Reading Robert Gottlieb’s literary ramblings is more fun than sitting at the elbow of legendary editor Maxwell Perkins and watching him pencil-whip Thomas Wolfe’s manuscripts into shape. A master storyteller, Gottlieb doesn’t just drop names, he cluster-bombs them. Avid Reader gets off to a rather leisurely start as he recounts his early literary enthusiasms while a student at Columbia and Cambridge. But after that, he runs full-tilt through his years mentoring authors at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, The New Yorker and then back to Knopf again as a benign éminence grise. There are also concluding sections on his years working with prominent dance companies and on his emergence as a writer with his own voice.

One of Gottlieb’s duties as an editor was coming up with titles for books and overseeing dust jacket and advertising copy. That being the case, it seems odd at first that the title for his own life story feels so tepid. But the reason soon becomes clear. Ingesting and remembering vast libraries is Gott-lieb’s hallmark. He’s a quick reader, too, he reports, a facility that has enabled him to pass sage judgment on manuscripts virtually within hours of receiving them. One of the headlines that heralded his move from Simon & Schuster blared, “Avid Reader to Head Knopf.”

Joseph Heller, Jessica Mitford, S.J. Perelman, Lauren Bacall, ex-President Bill Clinton, Katharine Hepburn, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, John Cheever, Nora Ephron, John le Carré and Bruno Bettelheim are but a few of the literary lambs Gottlieb shepherded—and there are copious personal tales for each. 

It’s interesting to note that William Shawn, the revered New Yorker editor whom Gottlieb replaced amid staff furor, is the only person in the book to whom Gottlieb consistently assigns the honorific “Mr.” He calls Clinton “Bill.” 

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

Sons may be destined to disappoint their fathers, no matter how much they crave recognition and attention from them or how much they strive to please them. Such stories are the stuff of many iconic works of Western literature, from Virgil and Homer to David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen.

Novelist William Giraldi's muscular, sometimes meandering and poignant memoir, The Hero's Body, joins a growing list of recent father-son memoirs, revealing his insights about this pivotal relationship through the experience of growing up and carving out his manhood in a small New Jersey town.

After an early bout with meningitis in Manville, New Jersey—"a town straight from the blue notes of a Springsteen song"—Giraldi turns to weightlifting in his uncle's basement, not only to regain his physical strength but also to find his way into masculinity. "[I]t's one thing to grow up in this blue collar zip code . . . and another to be raised by men for whom masculinity was not just a way of life but a sacral creed."

In the first part of the book, Giraldi chronicles his sweaty and glorious days in the Edge, a gym where he moves beyond mere weightlifting and enters the cultish world of bodybuilding, which operates with its own creed. Giraldi eventually takes second place in a bodybuilding contest, after which his father seals a bond simply by saying, "you did good."

Shortly after the Edge closes unexpectedly, Giraldi shuts himself off from the world and immerses himself in literature, but then the unexpected happens when his father is killed in a motorcycle crash at the age of 47. Giraldi slides through his grief by searching for answers he knows he won't find: "I want to say that his death was unavoidable . . . nobody or nothing could have saved my father . . . but in my most rational, regretful moments I consider that I or others might have saved him had we only tried; it's just that the trying would have seemed such a transgression against the familial code and such a betrayal of his joy."

Giraldi's robust and elegant writing delves in a vigorously poetic fashion into the heroic efforts men make to sculpt their bodies—either through bodybuilding or riding motorcycles—and discovers that the truly heroic is being fully and convincingly yourself.

Decca Aitkenhead never meant to fall in love with Tony. A drug dealer who was already married, Tony seemed the least likely candidate for a serious love affair. But insuppressible attraction and deep emotional intimacy led the British couple to a partnership that lasted nearly 10 years—until Tony, a man in his prime, suddenly died inside the space of 10 minutes while on vacation with his wife and two children in Jamaica.

