Tara Clancy is only 36, but she manages to make her 1980s childhood feel like a long-lost era. In The Clancys of Queens, she gives us a coming-of-age memoir defined by the distinctive neighborhoods she grew up in: Broad Channel, Queens, a “bread crumb of an island” where her Irish-cop dad lived; Bellerose, her grandparents’ Italian-American enclave; and tony Bridgehampton, Long Island, where Clancy spent half her weekends with her mom and Mark, her mom’s well-to-do boyfriend.

A frequent contributor to “The Moth Radio Hour,” Clancy expanded her Moth stories for this memoir. She offers colorful character studies of the people who filled her young life, like cursing Grandma Rosalie (“Fahngool” was Rosalie’s “go-to, catchall punctuation”) and the barflies at Gregory’s bar—English Billy, Joey O’Dirt—where young Clancy and her dad were regulars, and where she had her first Communion party, with her large Irish clan that includes 21 first cousins in attendance.

An always-in-motion tomboy, Clancy loved her scrappy St. Gregory’s softball team and her best friend Esther, but not school. Unable to sit still in elementary school, she’d wander out of class to chat up any grown-ups she could find. The memoir follows her through her more difficult teen years, where she went from drinking and smoking pot daily to finding herself obsessed with Shakespeare and scraping together the money for college.

The oddities of Clancy’s upbringing make for some hilarious passages, but each chapter also forms a love letter—to her parents, Grandma Rosalie, Mark, her friends and lovers. Although she sometimes skates over darker material, like her dad’s drunk driving, her own teenage partying and a close friend’s abandoning her baby while in the grip of drugs, that’s a small complaint. Clancy has written a breezy, funny memoir with a wonderful cast of characters and a terrific sense of place.

When World War II ended in Europe, American, British and Soviet military units rolled into communities throughout Germany to establish order. Within a short time the country was officially divided into East and West zones, as was the city of Berlin. The Soviet Union occupied the East sector, and with the beginning of the Cold War and the establishment of a Communist-led government, the residents there would have their lives changed for decades to come.

In East Germany, one small, seemingly innocuous act judged, by a person in authority, as a challenge against the police state could lead to a reprimand, imprisonment or worse. Many were able to escape but many others were killed or captured during their attempts. A brave young woman named Hanna from the rural village of Schwaneberg was able to escape and eventually lead a free and happy life as a U.S. citizen. But her close German family, which included her parents and eight siblings, had been the center of her life, and she missed them terribly.

Nina Willner, Hanna’s daughter, tells the true story of what life was like for her mother and her East German family during this period in her compelling Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall. Drawing on a wide range of sources including interviews with family members, memoirs, letters, archives, trips to relevant locations and historical records, this is a moving account of one family’s life under tyranny. In a fascinating twist, the author was the first woman to lead U.S. Army intelligence operations in East Berlin during the Cold War in the 1980s, and she relates some of her experiences.

At the heart is the story is Oma, the author’s grandmother, to whom the book is dedicated. Throughout the many devastating changes in their lives, she was able to keep up the morale of her children and her husband by word and deed, demonstrating the central importance of love and family.

After the war, as West Germany began to rebuild, people in the East went in the other direction, depriving many of basic items. The government’s propaganda, however, painted the West zone as much worse off.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect in the East was the establishment of the secret police, the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, for short. Eventually it became responsible for the wholesale manipulation and control of all citizens. The Stasi used clandestine operations, fear tactics and intimidation, attempting to get everyone to spy on everyone else as a way of life.

Forty Autumns includes a family and historical chronology that helps the reader put events in context. Willner’s sensitive and well-written account causes us to reflect on what is really important to us and how we would react in a similar situation.

Elizabeth Lesser has devoted her life to helping others find their way to health, healing and spirituality, writing books that include Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and cofounding the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. In Marrow: A Love Story, she chronicles a deeply personal crisis: Her younger sister Maggie’s lymphoma had returned after seven years of remission, and she needed a bone marrow transplant. Lesser turned out to be a perfect match.

Lesser and her three sisters hadn’t always gotten along, so Lesser decided that she and Maggie also needed what she terms a “soul marrow transplant” to fully understand each other and to help provide optimum body-spirit conditions for Maggie’s healing. Marrow is thus part medical account and part self-help/spiritual discussion, ultimately showing readers how to find their “authentic selves” as well as to better understand those close to them. While this may not be every reader’s cup of tea, Lesser is a clear-spoken, truly helpful guide who realizes that one approach rarely suits all.

