In St. Augustine’s Confessions (one of the first spiritual memoirs), he famously prayed “Lord, make me good, but not yet.” In his powerful, visceral new memoir, celebrity journalist Kevin Sessums, like a modern St. Augustine, testifies to the life-threatening pull between carnality and spirituality in his own life.

Readers of his best-selling 2007 memoir Mississippi Sissy will recall Sessums’ Southern Gothic origins: growing up gay in the Civil Rights era, the death of both parents by the time he was 9 and molestation by a trusted preacher. Lurking behind that story, however, is the one Sessums documents in I Left It on the Mountain. Even as he interviews celebrities like Hugh Jackman and Daniel Radcliffe, Sessums descends into the hell of crystal meth addiction.

His new memoir chronicles how the twin strands of bodily addiction and spiritual transcendence shape his life. But the path toward healing, both physical and spiritual, is neither smooth nor linear. He climbs Mt. Kilimanjaro, only to return to New York and the temptations of drugs and anonymous sex. Desperate to escape his addiction, he turns to a spiritual pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

His descriptions of the angels and devils he encounters on the Camino are transporting and hallucinogenic, as mystic visions must be. But even with powerful goodness surrounding him, Sessums boomerangs from the visionary to the squalid as he hits bottom with drug use and its consequences.

Ultimately a story of redemption and grace, I Left It on the Mountain is a spiritual memoir—albeit one with appearances by Courtney Love and Jessica Lange, earthly angels who walk by Sessums’ side.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with author Kevin Sessums.

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

George Hodgman had defined himself by his work as an editor in New York City. Newly out of a job, he returns home to small-town Paris, Missouri, and discovers that his mother, Betty, is in need of full-time care. Their affection and shared humor dance around the unspoken; Hodgman is gay, a fact his parents never acknowledged.

In Bettyville, Hodgman writes with wit and empathy about all the loss he’s confronted with. Betty’s poor health is mirrored by the failure of towns like Paris, whose farms and lumberyards are now Walmarts and meth labs. Coming out in the age of AIDS, he lost the people he was close to when he had nowhere else to turn. His commitment to “see someone through. All the way home,” is medicine for his own soul as much as his mother’s.

That doesn’t mean Bettyville is without humor—far from it. Paris eccentrics (one woman shampoos her hair in the soda fountain) compete with Hodgman’s colleagues in the office of Vanity Fair. The stresses of eldercare take their toll as well: “Monitored by graph, my emotions would resemble a chart of a frenetic third world economy.”

This is a portrait of a woman in decline, but still very much alive and committed to getting the lion’s share of mini-Snickers at every opportunity. When things are left unsaid between parents and children, it leaves a hurt that can never be completely repaired, but love and dedication can make those scarred places into works of art. Bettyville is one such masterpiece.

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

When Mimi Baird was 6 years old, her father, prominent Boston dermatologist Perry Baird, didn’t come home. In that moment, Baird effectively disappeared forever from his daughter’s life, for her mother told her only that he was “away.” Baird saw her father once in the 15 years between his disappearance and his death in 1959.

Although her life fills with marriage, children and a career in healthcare, her yearning to know her father haunts her. In 1991, she tells one of the surgeons at the hospital where she works about her father, and he soon produces a cache of letters between her father and his mentors, copies of which the surgeon retrieved from the Harvard Medical School library. As she reads these letters, her father’s manic-depressive state—and his own quest to understand its causes (Baird was the earliest to suggest that biochemical imbalances might lie at the root of manic depression, though he never got to pursue his research)—unfolds before her, but her journey toward understanding him is just beginning.

Three years later, she receives in the mail the manuscript her father had been writing and which forms the core of this poignant memoir. At the center of He Wanted the Moon is her father’s book, in which he describes in detail his institutionalization in Westborough State Hospital in 1944, his attempts to understand his own condition, his often brutal treatment by doctors and staff, and his reflections on the state of psychiatry in mid-century America. 

Through this moving memoir, Baird slowly brings her father back to life and reveals the sordid history of treating mental illness.

