BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, June 2016

When Isabel Vincent’s friend suggested that she have dinner with her recently widowed, 93-year-old father, Vincent was in need of a lift. She had just moved to New York City to take a job as an investigative reporter with the New York Post, and her marriage was falling apart.

“I don’t know if the temptation of a good meal did it for me, or if I was just so lonely that even the prospect of spending time with a depressed nonagenarian seemed appealing,” she writes, adding, “Whatever it was, I could never have imagined that meeting Edward would change my life.” 

She chronicles their time together in the touching Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship, in which she not only rediscovers herself, but also realizes that this lonely geriatric is a charming poet at heart, full of wisdom about love and marriage.

A refined, self-taught intellectual and old-fashioned gentleman, Edward can also cook—as in really cook. Vincent begins each chapter with a menu, full of dishes like herb-roasted chicken in a paper bag (one of Edward’s many specialties), pan-fried potatoes with gruyère and his signature dessert, apple and pear galette (the secret to which is using crushed ice and lard, he insists). Two warnings: Don’t read this book on an empty stomach because the mouth-watering food descriptions will drive you mad, and don’t expect to find recipes.

As this unexpected friendship deepens, Edward becomes Vincent’s much-needed “fairy godfather,” cheerleader, sounding board and shoulder to cry on. He advises her to wear lots of lipstick and takes her to Saks to buy a pricey dress. He tells wonderful tales of his past, while Vincent confides her marriage woes, and later, after her divorce, shares stories of her new beaus.

Soon Vincent realizes, “Joy, happiness—it snuck up on me every time I saw Edward.” Readers will savor their every encounter and turn each page wishing they could have been there.

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

In her closely observed memoir, A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles: A True Story of Love, Science, and Cancer, journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams reports on two years in her family’s life, during which she was treated for stage 4 melanoma. Williams first wrote about her disease in a New York Times Modern Love essay, in which she detailed her split from her husband Jeff and their journey back to coupledom. This book expands on that essay, focusing on the small ups and grueling downs of these two years.

As she begins treatment, Williams’ father-in-law succumbs to lymphoma, and her childhood friend Debbie undergoes surgery for advanced ovarian cancer. Williams is frank, funny and crass in describing these developments, as well as indignities like an infected head wound after surgery to remove her first melanoma. She and Debbie share a wisecracking philosophy: “I’m just over hearing people without cancer tell [us] how we’re supposed to do it,” Williams says. “Like there’s always supposed to be a struggle or a fight, and it’s supposed to be courageous. You know what? Bite me.”

“God, I can’t stand that battling talk,” Debbie replies. “Don’t assume I’m a warrior because I got sick.”

Williams also tenderly describes how her husband Jeff and their two school-age daughters cope and change, and she illuminates the recently revived field of immunotherapy. As a patient at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Williams qualifies for a phase-1 study of two new immunotherapy drugs. These save her life: After three months of treatment, the metastases in her lungs and back disappear, as do all signs of melanoma.

Williams often mines her cancer journey for comedy, but the scenes that stayed with me were quiet moments, such as when she drives away after visiting Debbie, not knowing if it’s the last time she’ll see her old friend. In the crowded cancer-memoir genre, this book holds its own.

Kristen Beddard moved to Paris as a “trailing spouse,” relocating for her new husband’s job but sure she’d find work of her own soon enough. Her joy gave way to homesickness that cried out for comfort food, but zut alors! The French, they did not, how do you say, have any kale. Or rather, they thought they did, perkily handing over savoy cabbages at every market and farm stand Beddard visited. Undaunted, she continued her quest for leafy greens, a calling that’s documented with charming style in Bonjour Kale.

Beddard’s tales of growing up with a health-foodie mother (and the inclusion of some of her nourishing recipes) make it clear the author was not an entitled monster demanding smoothies from her new neighbors. Once she learned that kale had become a “lost and forgotten” vegetable in France, it was a short leap to realizing that the American focus on kale as a “superfood” wouldn’t fly with the French, who found such ideas ridiculous. Still, Beddard’s efforts persisted, and her dogged outreach led her to better fluency in the language and new friendships. 

