and then I collapsed in shame at these outbursts. . . . I couldn’t manage to lift the grimy curtain of my unhappiness.”

Then she stumbled on a book about microdosing—taking tiny amounts of LSD, ofterwise known as acid. The doses are so small that they don’t cause hallucination but improve mood and focus. The process of microdosing was “not so much going on an acid trip as going on an acid errand,” she writes.

Following a strict dosing protocol, she experienced decreased physical pain and increased joy. Waldman, author of Bad Mother and a series of entertaining mysteries about a public defender turned stay-at-home mom, began her career as a lawyer and taught a college class on the war on drugs. She struggles with the morality of purchasing and taking illegal drugs, albeit for a good cause. She also writes openly about how her mental health has impacted her marriage; Chabon is portrayed with near-saintly patience, and a scene where they attend therapy is a lovely glimpse at a couple in it for the long haul.

A Really Good Day is a surprisingly poignant, funny and deeply introspective journal of Waldman’s month of treatment. Ultimately, her story is about family, marriage and dealing with modern life, with all its stressors and moments of beauty.

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

Maybe you’re a newish Clinton Kelly fan, courtesy of ABC’s daytime talk and cookfest “The Chew.” Or maybe you’ve loved him since his days as the mildly catty co-host of the makeover show “What Not to Wear,” in which he and Stacy London saved legions of American women from slogan sweatshirts and mom jeans. 

No matter how you know Kelly, you will know him infinitely better after reading I Hate Everyone, Except You, his hilarious, wise and revealing new memoir. It seems no topic is off-limits for Kelly (except his beloved grandma), who grew up gawky and gay on Long Island. He writes warmly of his family, including his stepfather, who gamely took on him and his sister when he married their mom. He recalls his time on “What Not to Wear” with just the right dash of gossip, and writes candidly about meeting his future husband, psychologist Damon Bayles. 

He also takes on heavier topics, such as the time he posted his wedding photo on his Facebook fan page on the day in 2015 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage.

“The post received 180,000 ‘likes’ and more than 6,000 people stopped whatever they were doing that day to wish us love and congratulations,” he writes. “Five people thought it was appropriate to tell us we were going to Hell. If you’ve never been told by a complete stranger that you’re going to Hell, let me try to explain the feeling to you. It makes you feel something like sadness, but it’s not quite sadness. . . . It’s smaller, subtler, like a thousand shallow pin pricks.”

I read this book in one sitting, so engrossed that I ignored my children, social media and my to-do list for several blissful, laughter-filled hours. Kelly delivers a perfect blend of heart, humor and trucker language.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Clinton Kelly about his book, I Hate Everyone, Except You.

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

When Trevor Noah succeeded Jon Stewart as host of “The Daily Show” last year, the 32-year-old South African comedian had huge shoes to fill. Could he prove himself a worthy successor? Who was he, anyway? In his fascinating memoir, Born a Crime, we get to know Comedy Central’s import, and the evidence is clear: Challenges are nothing new to Noah.

Born in 1984 to a Swiss father and a black mother, Noah was living proof that his parents had violated the law forbidding “illicit” relationships between whites and blacks. His mixed looks marked him as an outsider. Growing up without his father, he moved with his fearless, fanatical mother between the black and white townships near Johannesburg, rarely feeling accepted anywhere. Poverty precluded any hope of escape.  

Engaging and insightful, Born a Crime is not a rags-to-riches story; the memoir ends before Noah finds success. Instead, the book reveals the hard details of a grim life: a mother and son who, together, survived the cruelties of apartheid and domestic violence. Ironically, today it is Noah’s perspective as an outsider that serves him so well in his starring role in U.S. comedy.

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mark Slouka may be familiar to readers through his award-winning fiction, including Lost Lake, The Visible World and Brewster, a powerful coming-of-age story set in 1968 in Brewster, New York. In his new memoir, Nobody’s Son, Slouka uses his considerable literary talents to tell the searing, haunting story of his life with his Czechoslovakian-immigrant parents.

Slouka’s approach is novelistic, and far from a straight chronological account. He writes, “I believe the record of our time, told as truly as possible, is never, or rarely, chronological,” he writes. “Life is always looping back, revising itself, elaborating itself.”

One of the “loops” Slouka returns to again and again is the story of his mother, a powerful presence in his life. The author works to uncover the hidden forces that shaped her past in Czechoslovakia and, to a large extent, shadowed her future in America: her tortured marriage, a long, secret love affair, struggles with mental health and her complex relationship with her son.

 “You can’t reclaim someone’s past, no matter how fearless your imagination—not really,” Slouka writes. But as he imagines and pictures his mother, for instance, meeting F., the man she truly loved, she comes alive for the reader much the way a character in fiction does. The photographs included here remind us that she was very much a real, and often tortured woman.

“I’ve been writing her all my life,” Slouka says of his mother at one point, noting that his novel The Visible World was “a memoir embedded in a novel; an apt description of my life.”

In a similar way, Nobody’s Son sometimes feels like a novel embedded in a memoir. More than anything, beyond the labels, it is a moving and remarkable reading experience.