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.

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.”