This is a sweet story, and the included recipes follow a nice arc, from Entry-Level Vegetable Soup, a simple, low-cost belly-warmer, to recipes created by a chef who figured into her later success, creating an all-kale menu to help bring the message to the masses. Read closer, though, and you’ll see how many times Beddard was ready to give up, but managed to do one small thing to nudge the project along; her persistence is inspiring. Bonjour Kale reminds us not only to eat our greens but also to follow our dreams.

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

On July 9, 1984, reporter Joanna Connors was on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer when she was raped on the stage of an empty theater at Case Western Reserve University. Her assailant, 27-year-old David Francis, was arrested and sent to prison. In I Will Find You, she offers an insightful account of this life-changing event and its harrowing aftermath.

Connors describes the brutal crime, police investigation and trial with emotional honesty that’s complemented by her reporting skills. Francis’ arrest wasn’t difficult given the fact that he had his name tattooed on his arm, and that he inexplicably returned to the scene of the crime the next day.

Connors remained haunted not only by the event but by Francis’ chilling threat to find her if she reported it. She raised a son and daughter, not telling them about the crime until her daughter was about to go to college. 

At that point, she decided, “Maybe I should find him instead.” A records search revealed that her assailant had died in prison in 2000. “My search for him was over before it started,” she writes. 

And yet it wasn’t. Connors diligently tracked down Francis’ friends and family, discovering that his family life was filled with poverty, abuse from his father, alcoholism, addiction and crime. Her investigation leads her to conclude that her rapist and his family were victims in their own right. 

She writes: “As a reporter, I have asked so many other people to open themselves up and let me tell their stories, all the while withholding my own. I owed this to them. I owed it to other women who have been raped. I owed it to my children.”

Connors’ riveting, soul-searching book deserves a wide audience; it presents an unusual first-person perspective on critical issues of race, class and crime in America.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, April 2016

Reading Dimestore: A Writer’s Life is like sitting a spell on the front porch swing with novelist Lee Smith, hearing all about the kinfolk who nurtured her in the mountain “holler” town of Grundy, Virginia. In this collection of 14 essays, Smith’s voice sings out like the mountain music she was raised on, skillfully weaving together nostalgic melodies with modern insight.

Smith describes growing up in the warm embrace of her family, watching life unfold as she gazed through a one-way mirror in the office of her father’s variety store. “Thus I learned the position of the omniscient narrator, who sees and records everything, yet is never visible,” she writes. “It was the perfect early education for a fiction writer.”

Despite a seemingly idyllic childhood, everything wasn’t completely rosy. Her beloved father was what he described as “kindly nervous,” a euphemism for bipolar disorder, and her cherished mother was hospitalized several times for depression and anxiety.

However, Smith makes clear: “This is my story, then, but it is not a sob story.” Dimestore also contains a wealth of humor and joyful memories, such as an account of a 1966 rafting trip Smith took down the Mississippi River with 15 of her college classmates from Hollins, the inspiration for her novel The Last Girls. She writes beautifully of her epiphany upon meeting Eudora Welty and realizing that this master storyteller wrote “[p]lain stories about country people and small towns, my own ‘living world.’ ”

Sadly, the hometown of Grundy so near to Smith’s heart was relocated in recent years to control flooding. Smith concludes: “The dimestore is gone. Walmart looms over the river. I’m 70, an age that has brought no wisdom. When I was young, I always thought the geezers knew some things I didn’t; the sad little secret is, we don’t. I don’t understand anything anymore, though I’m still in there, still trying like crazy.”

Smith greatly underestimates her own wisdom—Dimestore is chock-full of it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Lee Smith about Dimestore.

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

American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox once wrote, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone”—wisdom contradicted by the gifted standup comedian, actress and writer Bonnie McFarlane in her often hilarious and sometimes poignant memoir, You’re Better Than Me. Saved, or cursed, by her instinct to find something funny in almost every situation, she advises her reader early on, “If you have the appropriate emotional response to things, congratulations, you’re better than me.”

Calling herself a “weirdo, but not a serial killer”—although her description of killing chickens on her family farm in Alberta, Canada might suggest otherwise—McFarlane recounts the trials (raped at 17) and tribulations (no television, no friends) of rural isolation and adolescent angst.

