In most biographies, an epilogue provides the story of what happens after the subject of the book has died or somehow left the scene. It’s a wrapping up, a life-after-life afterthought.

Will Boast, whose Power Ballads: Stories (2011) won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, cannily reverses this usual order by turning the epilogue into the entire story of his life until now. In Epilogue: A Memoir, Boast plunges into the depths of his own heart to probe the ragged mysteries that bring families together, hold them up through the years and cause them to fall apart.

Having already lost his younger brother to an auto accident and his mother to cancer, Boast, at 24, loses his father to complications of alcoholism. Muddling through his father’s papers, seeking consolation in women and wine and generally wondering what life will bring next, Boast stumbles upon secrets his parents had kept from him. He learns that his father had been married, with two sons, before he met and married Boast’s mother. As he attempts to get to know his half-brothers in England, he contemplates the light that these new relationships can shed on the truths of his own childhood, and he imagines rewriting his own family story.

Absorbing and agonizing at the same time, Boast’s narrative refuses to cover raw wounds, instead leaving them open to the fresh breezes of love and renewal that blow into his life after his father’s death.

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

Pioneering journalist Gail Sheehy has lived a life jam-packed with work, love, politics and writing. Best-selling author of 1976’s Passages, which revolutionized the way Americans thought about the phases of their adult lives, Sheehy has spent a lifetime documenting American culture. Now in her 70s, she casts a retrospective eye on the chapters of her own life in an absorbing new memoir.

Daring: My Passages is a “life and times” memoir: It’s as much about journalism, politics and culture as it is about her life. Sheehy had a career-long knack for capturing the zeitgeist in what we now call long-form journalism. Back in the late 1960s at New York magazine, they were calling it “the new journalism,” as famously practiced by Tom Wolfe. For New York, Sheehy put on hot pants and walked the streets with prostitutes in the early ’70s; she wrote about divorce and the Black Panthers; she found herself in the middle of the shooting in Belfast on Bloody Sunday. But she really hit her stride with Passages, which touched a nerve with readers and has been the template for many of her subsequent books.

Sheehy’s on-again, off-again romance with Clay Felker, legendary editor and founder of New York, is the emotional center of this memoir as it was of her life. A powerful and influential figure, Felker was an early mentor for Sheehy, before becoming her lover and, after many years, her husband. Her decade spent caring for Felker at the end of his life offers an unforgettable portrait of the evolution of love over a lifetime.

Sheehy’s theme for her memoir is “daring”; she suggests that the way to thrive is to dare to make changes as we move through adulthood. This fascinating memoir also suggests that our lives mirror our times, and that we flourish by looking outward as well as inward.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, September 2014

“So, really, what’s a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind?” Caitlin Doughty asks near the beginning of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, her by turns shockingly gruesome, mordantly funny and, ultimately, richly thought-provoking memoir about working in an Oakland, California, mortuary and crematorium.

It’s an excellent question. Part of the answer, we learn, lies in the death obsession Doughty developed as an 8-year-old after witnessing a child’s plunge from an escalator in a shopping mall in Hawaii where she grew up. One flowering of that obsession was a plan to create a slick, modern, hip—fun, even—mortuary she would call La Belle Mort.

But, Doughty soon discovers that “the day-to-day realities of working at Westwind were more savage than I had anticipated.” And she proceeds to write graphically—and wittily—about those realities: the transportation, embalming and cremation of all shapes, sizes and ages of dead bodies and body parts. Here is one of the less graphic passages: “For those of you who have not had the privilege of smelling Eau de Decomposition, the first note of a putrefying human body is of licorice with a strong citrus undertone. Not a fresh, summer citrus mind you—more like a can of orange-scented industrial bathroom spray shot directly up your nose.”