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

Photojournalist Lynsey Addario has reported for the New York Times and other media from the frontlines in the war on terror and the Arab Spring. In her vivid memoir, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War, Addario shows what it’s like to put oneself in danger in search of images to help the world understand life in a war zone.

“We want to see more fighting, to get the freshest, latest news, to keep reporting until that unknowable last second before injury, capture, death,” Addario writes. “We are greedy by nature: We always want more than what we have.”

Addario is an honest and absorbing writer, whether she’s recalling her childhood in Connecticut—her father left the family when Addario was 8 after reveling he was gay and going to live with his boyfriend in New York—or the fiery relationship with a young man in Mexico that consumed her 20s. But it’s when she turns to her work that the book shifts from interesting to spellbinding. Addario has seen the best and worst of human nature as a war correspondent, and she shares it all in words and in many of her stunning photographs.

It’s What I Do is one of the most memorable books I’ve read this year. Here is a youngish woman, married with a child, who feels an almost physical pull to cover the hardest of news, in Darfur, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq. She reports from the battle zones themselves, but also searches out the families—especially the women—impacted by strife. It’s a mystifying career choice for most of us, and in this book, Addario helps explain why anyone would do what she does.

 “My friends and family sometimes asked why photographers didn’t just take fewer assignments to preserve their marriages or relationships, why they didn’t simply become a different type of photographer, one who worked in some sunny studio adjacent to his home,” she writes. “The truth was, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist was the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter. The only thing the two had in common was the blank page.”

From the time she was 5 years old, Deborah Voigt was singing with all her heart, joyously belting out hymns like "His Eye is on the Sparrow" in church. In this sanctuary of spiritual sweetness, she discovered her tremendous vocal gift, as well as her love of performing for an attentive crowd. By the time she was a teenager, music possessed Voigt; she was immersed in piano lessons, singing Broadway tunes and eventually discovering and tuning into the pop music of Bobby Sherman and Donny Osmond. It was the voice of Karen Carpenter, however, who helped her realize she could have a career in music, and the voice of God, who told her, "you are here to sing" one morning and propelled her on the path to becoming an acclaimed operatic soprano.

Voight’s career became international news in 2004, when she was fired from a lead role in a London opera because her plus-size body was too large to fit into the preferred costume for the role. In the frank and often poignant Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva, Voigt reveals how that incident led her to undergo gastric bypass surgery. She also details the often desperate and gut-wrenching struggles between her musical spirit and her palpable physical desires for love, perfection and peace.

At the same time that she was discovering her musical gifts and creating her own identity, Voigt writes, her family life was falling apart. Not only did she hear the querulous voices of her mother and father every night, her parents, especially her father, diminished her gifts and offered little moral support for her budding interest in music.

She wandered off into her own uncertainties and anxieties, searching for love through a series of lustful and often destructive relationships, consoling herself through binging on unhealthy food and drinking so greedily that she sometimes couldn’t remember the previous day.

Fiercely honest, Voigt reveals the depths to which she sunk in search of love, reassurance and comfort, even as she performed on stage with some of the world’s greatest opera singers, including Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. In the end, she finally embraced the earliest lesson she learned as a singer—that music is a journey and that when you’re singing, you’re exposing yourself. In this touching memoir, Voigt reveals her heart and soul to readers as she sings the tale of her ups and downs.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder has become a joke in our culture. We label ourselves OCD if we prefer our socks folded a certain way or our desktop arranged just so. In The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought, David Adam exposes the insensitivity of these casual mentions by sharing his own struggle with this crippling mental illness. His book puts the OCD diagnosis in historical context, but he combines this broader frame of reference with his personal story, which adds humor, pathos and authority.

Adam, an editor at Nature, applies his curiosity and skills as a science writer to investigate his experience with OCD. For the last 20 years, he has struggled with obsessive thoughts about HIV infection. By revealing his own experiences, as well as a number of other sufferers’ accounts, he demonstrates that actual OCD is more severe than being extremely neat or particular about our surroundings. “As a journalist,” he writes, “I meet a lot of people and shake their hands. If I have a cut on my finger, or I notice that someone who I talk to has a bandage or a plastic over a wound, thoughts of the handshake and how to avoid it can start to crowd out everything else. . . . I know that I can’t catch AIDS in those situations. But still the thoughts and the anxiety come.”