Moving to Vancouver, McFarlane works as a waitress and freelance writer, where she discovers comedy clubs and joke writing. Eventually she realizes that her jokes will only be told if she performs them herself. She gets lucky, lands a manager and continues her roller coaster career via stints in Toronto, New York and Hollywood. She struggles with relationships, sexist stereotyping, depression, income and insecurity. She auditions constantly, writes for and stars in television shows that quickly die, and wins a role on the reality show “Last Comic Standing,” where she becomes infamous for uttering an obscenity. She scores a spot on David Letterman’s late-night show, “kills” it (a good thing), then clumsily drops the microphone, greatly annoying her host. She gets fired, heckled, rejected by her comedy heroes (Janeane Garofalo is one), and occasionally derailed by her own poor judgment (like excessive drinking and bad timing).

Now married, a mother and podcaster (“My Wife Hates Me”) with husband-comedian Rich Voss, McFarlane continues to provoke her live audience. She needs their laughs, because, she confides, “the audience is the instrument the comedian is learning to play.” Her readers can now join in the experience. Cue the applause.

The strange, faded glamour of a neighborhood in decay often reaches its peak in the bars that define the territory. It can be a place where everybody knows your name or a spot where people know enough to deny ever having met you. Sunny's Bar was a little of both and a lot more besides. Open just one night a week in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood before gentrification buffed its rough edges away, the was an unusual place that Tim Sultan stumbled into at random one night and in some ways never left. Sunny's Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World is a love letter to the place and time, but mostly to Sunny Balzano himself, the owner and a great American character.

Sultan describes Sunny as a barman philosopher and artist; he originally escaped from Red Hook and the family business to travel, spending time in India, rubbing shoulders with Andy Warhol's Factory denizens and finding a patroness of his own art before returning to take over the bar. Once a haven for longshoremen, it was also a safe place for mobsters to drop in and discuss private matters in the back room that doubled as an art studio. No kind of businessman, Sunny would make ice one tray at a time in the fridge and save it up for the Friday nights when he was open. Drinks were sold on a donation basis until inspectors intervened, taking much of the charm with them.

As Sunny's grew in popularity—the regulars were stymied when a "party bus" full of 20-somethings descended on the place one night—Sultan moved on to a new watering hole.

We can never really get back to the places that define an era in our lives. If they're not done in by an act of God, we grow so much in the intervening years that on returning they look like keychain ornaments. Sunny's Nights is a snapshot of a place and time that are no more, but also a loving portrait of the man who defined them.

When it comes to inspirational books, it’s hard to beat Alive, Piers Paul Read’s 1974 account of the survival and eventual rescue of 16 survivors of a plane crash in the Andes. Roberto Canessa, one of two men who hiked out of the mountains and then led authorities to the survivors’ location, wisely doesn’t try to beat it in I Had to Survive, choosing instead to write (with Pablo Vierci) a complementary account of the ordeal and its effect on the subsequent four decades of his life.

It’s been quite a life, with Canessa forging a career as a pediatric cardiologist in his native Uruguay. The book is his way of expressing how, as Vierci puts it, “his ordeal on the mountain had shaped his life.”

For the record, Canessa wastes no time addressing what, for many, was the most salient feature of Alive: how the survivors had to consume “the only nourishment that was keeping us alive, the lifeless bodies of our friends.” But he has a larger purpose than explaining that decision. Rather than consigning his ordeal to the past, he’s made it an indelible part of his life.

So while the first part of the book recounts the crash and its aftermath, the second part is where Canessa truly bares his soul. From his words and those of his family and the families of his patients, it’s clear that while some people might think the Andes cast a shadow over his life, his view is totally different: “It’s the light from the mountain that continues to illuminate my path, in life and in death.”

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

At 83, Joel Grey is a lifelong entertainer who created an iconic stage and screen role, fathered a movie star in her own right and came out as gay in early 2015. And his memoir checks in at a grand total of 256 pages?

Please, sir, we want some more.

But until that happens, we’ll take what we can get. And we get a very readable memoir indeed with as Grey—best known as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret—pulls few punches while galloping from his childhood in Cleveland to marriage and a family in Hollywood and finally fulfillment as a gay man in New York.