Aitkenhead’s new book chronicles the terrible details of Tony’s death by drowning and her mourning in the year that followed. “You always said I should write a book about you,” she writes in the dedication to Tony. “It wasn’t meant to be this one.” As this wrenching dedication suggests, Aitkenhead is an unsparing writer. Her understated prose makes the story surge forward with force.

It is not, though, an unusual story. Like many grief-stricken widows, Aitkenhead found herself, in the wake of tragedy, to be a person she did not know. This new Decca Aitkenhead had enormous and unpredictable needs. She felt split in half. Though it was her partner who drowned, it was Aitkenhead who was, as the title puts it, all at sea.

Aitkenhead is well known in England as a journalist, and she brings an intensity and objectivity to her story that is tremendously appealing. The consternation of how to remember Tony—and how to remember that heartbreaking day with her children—show up in ways both symbolic and mundane: how to plan the funeral, how to talk about Tony with her children, whether or not to bring new kittens into the household, whether or not to return to Jamaica. Though ostensibly a story of loss, this is also a story of survival by a woman who is strong, self-perceptive and a beautiful writer.

One’s 30s might seem a little early to write a memoir, but Sam Polk has done a lot of living in his 35 years. For the Love of Money opens with the moment in 2011 when Polk learned that his annual hedge-fund bonus would be $3.6 million—and he was furious that it wasn’t twice as much. He then backs up to describe the steps and missteps that brought him to that point. 

Polk and his twin brother, Ben, grew up in a tumultuous household in Los Angeles where there was never enough money and their narcissistic dad held sway, often abusively. Overweight and socially unskilled, both brothers were bullied until they took up wrestling, a pursuit that led Polk to Columbia University. But at Columbia, Polk descended into binge drinking, drug use and bulimia. After breaking into a dormmate’s room and stealing pot, he was asked to leave the university. 

Still, Polk was competitive and ambitious, and he managed to get hired as an analyst at Bank of America, where he traded bonds and credit default swaps (CDS), and then snagged a trader position at a premier hedge fund. He’d “made it”—still in his 20s, he had an enormous Manhattan loft and a beautiful girlfriend. But he slowly came to terms with ambition’s underside: his addiction to drugs, alcohol and porn, estrangement from Ben and crippling envy. With the help of a counselor and his first boss, now a mentor, Polk gained sobriety and repaired his relationships. 

Polk’s redemptive one-step-forward, one-step-back story, along with his insider’s view of Wall Street and the larger issues of income inequality, make for a memoir that’s not only revealing but also timely.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, August 2016

Nadja Spiegelman’s brilliant excavation into four generations of her maternal line is nothing short of astonishing. The daughter of Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Françoise Mouly (art director of The New Yorker), Spiegelman would have a compelling coming-of-age story to tell simply on the basis of her parentage and her upbringing among artists. I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, however, is unusually sensitive to the transmission of family secrets and wounds between generations. Rather than tell the story of an individual daughter, this elegant, beautifully structured memoir tells the story of four generations of daughters locked in painful battle with their mothers. 

The focus of the narrative, at first, is the glamorous and frightening Mouly. Her sudden rages and overt favoring of her son over her daughter could—in other hands—be grounds for a revenge memoir. Her maternal cruelty, particularly concerning food and weight gain, is honestly depicted by her daughter. Despite these clearly painful experiences, Spiegelman’s drive is to understand her mother, not condemn her. Alternating chapters that focus on each woman’s adolescence show how both were targets for their mothers’ anger. In Mouly’s case, she fled from France to New York at age 18 to escape the mire of family life.

Spiegelman’s desire to learn the truth about her mother’s childhood takes her to Paris and her grandmother Josée, yet another strong-willed and sharp-tongued woman. As she pursues Josée’s childhood story, as well as her mother Mina’s story, she learns that certain patterns and connections have haunted each of these pairs of mothers and daughters, even when they recall events differently.

A meditation on memory and the nature of truth as much as a family history, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This introduces a stunning new voice in the field of memoir.

