When you look at the father-daughter photo on the cover of Kelly Carlin’s raw and reflective memoir, A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George, you wonder what it would have been like to grow up in the shadow of the fast-talking, fast-thinking and fast-living comedian George Carlin. And then you begin reading, and you realize that Kelly’s reports from the trenches sound familiar to anyone who grew up amid the whirlwind social changes of the 1960s and ’70s.

As much a profile of the times as a peek inside the Carlin household, Kelly Carlin’s memoir captures both the intellectual and societal spaces opened up by freethinkers like George and his wife, Brenda, and the confusion inherent in such explorations, especially for a child growing up with parents who didn’t always act much like parents. Someone had to step up, though, and like many a child from a dysfunctional home, Kelly became the de facto parent early on, shepherding her father through bad LSD trips and her mother through severe alcoholism.

Carlin takes a chronological approach here, expanding on her one-woman stage show of the same name, and though she never co-opts her father’s biting style of comic commentary, she is an excellent storyteller in her own right. Each scene draws on the sometimes unbelievable drama playing out before her as well as the complex emotions she experienced within. So when a young Kelly decides to stop her parents from fighting by finding her father’s hidden stash of cocaine (hidden in Ram Dass’ classic book Be Here Now, of course) we understand both the heartbreaking absurdity of the situation and just how ridiculously normal this scene seemed to young Kelly. This dual awareness serves her well throughout her memoir, allowing her to truly show us the ins and outs of growing up with George.

Negroland is not a geographic locale. It’s the name Margo Jefferson gives to the place, time and circumstances of her upbringing in the upper echelons of black society. Her memoir, which reads with the blast force of a prose poem, looks back with love and no small amount of anger at a life spent navigating the freedoms of class while flirting with, and occasionally skirting, the imposed limits of race. 

Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1947 to a socialite mother and a physician father who was head of pediatrics at a prestigious hospital. Their family had hired help, but Margo and sister Denise were expected to clean in advance of their arrival, to keep the habits and inflections of vernacular blackness at bay, to assert their privilege by keeping distance between themselves and those who didn’t share it. This often afforded them a rarefied perch, passing as white when it suited their needs, and allowing them to look down on poor blacks and all whites with equal distaste. 

When the family takes a vacation without first vetting the hotel, only to have their reservation downgraded and the red carpet withdrawn the minute they’re seen, it’s a bitter reminder that their gilded cage doesn’t always allow access to the larger world.

Jefferson offers some broader historical context for her place and time, including thumbnail biographies of some “privileged free Negro(es),” then dives into personal stories, each helping to frame her highly particular circumstance and make it somewhat easier to understand. She is unsparing when describing her college years; if her life was unique, the melodrama she brought to bear on it is still a hallmark of that stage of life.

“ ‘Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro,’ my mother wrote seventy years ago. It wasn’t a disavowal, it was her claim to a free space.” This line from a letter Jefferson’s mother wrote to a friend reappears throughout Negroland. It’s a stinging reminder that identity can’t always be chosen but may be tailored to one’s advantage for those who have the resources in hand.

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

James Joyce once wished for an “ideal reader with an ideal case of insomnia”; a reader of Joyce Carol Oates similarly needs an ideal insomnia to plow through the 50-plus novels of this legendarily prolific writer. As it turns out, Oates herself suffers from insomnia, and has since she was a girl, using her night hours productively and well. Her new book, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age, offers an exquisitely rendered glimpse of her own childhood in rural upstate New York.

As in her 2011 memoir, A Widow’s Story, Oates writes tactfully, perhaps even grudgingly, avoiding the over-share, the “too much information” of the contemporary misery memoir. But the opportunity to follow her beautifully subtle stream of consciousness as it revisits the past is not to be missed. Oates sees herself as a ghost revisiting the old farmhouse of her childhood, the one-room schoolhouse she attended and the winding country roads of Sunday drives with her beloved parents. This book is as much a meditation on memory as it is a recollection of a specific time and place.

