No relationship is more fraught than the one between father and son; the son is always trying to please his father, and the father is feeling guilty about whether he loves his son enough. Now imagine that your dad is a gonzo journalist who has famously hung out with Hell’s Angels and loved his booze, drugs and guns. In Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up with Hunter S. Thompson, Juan F. Thompson lucidly and longingly tells us just what it was like being the only child of the notorious writer. 

Born in California, Juan moved to D.C. with his parents when his father was writing a book about the 1972 presidential campaign. The family eventually moved back to Aspen, where Juan grew up and watched his parents’ marriage fall down around him. Hunter Thompson was never a loving man, and Juan admits that as a child he feared his father and had very little respect for him. 

Eventually, father and son developed rituals, such as cleaning Hunter’s many guns, that cemented their tentative bond. Even so, Juan declares that in spite of his father’s talents as a writer, “in his daily life he was simply crazy . . . unpredictable, unreliable, unreasonable, given to sudden fits of rage.”

After Hunter’s death, Juan still wonders what his father wanted from him, and he still tries not to let him down. It’s a heavy burden to carry, even as the young Thompson ponders the ageless questions: “What do fathers want most from their sons? Do we only want them to be happy? Do we want them to be like us? Do we want forgiveness? Do we want to be loved by our sons?”

Juan never finds the answers to these questions, but his stories of searching for them are powerfully affecting.

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

Like so many teenage girls, Ruth Wariner and her friends used to spend hours back in the 1980s dreaming and talking of future romances. But despite living in a fundamentalist “plural marriage” colony in Mexico that had broken away from the Mormon church, most of them did not hope for a polygamous future as a “sister wife.” They knew all too well what that meant.

Wariner was her father’s 39th child; her mother, 17 when she married, was the fifth wife of “the prophet.” When Wariner was a baby, her father was killed by assassins sent by his brother in a bloody feud over control of the colony. Her stepfather had four wives, none of whom he could afford to support, and Wariner’s upbringing was horrific. In The Sound of Gravel, Wariner describes her childhood and eventual escape in vivid, heartrending detail.

Her mother, Kathy, loving but in thrall to her ghastly second husband, Lane, had 10 children, three with disabilities. They lived in cramped, primitive conditions in their Mexican settlement, largely supported by the welfare fraud Kathy committed on frequent trips back to the U.S. Lane was abusive and incompetent, ultimately with tragic consequences. 

Wariner loved her siblings and friends, but suffered from mistreatment, poverty and a truncated education as her family hid in plain sight from the puzzled but apparently clueless authorities. All her frantic efforts to end her step-father’s abuse were stymied by her mother and their church. 

Wariner takes us inside this renegade community as only a survivor could. She writes with particular beauty about her brothers and sisters, innocent children living sad, deprived lives because of their parents’ folly. Her fears for them finally drove 15-year-old Wariner to flee to the U.S., where she built a better life for the family with the intelligence, fortitude and compassion that are evident throughout her impressive memoir.

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

In this captivating companion to the sensational book and 1991 movie Not Without My Daughter, it is the daughter’s turn to tell her tale. Now grown, educated and fiercely independent, Mahtob Mahmoody recounts her harrowing escape with her mother from a tyrannical and abusive father in war-torn Iran. The years that follow, back in the U.S.A., are fraught with fear that the father will follow and reclaim his daughter. Instead of seeking anonymity, Mahtob’s mother, Betty Mahmoody, chooses to publicize their plight and the failure of U.S. and international laws to protect victims of international kidnappings. Loopholes get tightened and laws change as Betty becomes a passionate advocate for such injustices. Mahtob has no choice but to share the burden of her mother’s work: frequent travel, journalists asking probing questions and the constant threat of her father’s intervention.

Even changing her name temporarily to Amanda and reasserting her faith as a Christian do not alter the fact that Mahtob is her Muslim father’s daughter, and he wants her back. He stalks her dreams and threatens her security, engaging strangers to call and email her relentlessly, and even invade her apartment. Mahtob suffers from the debilitating effects of lupus and struggles with intimate relationships. She is unable to move on with her life until a psychology course assignment to “collect happiness” by keeping a daily list of five things that make her happy and sharing it with her classmates, seemingly impossible tasks, forces her to see things differently. Mahtob discovers she can change her life by changing her attitude. Before long, her disease is in remission and she is able to rid herself of many medications and their side effects. 

In My Name Is Mahtob, forgiveness comes in stages and takes many forms. It is a journey she bravely shares, as she discovers a “pleasure that there is not in vengeance.”