Along the way, we get enough neuroses to make a team of Viennese specialists complain about overwork. (Spoiler alert: It all started with his mother.) It’s been a life of personal struggle, and not just with his sexuality—or, as he puts it, his “sexual war with myself.” So Master of Ceremonies works on two levels: as a show-business memoir, and as a tale of personal redemption. Like his character in Cabaret, Grey was a master at hiding his true identity.

Grey is at his best when recounting his childhood years as part of a sprawling Jewish family that missed its calling by not pitching its own sitcom. Exposed to the stage at an early age, he’s never really left—literally or figuratively.

As for his involvement with Cabaret, Grey doesn’t disappoint when it comes to anecdotes, including a thoughtful recounting of how he came to interpret his role. (Fortunately for him, his big chance came along when he was playing a “crappy pirate” on Long Island.)

As for his personal journey, Grey doesn’t disappoint there, either. You’ll find yourself rooting for him just as hard in real life as on the stage or screen.

In her deeply personal new book, In Other Words, acclaimed novelist Jhumpa Lahiri notes that “writing in another language represents an act of demolition, a new beginning.” It’s a neat summing-up of what takes place in this brief, meditative memoir—Lahiri’s first work of nonfiction—as she shares the story of her passion for Italian and how she set out to master it.

Lahiri became enamored of Italian during her student days and studied the language somewhat casually in the years that followed. But her interest deepened over time, and in 2012 she moved with her family to Rome. Lahiri, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies (1999), was also seeking a “new approach” to her art, and over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that by unlocking the Italian language she makes unexpected discoveries about herself as a writer. 

But the endeavor is a humbling one. Lahiri is candid about the difficulties she encounters in gaining command of a new language. When she attempts serious prose pieces in Italian, she finds that the process of composition as she has practiced it throughout her career no longer applies. “I’ve never tried to do anything this demanding as a writer,” she admits. “I’ve never felt so stupid.”

Lahiri’s many fans will not be surprised to learn that she succeeds in her linguistic undertaking. She wrote In Other Words in Italian, and it’s presented here in a dual-language format. As the narrative unfolds and the new language forces her to relearn the rudiments of her craft, she achieves her usual artistry and delivers an impassioned valentine to the most lyrical of languages.

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

Prominent NPR talk show host Diane Rehm’s memoir, On  My Own, is a plainspoken but passionate account of the death from Parkinson’s disease of her husband of 54 years and of her journey through the first year of widowhood. 

Diagnosed in 2005, John Rehm, a retired lawyer, finally entered an assisted living facility in November 2012. By June 2014, his condition had deteriorated to the point that he elected to hasten his death by forgoing food, water and medications. The fact that he survived and suffered for another nine days caused Rehm to “rage at a system that would not allow John to be helped toward his own death” and spurred her to commit herself to Compassion & Choices, an organization that advocates for the right to die with medical assistance. 

But this memoir is much more than a polemic on aiding the terminally ill. Eschewing self-help clichés, the deeply religious Rehm offers a meticulous narrative of her personal struggle to come to terms with a profound loss. Though the intensity of her love for John is unmistakable, she takes pains not to portray their marriage in idyllic terms. Instead, she describes that relationship as one “filled with both times of joy and years of hostility,” and her mixed feelings clearly affected a “complicated and long-lasting” grieving process she reveals with candor and insight.

Anticipating her memoir’s publication, Rehm, who is 79, announced in December that she would leave broadcasting after 37 years, sometime after the 2016 election. Though she spends a considerable amount of time in the book musing about what it will take for her to feel useful in the years ahead, there is little doubt that this talented woman will find myriad ways to continue her valuable contributions to our world.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, February 2016

Chris Offutt has made a remarkable career for himself as an award-winning author and screenwriter (“True Blood,” “Weeds”). In his stunning new memoir, he turns to the complex legacy of his father, Andrew Offutt, a prolific writer of pulp science fiction and pornography. And by “prolific,” we’re talking more than 400 paperbacks of series fiction, with titles like Blunder Broads and The Girl in the Iron Mask. (The complete bibliography in the back of the book is worth a perusal for its less family-friendly titles.)