Composed of separate essays, many previously published, The Lost Landscape can feel a bit repetitive, although never scattered. This makes it a perfect book for readers looking for short, contained “memoir-ish” (Oates’ term) essays. She is particularly good at capturing the post-Depression world of working-class rural life, when finishing high school was a real achievement. Had young Joyce not been bused to a Buffalo suburb for high school, she might never have gone to college or become the eminent American author she is today. And yet, as The Lost Landscape shows, the world of childhood is also the source of her astonishing creativity and genius.

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

In the South, college football is religion, and on any Saturday afternoon in the fall, the deeply faithful congregate in stadiums across the region, praying that on this day their faith will be bolstered with a glorious victory on the gridiron.

Stuart Stevens grew up going to Ole Miss games with his father. In 1962, in the midst of tumultuous battles over civil rights on campus, Stevens and his father cheered the Rebels to a perfect season and a national championship. More than 50 years later, having just finished leading an exhausting and unsuccessful presidential campaign for Mitt Romney, Stevens “wakes up” and realizes that what he wants most in the world is one more season, “with my father and football and the Ole Miss Rebels.” 

In The Last Season, Stevens, a cracking good storyteller, affectionately regales us with tales of his and his 95-year-old father’s final shared season in 2012. Offering a game-by-game chronicle, Stevens reveals how he gets to know his father once again through their shared love of football and their (occasionally hilarious) travels to the team’s home and away games.

Though his father is now frail, he leaps to his feet at the Ole Miss-LSU game to celebrate an Ole Miss interception, “and in that moment the years shed away as effortlessly as tossing aside a quilt when getting out of bed in the morning.”

Though Stevens sometimes digresses from his poignant tale to offer platitudes about sports and life, he always trots back to the line of scrimmage with a winning play that has us cheering from the sidelines.

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

Rambunctious and poignant, Blaine Lourd’s moseying coming-of-age memoir, Born on the Bayou, takes readers to the swampy, misty marshes of his youth in New Iberia, Louisiana.

While Lourd regales us with tales of his two brothers, his sister and his mother, it’s his father who stands tall at the center of the story. Harvey “Puffer” Lourd Jr. is a salesman and a gambler, a lovable and cantankerous man living by the code of the bayou and the South, who tells his son he’s never had a bad day in his life. The younger Lourd emerges into manhood by hunting and fishing with his father, pulling the feathers off of still warm ducks just shot or cleaning a whitetail deer. “[T]his was the way of the South of my youth, boys walking in the footsteps of men who themselves did not know the way,” he writes.

Lourd does know that, like his father, he’s a Coonass, a badge he wears proudly: “A Coonass can be wealthy or poor, wise or foolish. At heart, he’s generally unpretentious and comfortable with himself, listens to his gut, has horse sense, and tends to be indulgent.” 

A dazzling storyteller, Lourd so skillfully describes the hazards of growing up in the bayou with a larger-than-life father that we can’t help but read with wonder that he survived his upbringing and lived to tell these tales.

Rambunctious and poignant, Blaine Lourd’s moseying coming-of-age memoir, Born on the Bayou, takes readers to the swampy, misty marshes of his youth in New Iberia, Louisiana.

While Lourd regales us with tales of his two brothers, his sister and his mother, it’s his father who stands tall at the center of the story. Harvey “Puffer” Lourd Jr. is a salesman and a gambler, a lovable and cantankerous man living by the code of the bayou and the South, who tells his son he’s never had a bad day in his life. The younger Lourd emerges into manhood by hunting and fishing with his father, pulling the feathers off of still warm ducks just shot or cleaning a whitetail deer. “[T]his was the way of the South of my youth, boys walking in the footsteps of men who themselves did not know the way,” he writes.

Lourd does know that, like his father, he’s a Coonass, a badge he wears proudly: “A Coonass can be wealthy or poor, wise or foolish. At heart, he’s generally unpretentious and comfortable with himself, listens to his gut, has horse sense, and tends to be indulgent.” 

A dazzling storyteller, Lourd so skillfully describes the hazards of growing up in the bayou with a larger-than-life father that we can’t help but read with wonder that he survived his upbringing and lived to tell these tales.

le of magazines in the spare room or perhaps the mountain of unused sporting equipment in the garage? You won’t find a much better incentive than reading Mess, Barry Yourgrau’s lighthearted account of his two-year quest to clean out his New York apartment.

