Even before reading the first words of Resilience: Two Sisters and a Story of Mental Illness, it’s obvious that this is no ordinary memoir. First there’s the cover, with author Jessie Close in the embrace of her sister, actress Glenn Close. Then there are the photos inside, with captions like, “My dad on the porch of our house in the paracommando camp in Zaire.”

It’s been a harrowing ride for Jessie Close, and not just because of her famous sister, or a father who served as personal physician to an African leader, or a family that was swallowed up by a movement known as Moral Rearmament (MRA), whose “Up with People” image hid a darker side that estranged her from her parents. Now 61, she has battled severe bipolar disorder, exacerbated by alcoholism, since her teens.

Resilience is her story, with occasional vignettes from Glenn. It’s quite a journey, with detours to Zaire, Switzerland and India before Close finally settles in Montana. As husbands, houses and bad decisions pile up, it’s painful to read but hard to put down—especially when it becomes clear to Close that her older son, Calen, has inherited the mental illness that runs in the family.

With wealthy ancestors and a trust fund to lean on, Close can afford top-quality mental health care for both herself and her son, although she inexplicably doesn’t receive a diagnosis of bipolar disorder until she is almost 50. Even then, she struggles with suicidal thoughts and only gets her illnesses under control with medicine, sobriety and a revamped lifestyle.

With a title like Resilience, it’s a foregone conclusion that the book will end on a hopeful note—in Close’s words, “a new chapter in my life, one of sobriety, hope and purpose.” With her sister’s encouragement, Close is telling her story to the world in hopes of removing the stigma from mental illness. It’s a story well worth reading.

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

Andie Mitchell had been overweight for as long as she could remember. But cutely plump as a school-age kid became morbidly obese at age 20, when she weighed nearly 300 pounds. Growing up with a depressed, alcoholic father and a mother who worked round the clock to pay the bills, Mitchell grew to view food—any food—as her friend and companion.

Bowls of sugary cereal kept her company for hours while her mom worked and her dad slept. Drive-thru cheeseburgers rewarded her for staying out of the way while her mother cleaned other people’s homes.

“Eating made me forget,” she writes. “Filling my belly stuffed my mind so completely that no space existed for sadness.”

Despite her weight, Mitchell had plenty of friends and several boyfriends. She resigned herself to a lifetime of obesity. But when size 16 became size 22 during her freshman year of college, and she saw the fear in her mother’s eyes, she knew something had to change. During the following summer and a semester in Rome, she learned to appreciate good food in moderation and discovered that exercise doesn’t have to hurt. Slowly, the numbers began to creep downward as her self-worth creeped up.

It Was Me All Along is the strikingly honest story of one woman’s long journey to self-acceptance. It’s a must-read memoir for anyone who has used food to numb the pain rather than nourish the body.

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

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BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, January 2015

If Elena Gorokhova’s splendid second memoir merely conveyed to readers a vivid, almost visceral understanding of the sometimes paralyzing sense of dislocation she experienced arriving in the United States in 1980 from the Soviet Union, that alone would be reason enough to read it. On her first day in the U.S., for instance, she visits the air-conditioned Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum with the American husband she barely knows, and wonders, “Why are there no smells? Russia assaults you in your nostrils: milk always on the verge of turning sour, the wet wool of winter coats we wear everyday for five months, rubber phone booth tiles buckled with urine. . . .”

In the first third of Russian Tattoo, which describes her first year in the U.S. and the full extent of her unhappy first marriage, nearly every page sings with sharp, intelligent, often witty observations about her new, confusing life in America.

But in a way, this section of the memoir is merely the brilliant surface of a more profound exploration of her split identity, of what leaving her Motherland and making a life in her new homeland has meant for Gorokhova: What does she carry? What does she leave behind?

Gorokhova accomplishes this through a moving exposition of her difficult relationships with her mother and her American-born daughter, Sasha. Readers of Gorokhova’s wonderful first memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs, know that Elena herself was a lively, rebellious daughter. Here she writes that her mother was “a mirror image of my Motherland—overbearing, protective, controlling, and nurturing.”

When Gorokhova’s own daughter is born, her mother arrives from the Soviet Union to live with them in New Jersey permanently. It’s a complicated set of relationships, but as the years pass, Gorokhova sees that her daughter has become “just as ruthless and honest as I used to be.” And she herself has seemingly become more like her mother. With these sorts of divides there are never clean resolutions, but as the illuminating final section of the memoir indicates, there are soulful accommodations. Some of us actually do get wiser as we get older.

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

For women of a certain age, Brooke Shields was our more perfect sister. In 1980, I didn’t understand what “nothing comes between me and my Calvins” meant any more than Brooke herself did. But I knew I needed a pair of those jeans.