As his book describes, OCD has been around for many years, but only recently understood. Not too long ago, it was even treated with lobotomies. If you are a healthy person who considers those with mental illness to be weak or fragile, I encourage you to read this book and discover the strength it takes to live a productive life as Adam does while coping with a diagnosis such as OCD.

“It began with a death in the family. My Uncle Ed, the most debonair of the clan, a popular guest of the Gentile social clubs despite being Jewish, had succumbed at age ninety-five with a half glass of Johnnie Walker on his bedside table.”

With that opening sentence, Alan Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams) invites us into his own remembrance of things past in his elegant memoir, Screening Room: Family Pictures. In episodic prose that shimmers with cinematic quality, Lightman recalls a time when aunts and uncles, cousins and siblings, parents and friends gathered in the Memphis moonlight to drink, talk in hushed tones about neighbors, sort out perplexing and slowly evolving attitudes about race and ponder the ragged ways people fall in love and out of it.

At the center of Lightman’s journey stands his grandfather, M.A. Lightman, who built a movie theater empire across the South, and whose presence and power haunted his family for generations. Not only does Alan Lightman’s father inherit the job of running a movie theater, he makes his son the assistant manager of the theater one summer; the young Lightman develops “a high-level expertise in making popcorn.” He sees two to three movies a week—“sometimes three movies in a single day”—and it’s then that he starts “seeing life as a series of scenes.”

The memorable scenes he brings us in Screening Room range from a wedding reception at the Peabody Hotel (where the famous ducks wouldn’t cooperate) to a 1960 meeting with Elvis (who attended private showings at M.A.’s personal theater). Lightman, who went on to become a theoretical physicist as well as a celebrated novelist, captures the South’s troubled racial history and offers poignant recollections of his family’s African-American housekeeper, Blanche.

He brings down the curtain with a wistful flourish: “I have found, and I have lost. . . . I have smelled the sweet honeysuckle of memory. It is all fabulous and heart-wrenching and vanished in an instant.”

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

Grandparents who love their only grandchild fiercely, but haven’t spoken since their divorce 50 years ago, incite her urgent question: What happened? As she writes in A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France, Miranda Richmond Mouillot hopes to recreate a fairy tale of love found, and somehow lost, amid the turmoil of World War II. But her grandparents, Armand and Anna, are growing frail and their memories of fleeing Nazi-occupied France are painful.

Anna, who lives in New York, deftly dodges specifics, all the while encouraging her granddaughter to move on and seek a life for herself in the French village where the couple’s abandoned house is sinking into ruin. In Geneva, Armand rages at any mention of his ex-wife, while his granddaughter’s probing questions try to stop his memory from slipping into the shadows of dementia.

Mouillot is haunted by her own nightmares that often pitch her into unexplainable despair, fears that, she learns, are the burden that descendants of the Holocaust must carry. Along with her grandparents’ gradually revealed history come details of horror and heartbreak—allowing her to finally understand her dreams.

Mouillot takes the reader along on her quest to learn what went wrong with her grandparents’ marriage, skillfully interweaving past and present as she tries to restore their ruined home and falls in love herself. Written with an almost poetic transcendence of time, place and memory, this moving memoir chronicles an amazing circle of life. No fairy tale, it is as epic as the times in which Anna and Armand lived and the love they inspired.

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

In 1971, 10-year-old Allen Kurzweil arrived at a Swiss boarding school called Aiglon. He was a Jewish boy from New York; his father had died, and his mother was “test-driving her third husband.” Kurzweil was happy to be back in the Alps—his Viennese father had brought him there for winter holidays and imbued him with a love of alpine hiking and skiing.

