In the poem she wrote for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day,” Elizabeth Alexander asked, “What if the mightiest word is love?” In The Light of the World, her memoir about the sudden death of her husband in 2012, the poet, essayist and playwright renders her own exquisite response. Using her medium of words, she illuminates and lyricizes the life of her mate—the painter and political refugee Ficre Ghebreyesus—and the shattering grief that follows his death at age 50. Her tool is the brush of poetic sensibility, casting her words through the filtering lenses of the African diaspora, the couple’s Eritrean and African-American ancestors, and her own sustaining community. Alexander creates an intimacy that coaxes a transformative empathy from her reader, and she rewards with a profound understanding of love and loss.

Yet, as sudden as Ficre’s death is, Alexander describes her grieving as mercifully graded, an evolution that allows her and their two young sons time to retrieve Ficre’s essence. First, there is the gut-wrenching physicality of the moment of his death, all senses erupting as she sees her lover leave his body behind. In the aftermath, she looks for him in what was once the familiar: Ficre in his garden, among the peonies he planted to bloom on her birthday; Ficre in his studio, where brushes still hold his touch; Ficre in the dishes he created as a popular chef. These comforting remainders—intensely sensual—carry her through that first aching year of widowhood. Finally, she moves her family from suburb to the city, not to flee memory’s hold in the house they all had shared, but to resume the plan the couple once had for their future.

Ficre too will live on because, as promised in Alexander’s poem, “Love beyond marital, filial, national . . . casts a widening pool of light.”

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

So-called “blended” families are a complex ecosystem, where kids can play adults against one another and even the goldfish gets a say about who does what on the chore wheel. It’s therefore not so unusual that one family was thrown into disarray by a possessive mutt. Enter Eddie, the Stepdog of the title.

For Mireya Navarro, it was easy to fall in love with Jim—both were successful reporters at the New York Times, and they had much in common. Mia could work well enough with Jim’s two kids, but Eddie seemed to have her number. Defying every command, ecstatic to see Jim or the kids while he barked at Mia, Eddie made it clear how he felt about the newcomer. When her attempts to befriend the dog fell flat, she began scheming to get him out of the picture.

Navarro’s story is ostensibly about the dog, but go beyond that and you’ll find a layered tale of family love. Mia and Jim know they’re right for one another, but her relationship with the kids never becomes “parental” despite living with them half the time. Jim loves Eddie in large part because he loves Jim unconditionally, a rarity when juggling the needs of so many humans. And Eddie? Mia’s psychological read on his behavior—that the dog is jealous—gets turned on its head by a canine counselor, who helps the two form a friendship of sorts.

Stepdog is fun and often funny, but it will be of special interest to anyone with a blended family life. It’s a powerful reminder that all you need is love, and possibly kibble.

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

The frequent surprises in Oliver Sacks’ guardedly self-revelatory autobiography begin with the book’s cover photo. There we see a buff, leather-jacketed Sacks astride his new BMW motorcycle in Greenwich Village in 1961. Who knew that the genial, gray-bearded, best-selling writer-neurologist once portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie Awakenings (1990) was such a hunk in his late 20s? Or a state-champion lifter on Southern California’s Muscle Beach? Or a physician addicted for a while to amphetamines? Or a closeted gay man who had sex during the week of his 40th birthday and then not again until he fell in love at 75?

Revelations like these will keep a reader turning the pages of On the Move. But Sacks’ book, self-effacingly subtitled “A Life,” actually has much more to say than these headline grabbers would indicate. The book is a kind of reckoning, a summing up, of Sacks’ growth as an intellectual and a writer. Born in England to a prominent Jewish family, Sacks was from an early age a ceaseless letter writer and journal keeper; he draws liberally on those writings to give readers a sense of who he was as a younger man. Many of this autobiography’s 12 chapters offer the backstories to Sacks’ books, known for illuminating the curious workings of the human brain. Sacks also writes with feeling about his immediate family, almost all of them doctors, as well as his lasting friendships with the likes of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick and the poet Thom Gunn.

In fact it is an early Gunn poem that provides the title for this book. And what an appropriate title it is! In these pages, Sacks is always on the move, leaping adroitly from one topic to the next. We are swept along by the velocity of his account of a long and eventful life.

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

Janis Heaphy Durham walked into the bathroom of her home one year to the day after the death of her beloved husband, only to stare in amazement at what appeared to be a handprint on the mirror. This was just one of many strange things that had happened since Max’s premature death from esophageal cancer at age 56. Was Max trying to contact her from beyond the grave? In her gripping new book, The Hand on the Mirror: A True Story of Life Beyond Death, Durham reveals her own awakening to possibilities beyond the material world.