After Andrew Offutt discovered his talent for churning out pulp fiction, he became a stay-at-home professional writer in the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky. While his wife catered to his every need, Chris—the oldest son—became the de facto caretaker of his three younger siblings. They all knew not to go into their father’s study, or walk too loudly or slam the door: The entire household revolved around the “great” writer’s sensitivities. Small wonder each child escaped by age 17, but as a writer himself, Offutt felt the burden of his father’s influence. 

The questions Offutt asks himself in this thoughtful, elegant memoir emerge from the emotionally wrenching process of organizing and cataloging his father’s work (more than 1,800 pounds of it) after his death. Did Offutt become a writer despite, or because of, his father? How does one mourn a difficult parent? How are we shaped by our childhoods, and can we truly move on from them? These are questions we all might ask upon the death of parent, and they will open up this particular story to many different readers. 

While the beating heart of the book is its depiction of a complicated father-son relationship, it also provides a fascinating glimpse of the literary culture of 1970s science-fiction conventions and the last days of paperback porn before the advent of video and digital pornography. My Father, the Pornographer preserves a slice of forgotten literary life within its keenly felt, lyrical portrayal of a son wrestling with his father’s inheritance.

RELATED CONTENT:  Read a Q&A with author Chris Offutt.

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

From his rare centenarian perch, Pulitzer Prize winner and World War II epic novelist Herman Wouk surveys the ups and downs of his long literary life—and the deep faith that has accompanied him throughout—in his delightfully sanguine memoir, Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.

The book’s title holds the two threads of his work, Wouk notes. “Sailor” refers to the scope of his writing life and the experiences that inspired him, and “Fiddler,” as in Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye, underscores the proudly Jewish author’s own “spiritual journey.” Wouk’s ability to weave these two strands together creates a unique framework to consider a life lived long and well.

Wouk's experiences as a naval officer in World War II inspired his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny.

Wouk might as well be inviting the reader to pull up a chair by the fire and have a listen over tea, so companionably chatty is the once-reticent writer. He is a man at peace with his age and his work. The latter, he seems reluctantly ready to admit, may finally be complete—although maybe not. In a 2012 New York Times interview, asked if he planned to stop writing any time soon, he answered, “What am I going to do? Sit around and wait a year?” And here he is once more, content “for the chance to please you through my books.”

The boy from the Bronx grew up loving a hard-working Russian-Jewish immigrant father who enjoyed “convulsing us kids with his drolleries in Yiddish.” The young Wouk also feasted on Twain’s humor, learned from Dumas’ action-packed narratives and took lessons about a writer’s fame from Melville, whose work came to life only 30 years after his death. Wouk then aspired to be “a funny writer, nothing else.” He succeeded, graduating from Columbia College and working as a gag writer for Fred Allen’s popular radio show, among others. Then came Pearl Harbor.

For Wouk, life didn’t get in the way of his writing: It became his writing. Experiences as a naval officer on the destroyer warship USS Zane, with its “crazy captain,” would become The Caine Mutiny (1951), earning him the Pulitzer Prize. Marjorie Morningstar, which landed him on the cover of Time, borrowed his mother’s family name, Morgenstern, Yiddish for Morningstar. Youngblood Hawke, he notes, is the what-if part of his life had he not met and married Betty Sarah, the love of his life as well as his literary agent. What he learned from military figures, historians and fellow veterans would inform The Winds of War (1971). His “main task . . . to bring the Holocaust to life in a frame of global war,” inspired War and Remembrance. Both novels earned Wouk a global audience; mixed, sometimes scathing, reviews; and popular success as the books became landmark television mini-series.

Now the novelist reveals the real-life sources for his fictitious characters, recounting their stories and contributions. He recalls the years spent doing prodigious amounts of research while trying to hold onto his confidence and get the words right (The Winds of War took seven years to finish; War and Remembrance, another seven). His fame has continued to fluctuate, but he still chooses his words carefully, mostly avoiding spite, melancholy or regret.

While The Atlantic recently praised him as “The Great War Novelist America Forgot,” here Wouk has what may well be the final word: “Other things in the literary life may have ceased to matter that much, but I have always loved the work.”

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.