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.

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.

Click here to read an excerpt from It Was Me All Along on Read It Forward.

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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.