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.

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.”