Raised by fiercely anti-religious parents who turned to the altar of The New Yorker, the outdoors, social justice and literature, Lesser was born with what she calls “a spiritual ache in my bones.” As the only adult sister not to live in Vermont, she sometimes felt she didn’t fit in, while the other sisters thought she was bossy. Meanwhile Maggie, a loving, free-spirited nurse, mother and accomplished botanical artist, left her marriage after many years and was diagnosed with cancer not long after.

Sadly, Maggie ultimately lost her battle with lymphoma, but the sisters’ “soul marrow transplant” worked beautifully. Maggie ended up living what she called the best year of her life, while all four sisters reached out to each other to overcome childhood misunderstandings. Meanwhile, Maggie and Elizabeth became the best friends they were always meant to be.

As Maggie explained, “the big trick” of “just being who I am” worked. “The more I stopped trying to be a perfect little human being for everybody else,” she said, “the more I stopped expecting other people to be perfect. The more I trusted myself, the more I trusted other people. It’s the darndest thing.”

Written with the taut urgency of a thriller, Danielle Trussoni’s memoir of the disintegration of her marriage is flat-out terrifying. Author of the bestselling novels Angelology and Angelopolis, as well as an award-winning memoir about her Vietnam-vet father, Trussoni turns her unique gaze in The Fortress to the dark heart of romance. Only she could write a memoir about a failed marriage that also includes black magic, Communist Bulgaria, the Knights Templar, ghosts and Provence. 

When Trussoni meets Nikolai at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the passion is intense, immediate and transformative. Soon the smoldering Bulgarian on a limited student visa is living in her apartment, eating her food and telling her that they have spent lifetimes looking for each other. He must be with her—which is why she ends up moving to Bulgaria with him when his visa expires. That, and the fact that she’s pregnant. Ignoring the persistent red flags in Nikolai’s behavior, she finds herself living in Eastern Europe for two years and giving birth in a stark Communist-era hospital. 

The relationship is good until it isn’t, but a major contributing factor is Nikolai’s volatile mental state. After selling her first novel, Trussoni moves the family to the South of France into a 13th-century fortress used by the Knights Templar. Her depiction of the psychological terrors of Nikolai’s unraveling mind set against the occult history of their remote castle is reminiscent of The Shining, down to the ghostly apparitions and nightmares they each suffer. By the time Trussoni discovers the Tibetan death threats Nikolai has carved into a doorframe, her fear is palpable and the suspense unrelenting. 

While The Fortress reads like a horror novel, its raw power comes from the hard-won emotional clarity Trussoni brings to her own role in the creation and dissolution of this marriage from hell.

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

I consider myself a bit of a Jennifer Weiner connoisseur. I’ve read all her books and short stories, watched her short-lived TV series “State of Georgia” and laughed at her live-tweeting during “The Bachelor.”

Yet even I—a borderline creepy Jen Weiner fan—was surprised by many of the personal details she divulges in her beautifully heartfelt new memoir. Hungry Heart is about all the phases of Weiner’s life: an awkward Jewish teenager in suburban New Jersey, a Princeton student, a bestselling writer, a twice-married mom of two girls.

“You fall down. You get hurt. You get up again” is the book’s refrain. And while she seemingly lives a charmed life, Weiner has had her share of falls. She writes poignantly about her father, a successful doctor, who was doting when she was young but then left the family and died a drug addict. It was only after his death that Weiner and her siblings learned that he had fathered another child. She shares the searing details of a miscarriage after an unplanned pregnancy in her 40s. In another chapter called “Carry That Weight,” Weiner writes about her nearly lifelong struggle with body acceptance. 

“You deprive yourself until you’re weak, faint with hunger, embarrassing yourself by drooling every time an Applebee’s commercial comes on,” she writes. “Then you cram whatever’s handy down your trough, and you don’t even taste it, and you eat more of it than you’d intended, and you hate yourself even more. Rinse, repeat.”

Ultimately, though, Weiner has found peace with her body—and her life. Her honesty, charm and buoyant spirit come through on every page of this hilarious, wise, putting-it-all-out-there book.

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

Ever the clear-eyed reporter, ABC television journalist Elizabeth Vargas honestly investigates her own psyche in this candid examination of the crippling anxiety and alcoholism she hid from the world for years. From her anchor position at "20/20," and at "World News Tonight" before that, Vargas has always transmitted cool confidence even as she detailed the most horrifying news, whether from Baghdad or closer to home. Between Breaths offers an intimate look at what was going on behind the news desk, where Vargas was throwing light on the world’s darkest corners while keeping her own demons tightly under wraps.