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

With seven generations of family secrets, two notable English country houses and multiple writers, England’s Sackville-West and Nicolson families have served as material for multiple memoirs. In A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations, Juliet Nicolson—daughter of Nigel Nicolson and granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West—takes her turn at the family trade. With the benefit of hindsight, as well as cabinets of old letters and diaries, Nicolson casts a gimlet eye on family stories extending back to her great-great-grandmother Pepita, the legendary Spanish dancer who entranced a young British diplomat, Lionel Sackville-West, into a passionate, illicit affair.

The patterns Nicolson observes in her family—ardent love affairs, maternal abandonment and the destructive effects of alcoholism—are fascinating in their repetition, showing how families do tend to repeat mistakes across generations. Nicolson’s familial dysfunctions are, however, particularly glamorous, as they involve naughty Victorians, runaway wives and aristocratic privilege.

Her great-grandmother’s life makes for particularly compelling reading, as the young Victoria travels to Washington, D.C. to set up a diplomat’s house for her grieving widower father (Lionel never married Pepita, but their children were legitimized by the family). Victoria’s flirtatiousness was legendary, resulting in a proposal from President Chester Arthur himself. After 14 proposals (at least), she was swept off her feet by a first cousin, named—like her father—Lionel Sackville-West. Her introduction to the “arts of love” is quite spicy, and the story gains much from Nicolson’s access to her own family’s papers.

The author’s elegant and balanced assessment of the women in her family focuses on marriage and domestic life, and a strain of unhappiness that tends to result in middle-aged alcoholic isolation after the fading of the glamour and beauty of their youth. Nicolson’s candor and realism make this legendary family accessible and sympathetic, and her book a compelling work of memoir.

In The Return, Libyan novelist Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men) tells the harrowing story of his search for his father, Jaballa Matar. Early in Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, Jaballa served as a U.N. diplomat, but he was soon accused of criticizing Qaddafi and forced to flee to Cairo with his family. In 1990, while Matar was at university in London, Jaballa was kidnapped by Egyptian secret police and sent to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Matar’s narrative roams through time, moving from his 2012 visit to see family in Tripoli and Benghazi after Qaddafi’s downfall (Matar’s first visit in 33 years), to the distant past—when his grandfather fought against the brutal Italian occupation of Libya. He recounts his efforts to gather scraps of information, meeting with former prisoners who might have seen Jaballa. 

At times, the memoir reads like a spy novel: In the 1980s, Qaddafi’s spies kept tabs not only on Jaballa but also on family members, following Matar’s brother when he was at boarding school. Decades later, Matar connected with Qaddafi’s “reformist” son Seif, who’d promised him an answer about what had happened to Jaballa. Seif put Matar through a series of phone calls and clandestine meetings in London hotels, mixing threats and compliments, meetings that ultimately proved fruitless.

The Return beautifully chronicles the vagaries of life as an exile and the grief of wondering about a father’s suffering. Yes, Matar’s memoir is sometimes bleak in describing the Qaddafi regime’s decades of bizarre repressive actions. But it also offers a portrait of a loving family and a needed window into Libya, not only its troubles but also its beauty, and the many kindnesses Matar encountered there.

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

Chris Forhan’s aching, lyrical memoir excavates both a lost father and a lost era in American history. The middle child in an Irish family of eight, Forhan came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. He recalls spirograph toys and the Beatles, Jell-O and tuna casserole, JFK and the moon landing. These details are important because they help Forhan cinematically recreate the family from which his father absented himself, ultimately by suicide in 1973.

Who was Ed Forhan? This is the central, animating question driving My Father Before Me, a mystery that continues to haunt his adult children. Their family life was riddled with silences: Where did Ed go when he didn’t come home at night? Was his apparent mental illness a result of unchecked diabetes, childhood trauma, bipolar disorder or all (or none) of those factors? His son Chris interviews his mother and siblings, and looks through family photos and newspaper clippings to find answers. 