When Kevin Powell appeared on the first season of MTV's “The Real World,” he developed a reputation for hostility toward his white roommates. I remember thinking he was an adult miscast in a show full of kids, always running out the door to work. In The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey Into Manhood, we learn about the grinding poverty and loss that fueled that anger, which resurfaced time and again to threaten all he held dear.

Powell grew up in a series of grimy apartment buildings in and around Jersey City. With no father to speak of, his mother, aunt and cousin were his world, and his mother's repeated abuse left Kevin fearful and angry. His successes—going to college, doing groundbreaking journalism as rap music underwent major changes, and even that MTV gig—often led to dead ends or being let go as a result of his temper.

At its best, Powell’s memoir is richly descriptive. A preacher from his childhood has "an elastic honey-coated face, a short-cut afro with a razor-sharp part chiseled in on the left side, and a river-wide grin that felt fatherly and protective." But it's not until Powell visits Africa and, back at home, searches for his absent father, that his anger and rage abate, and those qualities often make him a less-than-sympathetic figure. It’s hard to reconcile his complaining about a girlfriend who left him with the revelation, casually mentioned several chapters later, that he cheated on her. He works to overcome his violent tendencies, but even as he’s speaking in public about the need to stop violence against women, he struggles to take his own advice.

The Education of Kevin Powell is not an easy read, but it feels necessary in this moment, both for its unflinching look at abuse and its consequences, and for showing the value of working to overcome all obstacles, including those of our own making. Powell seems to have found both a measure of calm and a new drive and vitality by story's end, and we can only hope the peace is lasting. 

My Life on the Road is a traveler’s journey like no other, and Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient (President Obama called her a “champion notice-er”), journalist, organizer and activist, is your unique guide.

As a child from Toledo, Ohio, Steinem accompanied her father across the country whenever the spirit—and the need to earn money—moved him. Her mother, suffering from depression and unable to continue her own career, taught Steinem the painful price a woman could pay for staying put and isolated. Leading us on her road trips as a child and later as an activist and organizer, Steinem attaches faces and stories to the many reasons she loves and learns from it all. At 81, she is still at it.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Smith College, Steinem began her global education with a two-year fellowship in India. Here she learned the value of community. Traveling on trains with women who had little but shared everything, Steinem became part of their “talking circles,” where “listeners can speak, speakers can listen, facts can be debated, and empathy can create trust and understanding.” In this age of Twitter, email and texting, she cautions us not to forget the irreplaceable value of face-to-face dialogue in a shared space.

What makes Steinem such a credible activist and organizer for human rights is her ability to listen to and learn from others. For example, she learns from Native Americans that Ben Franklin used the Iroquois Confederacy as a model for the U.S. Constitution (except the Founding Fathers left out women). She asks, what else didn’t we learn in school?

If at the end of this inspiring trip, you aren’t inclined to share her wanderlust, you may at least see your own world—and opportunities for improving it—differently. As Steinem says, “We have to behave as if everything we do matters—because sometimes it does.”

Frederick Forsyth, former RAF pilot and journalist for Reuters, spoke four languages, enjoyed his share of cigarettes and liquor, toyed with members of the East German Stasi, slept with the mistress of a high-powered Communist official and covered a civil war in Nigeria. All before the age of 30. Forsyth shares his adventures in his entertaining new memoir, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, a fast-paced account of his career from post-World War II Europe through the Cold War and on to the present.

Readers who enjoy his political thrillers will particularly appreciate this book, as Forsyth’s own escapades became the basis for many of his stories. The idea that sparked The Odessa File came from a secret organization of Nazis he had learned about while stationed in East Berlin. The Dogs of War originated from harrowing experiences covering a brutal African conflict that nearly claimed his life. In fact, after fleeing the conflict, he returned to England jobless and destitute. So, desperate for money, he penned a novel he hoped would provide some income, based on his memories covering Charles de Gaulle while serving with Reuters in Paris. That novel was The Day of the Jackal, still his most popular work.

Forsyth’s voice is perhaps the most compelling part of his memoir. He writes in muscular, lean prose, with a hint of ironic humor that is mostly directed at his younger self. He is honest about some failed ventures—including total financial ruin at one point—but he saves his harshest criticism for incompetent diplomats, soulless mercenaries and a former Nazi concentration camp guard he encounters one dark night in a German pub.

If you’re intrigued by 20th-century history and politics, Cold War spy-craft or the life of a foreign correspondent, you’ll relish The Outsider.