Yourgrau, a writer and occasional actor, can afford to be lighthearted. From his description, which includes dozens of plastic supermarket bags wafting about like tumbleweeds, things are beyond messy at his pad but don’t approach reality TV territory. He can still navigate the premises, at least, and find a spot to write an entertaining chronicle of his project.

You might ask: Does it really take 256 pages to clean out an apartment? Why not call 1-800-GOT-JUNK and be done with it? The answer, naturally, is complicated, and in Yourgrau’s view, it goes back to a peripatetic childhood, a difficult relationship with his father and (surprise!) an inability to let go. Throw a girlfriend short on patience into the mix, plus side trips to various therapists, support groups and clutter experts, and you have more than enough to keep things readable.

Fortunately for Yourgrau (and the reader), there’s a specific goal: All he has to do is get things presentable enough to host his girlfriend and her mother for dinner. Given all the baggage (real and psychic) involved, that’s easier said than done.

Will Yourgrau sort out a lifetime of messy relationships and get motivated to clean things up in time to host that dinner? Let’s just say the reader who roots for a tidy ending won’t be disappointed.

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

When his 15-year old son, Samori, was devastated by the news that Ferguson, Missouri police had been exonerated in the death of Michael Brown, Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic and an eloquent, powerful voice on the subject of race relations, felt compelled to address his son’s despair. The resulting book was originally scheduled for publication in September, but was rushed into print by publisher Spiegel & Grau in response to a surge in interest that followed the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina.

An angry, proud, despairing, vigilant, fearful and fiercely loving father, Coates watches his son confront what he calls the barriers, distances and breaches that stand Between the World and Me (the phrase comes from a poem by Richard Wright). Offering wisdom as well as comfort, he guides Samori through these challenges as they concern the African diaspora, the range and significance of which Coates first glimpsed as a student at Howard University. Growing up in Baltimore, he had to learn the culture and ways of the gang-oriented street in order to survive. He was an indifferent student saved from a predictable fate by the discipline and expectations of his own father. He tells his son how he arrived in Washington, D.C., dazzled by the global span of black scholars, poets, music-makers and activists he finds there. He discovers a new kind of power in learning from them his true heritage and legacy, far removed from the white version of the American Dream.

Initially dismissive of the nonviolent protestors of the civil rights movement, Coates is inspired by the more pragmatic Malcolm X. With an honesty that is intimate and endearing, he recounts for Samori the moment when he fully realizes his country’s unacknowledged, deeply troubling history: In 2001, Prince Jones, an innocent African-American friend, is killed by a Maryland policeman. The officer is exonerated.

Coates understands that he cannot protect his son. Children born into African-American families, he says, come already endangered: Parents beat their children first so that police will not beat or kill them later. It is not enough to want or expect police to change. He believes reform cannot happen unless we as a nation change, recognizing that they are us.

In a June 2014 article for The Atlantic (“The Case for Reparations”), Coates catalogued a history of institutionalized wrongs inflicted upon African Americans, ranging from government policies to fraudulent business practices. Now Coates likens such racism to a disembodiment, and he calls on Samori—named for an African king who died resisting foreign rule—to reclaim his identity, his body.

Ultimately, Coates’ powerful message, driven by a parent’s love, remains painfully hopeful. The struggle for change has meaning, and questions matter, perhaps even more than the answers.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s new memoir does more than chronicle his contrasting lives in the two very different worlds he simultaneously occupied. Undocumented gives the Dominican-born, American-raised Peralta a voice and, perhaps, more importantly, it gives readers a figure they can understand and empathize with.

Peralta became a face in the immigration debate nine years ago when The Wall Street Journal published a long-form profile a month before he graduated from Princeton University. The article recounted Peralta’s arrival in the U.S. at the age of 4, his childhood in New York City homeless shelters and a love of learning that took him all the way from a public school in Chinatown to the Ivy League. When the article was published in 2006, Peralta was seeking a waiver of his status as an illegal immigrant so he could accept a two-year scholarship at Oxford and return safely to the U.S.

In the book, Peralta’s storytelling is often raw and emotional—“all the shit going down in my life, and now I had to deal with the trials and tribulations of the aggrieved younger brother”—while also being direct and powerful. “[E]very day,” he writes, “I feel grateful to this country for the education it has given and continues to give me and my brother.”

