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.

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.