Soon, however, Kurzweil (the youngest student at Aiglon) was being tormented by one of his roommates, 12-year-old Cesar Augustus, a native of Manila. Cesar’s abuse came in many forms, both physical and psychological, and Kurzweil begins Whipping Boy by taking readers back to that monumental time in his life.

Kurzweil leaves the school after a year, but the memories of being bullied continue to haunt him, even as an adult. As a novelist, he writes a children’s book featuring a bully modeled after his nemesis. When Kurzweil decides to look into what became of the real Cesar, he discovers that he’s in federal prison for his part in a bizarre international swindling scheme.

Kurzweil’s long-term pursuit of this strange story and his eventual confrontation of Cesar reads like a thriller, full of intrigue as well as humor and self-reflection. “Why am I still pursuing Cesar?” the author asks himself. “Is it to uncover his story? To avoid my own? The bottom line is this: I’m not sure what I’m after. Nor can I explain what compels me to travel cross-country to spy on the actions of a convicted felon I have promised my wife I will not confront.”

Kurzweil puts both his journalistic and literary skills to wonderful use in his “investigative memoir,” making numerous trips to revisit his school and to interview old classmates, staff, swindling victims, prosecutors and federal agents.

Kurzweil’s final meeting with Cesar is a worthy finale, bound to prompt plenty of meaningful discussions among readers about the nature of childhood, bullying and memories.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, February 2015

Alexandra Fuller’s hardscrabble African lyricism returns in her third memoir, which focuses on the push-pull of her marriage to American adventurer Charlie Ross. Although much of Leaving Before the Rains Come is set in Wyoming, where Fuller settles uncomfortably into American domesticity, her war-torn childhood in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the drunken pragmatism of her parents continue to shape her worldview.

When Fuller meets her future husband at a polo club in Zambia, he seems the perfect blend of adventure and restraint. He runs a river guiding service on the Zambezi, and takes clients up Kilimanjaro—safely, with Range Rovers to collect them at the end of the adventure. It’s unlike Fuller’s own African childhood, which was filled with random acts of catastrophe and violence. Charlie’s appeal is undeniable, but so is the simmering tension between his perspective and hers.

The “sacred terror and beauty” of Africa is lost to Fuller in the mountain subdivisions of Jackson Hole, where Charlie becomes a real estate agent and frets over columns of numbers. They have three children, and the weight of American materialism displaces adventure in their relationship. The financial crisis of 2008 hits their marriage hard, as does Fuller’s heartbroken realization that she is not African anymore.

Turning to the example of her father and her English and Scottish ancestors, Fuller’s work in this memoir is to patch together her own identity and—in a profound sense—to retrieve her soul. Her father’s life lessons are what save her: among them, fearlessness, endurance and dressing for dinner. Also: humor, gin and tonics and Epsom salts. “Loss is a part of the game,” he tells Fuller, and “regret’s a waste of bloody time.”

Fuller’s blend of wry honesty and heartfelt environmental consciousness will resonate with both new readers and longtime admirers of her distinctive style.

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

In his bestseller The Other Wes Moore, Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran and White House fellow Wes Moore pondered how his youth propelled him to the pinnacle of success while another Baltimore man with the same name sank into poverty and crime. Moore’s inspiring new book, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters, could be considered a sequel, as Moore describes what happened when he became an adult. More than a travelogue of adventures, however, this memoir shares his quest to understand how people find their true calling.

Moore’s career has not had a straight trajectory, and readers puzzled about their own direction might find his indirect path encouraging. In choosing employment, he found more motivation in compassion and a hunger to serve than in personal gain or status. Moore’s course has intertwined with larger events such as the war in Afghanistan, where he served as a paratrooper, and the recession, which found him working in New York’s financial district at the time of Wall Street’s collapse. His inside accounts of these events strongly evoke the concerns of those times.

Between each chapter, Moore tells stories of other people who bring their unique talents to lives of service. These stories underscore Moore’s point that the meaning of life is clearer when we are willing to serve others, whether as an inner-city principal or a social entrepreneur. The Work will resonate with people seeking their own purpose in life.

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