Central to the Brooke Shields mystique was her mother, Teri Shields, who became the focus of nasty speculation after allowing 12-year-old Brooke to be cast as a child prostitute in the 1978 film Pretty Baby. In fact, the motivation for Brooke to write her new memoir was the character-assassinating obituary the New York Times published on Teri after her death in 2012.

There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me offers readers Brooke’s own perspective on this complicated and co-dependent relationship. Teri’s alcoholism and its effects on her only child form the nucleus of the story. From an early age, Brooke felt responsible for tending to her mother’s emotional needs, rather than the other way around. This story of Brooke’s career as a model and actress unfolds from the perspective of an adult child of an alcoholic.

Her voice in this memoir is unguarded and raw and deals head-on with the damage alcohol causes in intimate relationships. For a celebrity of her stature to write so honestly and intelligently about emotional wounds is a refreshing change.

The book will appeal not only to Shields fans, but also to readers who seek out memoirs about surviving dysfunctional families. Brooke Shields is still our sister, just more real and imperfect.

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Running a totalitarian regime is simple: tell the people what they’re going to do, shoot the first one to object, and repeat until everyone is on the same page.” Such was life in Ukraine for young Lev Golinkin and his family, and it might have been tolerable had he not also suffered daily beatings in school for being a Jew. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the family fled to Austria where they lived in a refugee hotel before immigrating to the U.S. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka is the story of that journey and of Golinkin’s struggle to reclaim his identity.

When the family finally makes it to the America extolled in folk songs and held out as their greatest hope, assimilating is as hard as you might imagine. Golinkin’s father, an engineer in the Ukraine, spends eight months sending out resumes in order to land an entry-level job in his field. His mother, a doctor, struggles with the language barrier while pulling espresso shots as a barista. Lev and his sister Lina are the family’s great hope, but while she studies, he struggles to dismantle his internalized anti-Semitism.

Golinkin writes with dry humor about his experience but connects emotionally when describing how a lengthy stint doing charity work in college finally led him to investigate his past and the people whose charity made his own life not just better, but possible at all. A friend in Vienna steered them to Indiana so they wouldn’t be lost among refugees in Brooklyn, and the efforts expended to get the children into college were heroic. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka blends memoir and history into an intimate tale of personal growth.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A few years ago, I taught Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in a college freshman writing class. I thought the story of Chris McCandless, who turned his back on civilization to hike into the Alaskan wilderness, would resonate with undergraduates. Chris’ tragic journey may have ended with his death, but his quest for purity and adventure was inspirational. Or so I thought.

Apart from one lone hippie idealist, the other students condemned Chris for his selfishness: How could he turn his back on his parents after all they had done for him? As it turns out, many other readers felt the same way. But they didn’t know the whole story of the violent dysfunction that Chris was escaping in his bid for freedom. Now his sister, Carine McCandless, has written a brave and sensitive memoir that fills in the gaps.

In The Wild Truth, Carine depicts their father, Walt, as a violent, controlling abuser. While still married to his first wife, Marcia, he began an affair with Chris and Carine’s mother, Billie. Marcia had six children, and Billie had two—Chris and Carine were technically illegitimate. None of this was explained to Chris and Carine as children, though they spent time with their half-siblings.

But their father’s violence and their mother’s denial of it were perfectly clear. Although Chris tried to protect his little sister, there was no denying the level of physical, emotional and verbal abuse and manipulation in the house. Carine’s description of this dynamic is even-handed and the more horrific for it. And the manipulation continued after Chris’ death in the way Billie and Walt handled his revenue-generating afterlife.

Carine, writing with the full support of her siblings and Krakauer, has succeeded in bringing grace and truth back to her brother’s story.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Most non-poetry-reading Americans first encountered Richard Blanco in 2013, when he was the presidential inauguration poet. On that occasion, his moving poem “One Today” made passing reference to his Spanish-speaking mother who rang up groceries for 20 years and his father who cut sugarcane so Richard could move ahead in the family’s new country.

Blanco, a gay Latino from Miami’s Cuban community, has now beautifully repaid that debt with The Prince of los Cocuyos, a loving memoir of his boyhood among exiles.

We follow young “Riqui” from his childhood into the larger world of school and El Cocuyito (The Little Firefly), the grocery store where he worked. His tone is fond but clear-eyed: As a boy who loved fairy princesses, he was a puzzle to his relatives. His grandmother was particularly harsh, always badgering him to be more masculine. She was frightened of what might happen to him otherwise.