An award-winning poet, Forhan writes with grace and intelligence about the very process of constructing a memoir. How can he trust his memories of his father, these flashes that may reflect desire more than fact? By bringing in the voices of his siblings and mother, he fleshes out this portrait of a haunted and wounded man, adding heft and color to the fragments of memory. Forhan learns more about Ed’s tragic and lonely childhood, one of the many things the family never spoke of directly.

Ultimately this memoir documents four generations of fathers and sons and tracks the patterns of damaging emotional behavior passed down through the family. Now that Forhan is himself a father to young sons, it is essential to recollect his father, if only to free himself from the burden of his influence. Fortunately for the reader, his journey is beautifully and resonantly captured here.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, July 2016

Like almost everyone else in the U.S., Atlanta attorney Joseph Madison Beck had read To Kill a Mockingbird, and he decided in 1992 to satisfy his curiosity about the similarity between the novel and an episode in his own family history. He wrote to author Harper Lee: Did she know about his white father’s legal defense of an African-American man accused of raping a white woman in 1938, not far from where Lee was then growing up in south Alabama? No, Lee wrote back politely; though she could see there were “obvious parallels,” she didn’t recall the case at all.

The case in Troy, Alabama, was locally notorious at the time, but whether or not it had any unconscious influence on Lee, the story outlined in Beck’s family memoir, My Father and Atticus Finch, is absolutely worth knowing as an illuminating instance of the staggering racism of the Jim Crow South and of the complications of its social order. 

Joseph Beck’s father, Foster Beck, a young rural lawyer, was strong-armed into defending the accused rapist by a judge who was embarrassed by how bad the Alabama legal system had looked in the recent “Scottsboro Boys” case. At first reluctant to take the case, Beck became convinced that the defendant Charles White was innocent, and he fought for him to the tragic end. 

His strong legal argument ran into a wall of white intransigence. In Lee’s novel, the courageous Atticus ultimately goes on with his respectable life; Foster Beck was not so lucky. He paid for the rest of his days for the “crime” of defending a black man too vigorously.

His son has delved into court records to narrate the trial, but also beautifully describes the region’s community rituals—hunting doves, killing hogs, making cane syrup. More importantly, he lovingly portrays his parents and grandparents in all their complexities. Foster Beck and his wife-to-be Bertha Stewart were honorable people who were punished for fighting injustice, and this book is a fine tribute.

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

Fans of Thad Carhart’s bestselling 2001 memoir, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, will be glad to know that his latest book, Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France, offers a similar mix of memoir, history and wonderful digressions about France.

Carhart spent several years of his 1950s childhood in the village of Fontainebleau, France, where his Air Force pilot dad served as a staff officer at NATO (then headquartered at Chateau de Fontainebleau). Finding Fontainebleau’s main narrative follows the family, five kids ages 2 to 12 and their beleaguered parents, as they settled into an immense old house next door to the chateau. Carhart recounts adjusting to to French Catholic school, both its strictures—including Saturday classes—and pleasures—1950s French schoolboys were as crazy for marbles and coonskin caps as American boys. The family’s daily life mixed French and American: They shopped for food at the traditional outdoor market and boulangeries as well as the American military commissary, and had wine delivered (35 cents a bottle); and they piled into their Chevy wagon, heading to Paris for Carhart’s dad’s fencing competitions, and on near-disastrous camping trips in the French countryside and in Spain and Italy.

The book’s other narrative gives us a lively history of Chateau de Fontainebleau, built in 1137 as a hunting lodge, then added on to by successive kings, queens, and two Napoleons. Carhart takes us into closed-off rooms, where architects, carpenters, and other craftsmen work at restoration. He sees the rambling chateau, with its idiosyncratic additions, as a more fitting symbol of France than the more well-known Versailles.

Throughout, Carhart turns his observant eye on small, sometimes odd-seeming details—the once-ubiquitous Turkish toilets in cafes, the uniquely French method of taking household inventory, French cars of the 1950s. These lovely digressions, along with Carhart’s own family’s story, illuminate French culture in an appealing way. 