Peralta describes seemingly basic acts like opening a personal bank account or accepting financial aid that were made difficult by the lack of a social security number. Readers of Undocumented will find themselves growing increasingly frustrated with a system that nearly failed Peralta had it not been for the help of those who didn’t see an illegal immigrant, but rather a bright boy with a promising future.

Whatever your stance on immigration reform, you’re likely to be moved by Peralta’s plight as he recalls the tumultuous obstacles he and his family have faced.

Children’s earliest memories are of their families. Siblings, especially the closer they are in age, are our first friends, the only people in the world who shared the same womb and share the same memories. But what if your only memories of your siblings are how they disappeared?

Mary Anna King’s new memoir, Bastards, is the story of her fractured family. Growing up in New Jersey, she never realized the depth of her parents’ poverty, even when they gave away five of her younger sisters to make ends meet. It wasn’t until one of those sisters returned well-dressed and well-mannered that King began to see her own family through someone else’s eyes. King, as well as her brother, were taken to Oklahoma to be raised by her maternal grandfather and his second wife—a couple with lots of possessions, but not a lot of warmth. Though she was provided for, King and her brother continude to struggle with the memories of the family they left behind, always wondering about the sisters they lost.

King tells her story in straightforward fashion without judgment or regret, though her tone mixes melancholy with moments of hilarity. When she begins to be reunited with her sisters as a college student, there are no sentimental scenes of hugs and kisses. The siblings get drunk, smoke pot, argue and go on road trips, all while trying to fill the holes left by the girls’ adoptions. King is frank about the damage done by her troubled parents, especially her estranged father, and the consequences of their choices. Ultimately, though, the siblings find connection and acceptance, however imperfect, and begin to make new memories as a whole family again.

In 1993, Mardi Jo Link was a 31-year-old wife and mother of two and a bar waitress with a college degree. Just before sunrise on an October Michigan morning, Link and three friends set off on what would become an annual get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge adventure to the isolated refuge of Drummond Island on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In 1993, Link was the newest member of the sorority, but she eventually became the chronicler of the highs and lows of the annual island weekend.

In The Drummond Girls, Link proceeds roughly year-by-year as the conclave grows from four to eight, and as each of the friends passes through the peaks and valleys of life, from marriage and divorce to birth and death, including the sudden death of one of their own, Mary Lynn.

Link regales readers with tales of nights and days spent exploring the North woods, running into some of the island’s more colorful inhabitants—both animal and human—and bonding deeply with a group of women who, as Link says, would “do ninety days at a minimum-security prison camp or plan a hostile takeover of a Caribbean beach resort” for each other.

So pick up this book: You’ll laugh; you’ll cry; you’ll find yourself pondering the meaning of life’s small disappointments and its greatest joys, especially the “fierce friendships” at the heart of this remarkable story. 

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

Tracy Slater thought she’d stay in Boston forever. A writing teacher with a Ph.D. in literature, Slater worked with diverse students, practiced yoga, published essays and enjoyed her close-knit community of friends. Yet one fateful summer, she agreed to teach English in Japan. “Don’t fall in love,” said her mother. Naturally, she did. 

Enter Toru, a soft-spoken and quietly joyful Japanese man. Toru and Slater develop a deep emotional bond that baffles Slater’s friends and family. Against all odds, the pair indulges in a transcontinental romance that lingers long after Slater’s teaching stint in Asia ends. The Good Shufu chronicles their romance in all its charming—and occasionally painful—detail.

Slater is candid about the intellectual, emotional and cultural tensions in her new life. Why, she wonders, would a devoted feminist be happy to play shufu, or housewife, in a traditional Japanese context? How has life led to her cooking dinner three nights a week for her boyfriend and his dad? Why would someone who loves Boston so much take up a life in a land where she will always be a cultural outsider?

These questions are very much Slater’s own, yet anyone whose life didn’t quite turn out as they imagined can relate. The pleasure of this book is Slater’s ability to wrestle with very real contradictions in her life even as she masterfully unfolds a story of falling in love and finding home in unexpected places. 

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