Indeed, the fear that comes with an unfamiliar language and culture is a running theme: his aggressive abuela flummoxed in a Winn-Dixie; his proud parents treated with contempt during a traffic stop. And Riqui himself was initially frightened by his sexuality. He only slowly integrated his personality—gay, Cuban, American—with the help of fellow Cubans, straight and gay, and an elderly Jewish woman who taught him that living among different worlds could be great fun.

Blanco used the same material in his first poetry collection, City of a Hundred Fires, and he approaches the memoir as a creative artist who shapes his narrative, making clear that it is “not necessarily or entirely factual,” with memories “embroidered.” It doesn’t matter: Blanco’s touching reminiscence has a deep emotional truth.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Suki Kim, author of the highly regarded novel The Interpreter, went to North Korea to teach English under doubly false pretenses. Her fellow instructors at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) were evangelical Christians pretending to be nonreligious teachers. (“North Korea was the evangelical Christian Holy Grail, the hardest place to crack in the whole world,” she writes.) To be accepted into the program, Kim pretended to be an evangelical pretending to be a nonreligious teacher. She feared exposure on all sides.

Maybe that fear explains the sharpness of her observations in Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite. Her nuanced account is loosely chronological, covering the two semesters she taught at PUST between July and December 2011, based on secret journals she kept with great care, and informed by the heartrending stories of her family members split asunder by the Korean War. Readers will find her experiences and reactions surprising in many ways.

Kim’s 19- and 20-year-old students, all male, came from the elite families of North Korea, one of the most opaque societies on earth. Sharing three meals a day, classes and endless, if sometimes awkward, conversations with her students, Kim developed a strong affection for them, and they for her. At the same time, she was “struck by their astounding lack of general knowledge about the world.” Her subtle attempts to expand their awareness often backfired, her students withdrawing into a rote formulation of their nation’s superiority. Kim’s book illuminates “the inherent contradiction of a country backed into a corner, not wanting to open up, but needing to move toward engagement to survive.”

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Norman Lear wants to show you his scrapbook, and—after 92 years—it’s a pretty thick one. Although he established himself as a comedy writer at the dawn of television in 1950, writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Lear didn’t really become a public figure until the 1970s. During that golden decade, he revolutionized TV with such socially conscious sitcoms as “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “One Day at a Time.” Unlike the comedies that preceded them, these series explored such touchy subjects as racism, ethnic prejudices, homophobia, women’s rights, abortion, sex education and single parenthood.

In recounting how he built these cultural landmarks, Lear also provides glimpses of the actors who brought the episodes to life. Carroll O’Connor, who played the iconic bigot Archie Bunker, fought with Lear over every script but was so perfect for the role that Lear has nothing but praise for his acting skills. Jean Stapleton (Edith Bunker) and Bea Arthur (Maude) were dreams to work with, as was Rob Reiner (Archie’s “meathead” son-in-law, Mike), whom Lear had known since he was a 9-year-old next-door neighbor. Lear would later back Reiner in the classic “rockumentary,” This Is Spinal Tap.

Born into a lower-middle-class family in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear recalls being sent to live with relatives when his father served time in prison for a financial scam. Clearly, Lear has spent much of his life trying to justify his worth to his largely self-centered parents. He speaks frankly here about his three marriages and his weaknesses as a husband and father. And he explains how his political bent led him to found the liberal lobbying group, People For the American Way. Age has not diminished Lear’s gifts as a storyteller.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones is a stunning coming-of-age story that tracks New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s rise from a poverty-stricken childhood in Louisiana to the respected journalist he is today. An introspective and poetic memoir about race, masculinity and sexuality, it also reckons with the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the core of his identity.

The youngest of four sons, Blow is devoted to his mother, who struggles to support the boys on her salary as a home economics teacher. Her commitment to education and newspaper reading is a positive influence on young Blow, a corrective to his father’s drinking and emotional manipulation. The summer Blow is 7, his older cousin comes to stay with the family, and offers at first the attention the child is hungry for, an attention that swiftly turns abusive.

Blow’s portrait of the psychic and spiritual aftermath of that abuse is intensely honest. He describes the severing of body and spirit, the self-blame and self-doubt. As he grows older, he shows how the experience lay behind his drive to become invincible, a popular boy. But the legacy of abuse is subtle and pernicious, and in his role as fraternity president at college, Blow presides over hazing rituals, which are no less sadistic for being traditional. The moral conflict he experiences and choices he makes offer him a first step toward untangling his childhood experiences and moving into his future.

Blow nests his story within the life stories of other men and boys he knew, gay African Americans who challenged the culture of masculinity and bravado simply by existing, and who were met with community rejection or violence. Their untold stories, reflected in Blow’s, make Fire Shut Up in My Bones an essential work of autobiography.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.