Celebrity memoirs often have a predictable arc: I was born, and for a brief while I was much like you, eating cereal and riding bicycles, then (big famous thing) happened and now here I am, not much like you at all. These memoirs fill a need, because we want to know about the famous thing but also the steps that led to it, in hopes that we might trade our own cereal bowls for shrimp forks. By that metric, Mary-Louise Parker’s Dear Mr. You, a memoir written by an actress, is the farthest thing imaginable from a celebrity memoir. For this we can rejoice and be glad.

Parker has written a collection of letters, many of them poems in epistolary drag, to men in her life: a grandfather she never knew; her father (“To convey in any existing language how much I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.”); an amazing neighbor; a doctor who saved her life; the hippie co-op colleague whose loincloth made him look like a “Malibu Jesus doll.” She apologizes to a cabdriver she screamed at one day and tackles the three heads of disastrous ex-boyfriends. There’s a tiny bit of beekeeping advice, but not a fried green tomato to be found. 

Dear Mr. You keeps many of its addressees vague, letting flashes of poetry and telling detail sketch an outline we can nearly feel. A few are clearly also famous, but if you can identify them, your fame-tracking software is more finely tuned than mine. Some, like the “Future Man Who Loves My Daughter,” are still pending.

Don’t pick up this book looking for gossip about “Weeds” or life on Broadway. Parker offers instead a portrait of a human life apart from the cycles of fame: private, flawed, strange, funny, polished and reflective of the people she’s encountered along the way.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, November 2015

Home Is Burning is perhaps the funniest book about dying I’ve ever read. Dan Marshall deftly chronicles the months he and his four siblings dealt with the terminal illness of not one but both of their parents. His beloved father, Bob, has held the family together for more than a decade while his mom, Debi, fights non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So when Bob is diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), it’s a punch in the gut for a family already dealing with bad news.

Marshall, 25, moves home to Salt Lake City from Los Angeles, where his public relations career was blossoming and he had a serious girlfriend. He joins his brother Greg, fresh out of undergrad, and sister Tiffany, already burned out from dealing with the parents, to care for Bob as his disease progresses faster than any of them could have expected. Within months, Bob goes from running marathons and shuttling his younger daughters, Chelsea and Michelle, to school and dance class to being unable to lift his arms or breathe without a respirator.

So what’s possibly funny about all that, you ask? For one, the Marshall clan has one of the filthiest collective mouths in history. Even Debi chimes in with well-placed f-bombs from the chemo chair. They also have a pitch-black sense of humor that holds them together through the worst time of their lives. When Bob insists on going to daughter Michelle’s hearing on a drinking violation—no matter that he can barely speak—Marshall’s response is, “Really? Why don’t you rest up so you can try to not die later today?”

Bob is so insistent on getting to that court date, Marshall realizes, because “the disease made it so he could no longer parent his children the way he wanted to. He could no longer drive them to school. He could no longer patiently help them with their homework. . . . But he was still our dad. He wasn’t dead yet. He was still capable of flashes of greatness, flashes of his old self.”

Home Is Burning packs a wallop. Marshall doesn’t hold back in his descriptions of how a horrific illness wreaks havoc on his dad’s body, and he takes an unflinching look at how real families fall apart—and pull together—in their own ways.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Readers familiar with Jenny Lawson, as either The Bloggess or the author of the 2012 bestseller Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, are aware that she has created a tribe of perfectly flawed followers by telling hilarious stories about some of the darkest times in her life. Furiously Happy is similar in focus—you’ll find taxidermy, riotous fights with husband Victor and funny if slightly scary family stories—but Lawson’s latest book is even more open about the challenges posed by illness. It will make you laugh to the point of tears, but it could also help you make it through the toughest stuff life has to offer.

Lawson’s diagnosed illnesses, mental and physical, stack like layers of a wedding cake, and she often finds herself in the midst of a panic attack or rheumatoid arthritis flare-up while facing the public demands of her job. “It’s hard to understand anyone’s being depressed or anxious when they’ve been given a gift it seems anyone would kill for. . . . But still, it happens,” she writes. As a result, she has learned to show up for life even when it’s scary, but also to savor time at home, reach out to folks on Twitter for support on bad days and pay very close attention when things are going well. 

This adds up to a kind of mission statement, a commitment to wild joy in the face of adversity. If the downside of being a Bloggess is tough, the perks include asking the IRS for stuffed armadillo deductions, dressing as a koala to the great confusion of the Australian tourist industry and having the kind of connections needed to get new limbs made for a dead raccoon who suffered a postmortem rollercoaster mishap. Living well may be the best revenge but instead, why not be “furiously happy”?