Durham is the former publisher of the Sacramento Bee, which earned two Pulitzers during her tenure. She relies on her background in journalism to investigate the supernatural events following Max’s passing, though that very background also prevented her from sharing her experiences for many years. Afraid of losing her credibility as a newspaperwoman, she talked about the events with only a few friends. After she realized how many people had had similar experiences, she began to be more open about what had happened to her.

Durham spends much of the book describing her encounters with leading parapsychologists as she tries to decipher the messages she believes Max is sending her. Whether or not the reader accepts her story as true, Durham’s book is a moving account of how we deal with loss and how many of us hope for reunion in the next life. Particularly touching is the account of her mother’s decline and death, which demonstrates the possibility of change and the power of forgiveness, even at the very end of life.

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

Not long after his family moved from Memphis to rural Mississippi, young Harrison Scott Key began to notice how out of step he was with his surroundings. Willing to rise at 4 a.m. to accompany his father and brother on hunting trips, he nevertheless preferred to read, or bake, or simply not shoot things. With The World’s Largest Man for a parent, though, those options often took a backseat to a day spent in camouflage with gun at the ready.

Key’s memoir is frequently hilarious. His storytelling pulls no punches: Pop was physically abusive, somewhat racist and entirely sexist, and while Key is different in many ways, some of his father’s worst behaviors are handed down and threaten his own marriage. Yet this material is all fodder for stories that balance wit and gut-punch delivery. When a Thanksgiving dinner is blown off course by Pop’s ruminations on breastfeeding, Key muses, “If I’d had a gun, I would’ve just started shooting everyone, to save the world from us.”

Like Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, The World’s Largest Man is about a willful Southern father, a wife trying to eke out a little sanity for the family and the kids who nevertheless bear the scars of such an upbringing. And as was true with Lawson, Key continues to look for the familiar in his adult life. When his creepy neighbors in Savannah, Georgia, burn trash in the yard and tear out all the landscaping with a truck, his annoyance is clearly tempered with some nostalgia.

Both laugh-out-loud funny and observant about the ways we become our parents while asserting ourselves, The World’s Largest Man is a wise delight.

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

The appeal of A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life ultimately has as much to with who Brian Grazer isn’t as with who he is.

Grazer isn’t a psychologist or a scholar, and he never formally studied curiosity. He’s an Academy Award-winning movie and television producer (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, "24," "Empire") and a first-time author who spent the past two years trying to personally define his own curiosity.

The result is as conversational as the 30-plus years of “curiosity conversations” the book is based on—making it anything but a prototypical Hollywood memoir.

Instead Grazer, 63, who credits his grandmother with fostering his curiosity as a young boy, worked with journalist Charles Fishman to craft a consistent narrative about where his curious mind has led him. Their effort is less a depiction of Grazer’s career achievements—though the book is filled with moviemaking anecdotes—and more “a working portrait of curiosity itself.”

Fishman succeeds in capturing the eagerness and excitement of Grazer’s voice, especially when he talks about the “different shades and different intensities” of curiosity.

From Andy Warhol and LeBron James to Henry Kissinger and Fidel Castro, Grazer recalls his conversations with philosophers, bankers, Pulitzer Prize winners, archaeologists, neurologists, architects, seismologists and Fortune 500 executives.

He met with technology experts—Steve Jobs and later Tim Cook, who is currently the CEO of Apple Inc.—but understands that the knowledge afforded him through his curiosity extends beyond smart phones and tablets.

In fact, Grazer wryly states, “You can’t Google a new idea.”

Curiosity is free, but it can also be risky. His conversation with Edward Teller, a theoretical physicist, who helped develop the first atomic bomb, didn’t go particularly well. It lasted all of 45 minutes.

There was also the time he flew cross-country to meet with science fiction author Isaac Asimov only to be left sitting alone when, 10 minutes into the conversation, Asimov’s wife Janet proclaimed, “You clearly don’t know my husband’s work well enough to have this conversation.”

Curiosity is a learning process. It’s also a means of overcoming fear, and Grazer writes, “It never lets you down.” In fact, according to Grazer, curiosity motivates discovery.

His son Riley was only 7 years old when he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome and, in the nearly two decades since, Grazer has worked continuously to “connect him to the world.” That effort combined with his curiosity indirectly led him to produce the Academy Award-winning film A Beautiful Mind.

The essence of the book is captured by Grazer in his introduction: “Life isn’t about finding the answers, it’s about asking the questions.” This thought-provoking salute to the power of curiosity is likely to motivate readers to begin asking more questions of their own.

Stephen King called Abigail Thomas’ memoir A Three Dog Life “the best memoir I have ever read,” and Thomas has another winner with her latest, What Comes Next and How to Like It.

The previous book focused on life after a tragic accident left Thomas’ husband brain damaged and, seven years later, dead. What Comes Next shares the aftermath as she contemplates life in her 70s.