Ann Patty was at loose ends after being forced into early retirement from her high-powered job in book publishing. It was 2008, the recession was grinding everything to a halt, and suddenly Patty, the editor of the bestselling Life of Pi, was rattling around her home in upstate New York. She joined Match.com, read piles of books and weeded her garden. But something was missing from this new life.

“I took on more and more uninspiring freelance work and honed my gourmet cooking skills,” she writes in her lovely new memoir, Living with a Dead Language. “With the companionship of too many glasses of wine, I could while away hours comparing recipes, shopping, and preparing meals. . . .  I gained ten pounds.”

Worried that she would become “a drunk, a bore, a depressive,” Patty decides to study Latin at nearby Vassar College. She is the oldest student—by far—and her classmates don’t quite know what to make of her, mostly choosing instead to gaze at their cellphones until class starts. But slowly, Patty decodes the language and learns some things about herself in the process.

Look, I know what you’re thinking: a book about a retiree studying Latin in Poughkeepsie. Titillating! But Patty brings humor and clarity to her storytelling, and she paints a vivid picture of her hours toiling in a musty college classroom. Anyone who loves words and language will recognize him or herself in these pages. Through the study of a dead language, she makes peace with her past and finds purpose in this next phase of her life.

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

What child would not long for a secret password that opens a magical door? At age 3, Claire Hoffman was given just such a word—a mantra she believed was created just for her. It provided entry into the intense spiritual world inhabited by her mother, a practitioner of transcendental meditation (TM). Hoffman’s thoughtful memoir, Greetings from Utopia Park, chronicles a childhood immersed in TM and the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as well as the adult reckonings that followed. 

From a trailer on the campus of the National Headquarters for Heaven on Earth in Fairfield, Iowa, Hoffman watched the Maharishi’s quest for world peace through meditation rise and fall outside her bedroom window. Her story could be yet another tale of growing up in and escaping a religious cult, but she is careful to note not only the heartbreaking ways her innocence was taken from her, but also the life-affirming sense of community and purpose she gained in Fairfield. 

This balanced approach, likely related to her career as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, sets Hoffman’s story apart from more simplistic retellings. She never pulls punches in the personal arena—young Claire’s unchecked enthusiasm comes through as clearly as her adolescent skepticism.

Although she analyzes the social and historical influences on the Maharishi’s movement, in the end, Hoffman’s story is intensely personal and spiritual. When she goes back to gather the threads of meaning that remain for her in TM, we understand that she has reached a new kind of transcendence, one that accepts uncertainty without giving up hope.

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

After reading this slim, melancholy memoir, you may be tempted to turn to the Book of Job for comic relief. Notaro’s avalanche of ordeals has become such a staple of her comedy routines and interviews and is so prominently featured in the 2015 documentary Tig that many readers will likely know about them already. For those who don’t, they include, in rapid succession, a broken romance, a debilitating digestive tract disorder called C-diff, the sudden, violent death of her mother and breast cancer leading to a double mastectomy. All these calamities are revisited within a framework that embraces Notaro’s difficult childhood relationships with an endearing but irresponsible mother, a martinet stepfather and a spaced-out, absentee biological father. 

Although there are diverting comic touches (most in the ironic vein), the book’s chief virtue is Notaro’s absolute candor in describing how these devastating setbacks wracked both her body and soul. We feel C-diff sap her strength, partake of the terror she experiences when discovering she has cancer and grieve with her as the mother she emotionally relied on slips away.

The focal point of I’m Just a Person—and the turning point in her career and outlook—is the night in 2012, when she goes onstage at a comedy club and begins her routine with, “Hello. Good evening. Hello. I have cancer, how are you.” Her performance, undertaken as a wild gambit, captivated the crowd and became a milestone in comic history. Even with cancer gnawing away at her, she had triumphed.

Notaro ends the book with the happy tale of meeting and marrying Stephanie Allynne and of looking, with fingers prudently crossed, toward a bright future.

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