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

At 51, his days full of work and travel as an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for CNN, Tom Foreman relaxes in what free time he has. He ignores the added pounds and growing lethargy until the day his 18-year-old daughter asks, “Will you run a marathon with me?” Foreman is too loving a dad to say no, and way too far past his days as a competitive runner to rise easily to her challenge.

In Foreman’s witty and endearing chronicle, My Year of Running Dangerously, we follow his transformation from self-described couch potato to marathoner, then ultra-marathoner. You don’t have to be a runner to understand—and feel—the blood, sweat and tears Foreman pours into his training and his first marathon with his daughter, the one he ran for her and—she later admits—she ran for him, to get him off that couch.

About halfway through this well-paced read, you may be asking, as does Foreman himself, why endure such punishment? The marathons and half-marathons keep coming, and then there is the 50-plus mile ultra-marathon he cannot resist giving a try. His brother survives a heart attack. His mother worries he’s next. His wife and daughters adjust, and readjust, to accommodate his all-consuming obsession. Foreman admits he cannot even manage one night out with his frustrated wife without bringing up his next run. Yet, lucky for him, those closest to Foreman rise to go the distance in offering their support. Together they learn that the goal is to go on challenging yourself, period. Balance comes with the eventual realization that, consequently, life is fuller and each moment richer. 

Anyone who runs, has been inspired by their own child or has tried to accomplish something difficult will find plenty worth pondering in the story of Foreman and his family. Life, he concludes, “is worth more than just living.” You just need to go for it.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 2010, musician Patti Smith published Just Kids, a radiant memoir about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their lives as bohemian babes-in-the-woods in New York City. Set in the 1960s and ’70s, the story of their coming-of-age as artists—Smith’s first full-length work of prose—won the National Book Award. 

In her new memoir, M Train, Smith trades the circus atmosphere of the psychedelic era for the here and now, offering readers a remarkably intimate look at her life in New York City. Throughout M Train she bounces between home and her favorite Greenwich Village café, where she writes in her notebook and ponders the past. Memories of her Philadelphia childhood, her extensive travels and her marriage to the late musician Fred “Sonic” Smith provide points of departure for the narrative.

Not as tightly constructed as Just Kids, M Train has a meandering quality that reflects Smith’s inquisitive, exploratory spirit. Music and speaking engagements make her a frequent flyer, and the journeys she recounts in the book are filled with surreal moments. When she falls ill before giving a talk at Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul, she’s allowed to rest in Diego Rivera’s bed. During an unexpected rendezvous in Iceland, she sings Buddy Holly songs with chess legend Bobby Fischer. Things are equally uncanny on the homefront. Just weeks before Hurricane Sandy strikes, Smith purchases a run-down bungalow (which she fondly names the Alamo) on Rockaway Beach. Somehow the house survives the storm.

Smith turns 66 while writing M Train, but she’s still a bit of a kid. At home, she falls asleep in her clothes, ignores the mail and neglects household chores. Her writing style is at once poetic and direct. Like her trademark attire—boots, cap, coat—her narratives have a plainspoken beauty that transcends the times. An American original and a magical writer, Smith makes the reader believe in the redemptive power of art.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Imagine being a tall, Swedish redheaded mother of two young girls―the apparent picture of health―but for years living with constant chest pressure, severe fatigue and difficulty breathing. In Beautiful Affliction, Lene Fogelberg explains how, for much of her life, she feared she was about to die because of what she called "the monster" pounding against her ribs.

Early on, a specialist reassured Fogelberg's family that a congenital heart murmur was nothing to worry about. Nonetheless, she could never do things like mow lawns or walk long distances, prompting others to think her lazy. Once she became a mother, simple tasks made her feel faint, prompting her to slump over a chair in front of the stove to summon the energy to simply flip pancakes.

At the time, the Swedish healthcare system didn't allow for wellness checkups, and other types of appointments required months of waiting. When Fogelberg did seek help, she was told she had pneumonia, or perhaps a fungal infection, or that she was a hypochondriac. Eventually, she flirted with the idea of suicide.

"My girls are still small," she mused, "and my life has barely begun, and I have been miserable for so long, I cannot even remember what it feels like to be happy."

Thankfully, when her devoted husband Anders is transferred to the Philadelphia area, doctors quickly realize that her aortic valve is nearly blocked and needs replacing.

Fogelberg, a poet, structures her saga well, writing in alternating chapters about growing up with her "monster," and arriving in the United States, where her condition is diagnosed and she has corrective open-heart surgery. Beautiful Affliction is an unusual, riveting medical drama crafted with deep emotion and exquisite detail.