Thomas bares her soul in a series of short chapters, some only a paragraph long. The result, while a breeze to read, paints a rich, multifaceted portrait of the author’s daily life in Woodstock, New York, with her beloved dogs. She is both forthright (“I am who I am and it has taken me a long time to get here.”) and self-deprecatingly funny (“Who sits in a dark room watching Burn Notice on a beautiful day?”).

Thomas frames her narrative with the story of how, years ago, her daughter Catherine had an affair with her best friend, literary agent Chuck Verrill, and how the repercussions affected her relationships with the pair for years afterward.

Catherine and Chuck continue to be mainstays in Thomas’ life, but also a source of continuing worry. Catherine, now happily married, undergoes treatment for breast cancer, while Chuck, divorced, suffers from serious liver disease.

When a student describes her as a “nice old lady with a tattoo,” Thomas reports that she is startled “because I think of myself as not nice, not old, not a lady.” That’s all the more reason, of course, that readers will treasure this journey with a writer who comes across as a compelling, lively friend.

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

The Folded Clock, as crafted by novelist Heidi Julavits, is intricate and delicately worked. Time doesn’t flow linearly in this memoir as we might expect. What at first glance appears to be the diary of a writer in her 40s living an enviable life—an apartment in Manhattan, a house in Maine, sabbaticals in Europe—turns into a structure more complex, like an origami crane. Meditations on marriage and friendship appear and reappear. Diary entries might skip six months, or jump back a year. Julavits arranges the raw material of her diary in such a way as to provoke insight across the units of time that we normally experience: the day, the week and the month.

Once the reader understands that this is no ordinary diary in which life is sliced into manageable chunks, the fun begins. Julavits opens her book by telling us about her middle school diary, how it accounts for the days but not for the self who experiences them. (But whose middle school diary manages that?) She makes the canny observation that a day is a piece of time too small for a middle-aged working mom to contemplate; a week is the smallest unit of time she experiences, or even a month—life measured out in bills due.

The magic of The Folded Clock is the way it recaptures time, slowing and bending it, to create something new: art from life. There’s plenty of life here: swimming in the open ocean, writing in the library, drinking beer in the afternoon, a first husband, a second husband, therapy, girl crushes and more. By connecting these units of daily life, Julavits transforms her diary into an exceptional work of art.

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

It’s rare that a memoir is so emotionally engaging that a reader may wish to reach back through time and envelop the author in a warm parental hug. But that’s the impulse poet Tracy K. Smith engenders in this account of growing up as a dutiful daughter in a small town in northern California during the 1970s and ’80s. “My mother was proud of my decorum,” Smith recalls. “She liked having a little girl who instinctively wanted to obey.” Smith was much more than a compliant child, though. She was also preternaturally attuned to everything happening around her and determined to find a place for it in her rich imagination.

Smith was the youngest of five high-achieving children born to a former schoolteacher and an Air Force engineer. The fact that she is black does not immediately loom large on her mental horizon, but little by little, idle remarks from white friends and overheard family conversations knit themselves into a perspective that keeps her aware and on guard. By the third grade, she is recognized as intellectually gifted and put on a scholastic path that will lead her to Harvard and beyond. In high school, she is drawn to literature: “When my teacher and I talked about a poem or story,” she writes, “I felt its words rolling toward me in great waves that crashed, receded, then gathered force and returned.” She is also drawn to her lit teacher—and he to her—even though he is married and twice her age. For months, they engage in an intense but chaste love affair that leads to her first of several heartbreaks.

At Harvard, she revels in the “small freedoms” of being on her own, one of which is having her first sexual relationship. But always at the center of her life is her overwhelming love for her mother, who dies of cancer soon after Smith graduates. It is that sad event with which Smith begins and ends her compelling story.

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

Open Candice Bergen’s A Fine Romance and be prepared to settle in for an evening filled with a few drinks, casual grazing, laughter, tears and rollicking tales from one of America’s finest actresses.

In this follow-up to Knock Wood, Bergen reveals the glorious days of her long and passionate love for French filmmaker Louis Malle, their frenetic and full marriage, the birth of their daughter, Chloe, and the success of her Emmy-winning sitcom, “Murphy Brown.”

Bergen married Malle in 1980 after a four-year courtship that had an inauspicious beginning but grew tentatively and then blossomed into a colorful marriage. Bergen calls Malle an “incredibly courtly and charming dynamo . . . always leaning into whatever he was heading for; he was never idle.”

Ambivalent about having children, Bergen pondered the ways that becoming a mother might add a new dimension to her life. When Chloe—a “potent and tiny spirit who had clearly been fighting to get here”—was born, Bergen declared that her child would be her first priority “by miles.”

Three years later, the script for a sitcom about a cantankerous TV newswoman landed on her desk. Despite what she calls a “horrible” audition, she won the part, bringing a natural sense of comic timing to her role in “Murphy Brown,” a show that had a celebrated 10-year run.