The story Vargas tells may seem familiar—many a memoir has been penned about hitting bottom with the bottle, and Vargas herself came clean about her alcoholism in a Good Morning America interview in 2014—but her telling is unique because it’s almost entirely unsentimental, and certainly unembellished. In straightforward, simple prose, Vargas shows us that conditions like anxiety and alcoholism can hit even the most accomplished among us. She never feels sorry for herself on the page; she’s reporting the facts, as always. Yet, her confessions show how her life spun out of control, how her illness endangered her marriage, her role as a mother and even her life. If you didn’t previously believe that alcoholism was an excrutiatingly difficult disease to recover from, you will by the time you finish this book.

While Vargas’ internal struggle would be engaging enough, she also includes material that we all remember from the news. We go back in time with her to Bob Woodruff’s IED injuries in Iraq and to Peter Jennings’ cancer diagnosis. We’re there when she reports from Baghdad and when she interviews Amanda Knox’s parents. By invoking unfolding global events, Vargas expertly involves us in her personal world as well. We see clearly the immensity of the world’s problems, and the strength it took for someone like Vargas to keep telling the truth. And now, she’s telling the biggest truth of all: her own.

Swimming in the Sink is a comeback tale told straight from the heart—the big, intrepid heart belonging to Lynne Cox. In refreshingly candid style, the legendary open-water swimmer details her many achievements and sets the stage for her greatest challenge. From setting a world record crossing the English Channel (at the age of 15) to swimming in Arctic waters without a wetsuit, she swims with a purpose, whether promoting peace between Argentina and Chile or calling attention to environmental concerns. In 1987, her swim across the frigid Bering Strait helped to ease Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. 

As an elite athlete with a unique ability to acclimatize to cold, Cox also participated in scientific research studying the body’s response to extreme cold, helping to refine surgical and emergency treatment for cold-related traumas. When it came to recovering from the deaths of her beloved elderly parents, however, Cox found herself suddenly helpless, gravely ill and frightened by her damaged heart. Its fitting diagnosis: broken heart syndrome. Medications for atrial fibrillation, along with exercise and dietary restrictions, reshaped everything she knew about her body. Her swimming life seemingly over, Cox despaired: “I did not know what I was. I didn’t like the way I was. I didn’t like what was happening to me.”

With the help of good friends and caring physicians, she uses the mind-body connection to lower her heartbeat and restore proper breathing. She tries to swim again—beginning, improbably, in her kitchen sink. Mindfulness and positive thinking, added to her athletic grit, help Cox learn what it takes to swim—and love—all over again.

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

When New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins moved to London, she thought that would be the farthest she’d ever be, both physically and culturally, from her native Wilmington, North Carolina. Then she met Olivier. “Soon I was living with a man who used Chanel deodorant and believed it was a consensus view that Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was on account of the rain,” she writes in her wry memoir, When in French. 

Collins and Olivier established their relationship in England, a somewhat neutral zone: his continent, her language. But when his job took the couple to Geneva, Collins began to realize that she could no longer put off learning French. It wasn’t just because she was shut out of everyday life in Geneva or because she had mistakenly implied in a note to her mother-in-law that she had given birth to a coffeemaker—without knowing French, she was unable to truly understand her husband. “Talking to you in English is like touching you with gloves,” says Olivier.

So Collins embarks on a quest to learn French, starting with a language class and working her way up to newscasts and episodes of “The Voice: La Plus Belle Voix” on TF1. 

In between unsparing recitals of her pratfalls and triumphs on the road to conquering her husband’s langue maternelle, Collins flashes back through their relationship, exploring its cultural divide. She also investigates the questions that her pursuit raises. Does speaking a different language change who you are as a person? How does language shape a culture? She visits the Académie française, researches an Amazonian tribe that requires its members to marry into a different language group and unearths other tidbits of trivia and history that will fascinate lovers of words and language. 

Still, the heart of the book lies in Collins’ personal story, which she tells with humor, humility and a deep affection for the people and cultures involved. Whether she’s describing the grinding exhaustion of learning a foreign language or the euphoria of a breakthrough, her determination makes the reader root for her. When in French is both an entertaining fish-out-of-water story and a wise and insightful look at the way two very different people and families manage to find common ground.

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

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.