Fifteen years after their wedding, Malle succumbed to cancer. A light in Bergen’s life was extinguished, though she and Chloe grew closer. Three years after Malle’s death, she met and eventually married real estate developer Marshall Rose. The union has brought her much joy, though Bergen candidly chronicles her struggles with the differences between her two husbands.

Bergen’s rapier wit, warm personality and unflinching honesty make these stories of life and love all the more appealing.

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

“Let’s get one thing straight right from the beginning: I didn’t set out to be a comma queen.” In fact, Mary Norris explored quite a few interesting career paths before finding her calling as a copy editor at The New Yorker. Her work life began at the age of 15, checking feet at a public pool in Cleveland. She went on to drive a milk truck, package mozzarella at a cheese factory, and wash dishes (all the while managing to pursue a graduate degree in English).

Eventually, in 1978, Norris landed a job in the editorial library of The New Yorker. Her first day at work coincided with a snowstorm. While riding in the elevator with an editor, she remarked that he was wearing “the kind of boots we wore in the cheese factory.” The editor quipped, “So this is the next stop after the cheese factory?”

As it happens, it proved to be a very good stop, both for devotees of The New Yorker and readers of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, Norris’ funny and entertaining new book about language and life (both in and out of the magazine’s offices).

After more than 35 years at The New Yorker, Norris has amassed considerable knowledge of the English language and how (not) to use it. In a chapter entitled “Spelling Is for Weirdos,” Norris discusses the history of dictionaries and why spellcheck isn’t enough, and recounts the story of her first big break at the magazine—discovering a typographical error everyone else had missed. We learn that Charles Dickens punctuated by ear, that the semicolon is an “upper-crust” punctuation mark best avoided and that the apostrophe will most definitely need our prayers if it is to survive.

While Norris may have a job as a “comma queen,” readers of Between You & Me will find that “prose goddess” is perhaps a more apt description of this delightful writer.

At this moment on the other side of the world, a girl is sitting in the dark. A rare skin disease prevents exposure to the sun, to a shining bulb, even to the benign glow of a Kindle screen. She covers up the slightest cracks of light with tin foil. What do people who pass her house on the street think of these ceaseless black-out blinds, she wonders. She doesn't find out.

She spends her evenings with her husband, who enters her box of darkness to listen to the radio and to make love. He looms large in her world, and one can feel her enthusiasm for him. Lyndsey, who before falling ill worked for the British government, finds she cannot listen to music alone because it stirs up too much despair. Her very skin is a prison. Yet, like many stories of enduring seemingly impossible circumstances, Lyndsey's poetic reflections on her life in the dark shed light on how valuable it is to be human, how beautiful it is to be alive. 

Rather than a strictly chronological account, Girl in the Dark offers short, vital essays around various themes, such as dreams, word games, hats, autonomy, rain, her mother, physics and memory. In one titled "People," she writes, "For [guests] I put on my corset of cheerfulness, a solid serviceable garment. It holds in the bulgings and oozings of emotions, and soon I find they are, temporarily, stilled." The image of the corset of cheerfulness does not quickly leave the reader. Similarly thoughtful metaphors are planted like so many bright flowers on the fertile pages.

Through Lyndsey's remarkable storytelling, through the rightness of her words, her world comes alive. The book becomes so much larger than her darkened room. I cannot recommend it warmly enough.

You don’t have to be an expert on Chinese proverbs to discern what might happen when an egg meets a stone, but you will understand much more about modern China and its struggling people when you meet this fearless egg: Chen Guangcheng, the narrator of the riveting memoir The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China. Born in 1971, blind since infancy, growing up in dire poverty, Chen learns to escape all his constraints. Barred from the village school and its force-fed propaganda, Chen instead learns from his father that the folktales and myths of his homeland carry a message: As surely as empires will rise, corruption will bring them down. Justice must find its way.

Soon Chen becomes a “barefoot lawyer,” self-taught and fighting for rights for the disabled, including himself, rights which exist in Chinese law but not reality. He learns the wisdom of using media to bring victims’ struggles to worldwide attention as he exposes the brutal violence that enforces the government’s one-child policy. The perils of his activism will eventually wreak havoc on anyone who befriends him, endangering their lives as well as his own.

Imprisoned for more than four years on false charges and in failing health, Chen is forced to endure house arrest. He can go nowhere, speak to no one and receive no medical treatment, surrounded by forces hoping he will die. Instead, in 2012, Chen miraculously escapes and flees—despite a broken foot—to the American embassy in Beijing. After a series of diplomatic firestorms, in themselves a gripping tale, Chen finds safety in America. Only broken promises and more troubles, however, befall his extended family left behind.

This is a story that will go on. As a presidential election year nears and foreign policies are scrutinized, Chen, as outspoken as ever in Washington, D.C., will no doubt see to that.