Doughty’s very unsentimental education at Westwind and, later, in mortuary school has turned her into a forceful and eloquent advocate for confronting the reality of death, as readers will discover in the final chapters of this memoir. “I went from thinking it was a little bizarre that we don’t see dead bodies anymore to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world,” she writes. “Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.” Smoke Gets in Your Eyes offers a path toward that knowledge.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Doughty for Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

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

Journalists typically don’t like to write about themselves. It comes from years of writing in the third person and striving for objectivity. And with so many critics of the press, reporters assume no one likes them. Robert Timberg grapples with this issue in his moving memoir, Blue-Eyed Boy. After nearly 40 years as a journalist and three noteworthy books, perhaps he has a story to tell. But he also has self-doubts. Then he looks in the mirror and sees his disfigured face. It is an image he has been trying to forget since 1967, when as a young soldier in Vietnam, just days away from the end of his tour, he suffered third-degree burns from a land mine explosion. He finally decides to confront this defining moment of his life. “I want to remember how I decided not to die,” he writes. “To not let my future die.”

Journalism is a seductive profession. Each day is a new story. There is fame and notoriety. And it’s easy to lose oneself during long hours in the newsroom. Timberg did just that during a long stint at The Baltimore Sun. He wrote about the Iran-Contra Affair, penned books about Oliver North and John McCain, and destroyed two marriages along the way. He was able to forget about his disfigurement. Then in retirement, he had time to reflect. This was the catalyst for his fast-moving, crisply written memoir.

In Blue-Eyed Boy, Timberg at long last examines the physical and emotional pain he experienced, and how it shaped his life. He realizes that it motivated him to be the best at his profession. He also understands how his singular drive hurt some people along the way. Blue-Eyed Boy is a fascinating look at how a tragedy that would make most men crumble instead drove the author to survive, and on many levels, succeed.

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

In a Rocket Made of Ice is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary place. Wat Opot Children’s Community is a Cambodian orphanage started with $50 by Wayne Matthysse, a former Vietnam medic driven to make life better for children in war-torn countries. The orphanage is home to children and women affected by HIV and AIDS, where they can get the powerful antiretroviral drugs they need to stay healthy, as well as education and a community in which they belong.

Gail Gutradt, a Maine native who has spent several stints volunteering at Wat Opot, paints an achingly beautiful portrait of the place, which may not have many material resources, but is imbued with a much-needed sense of family for children who have been orphaned by AIDS.

“In truth, daily experience at Wat Opot is complex and chaotic,” she writes. “I wake up early in the morning and someone comes running up to me for a hug. Often there are several kids hanging off my arms on the way to breakfast. Most of the day it is kids playing, running in packs, sulking, hugging, laughing, dancing, studying, doing what children do. You play with them, pick them up when they cry, let them nap on your shoulder. It is easy to forget that some are HIV positive. . . . It’s totally normal in some ways, while at the same time it is exceptional.”

The ultimate goal of Wat Opot is not just to get kids healthy, but to instill in them a belief that they can live and thrive among other Cambodians, where the stigma of HIV and AIDS lingers. Many of the children go on to university, a testament to the powerful work being done on a shoestring and a prayer. Gutradt has given us an inspiring, unforgettable book.

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

Brian Benson’s new memoir about the journeys we take and how they shape the people we become is not to be missed. Going Somewhere begins in South America where, as a young college graduate with a liberal arts degree, Brian decides to spend a few months backpacking. He’s stopped in his tracks by Rachel, an American making her living as a singer. He joins her band. They fall in love. And a few months later, they decide to ditch Guatemala in favor of a different adventure: biking from Wisconsin to western Oregon. He’s a lanky, six-foot-tall athlete; she’s a diminutive beauty with a plus-sized wit. They buy matching bikes, and their love seems to be in full bloom. But what happens on the trail?

Of course, a lot happens. But like other memoirs that explore the intersection of people and place, the “plot” of the narrative is a lot less interesting than Brian’s inner life: how he understands himself and his world and how that understanding shifts as he attempts to do this really cool, really hard thing.

He doesn’t shy away from vulnerability. Readers get insight into all sorts of ungracious, self-questioning thoughts. But rather than weaken the memoir, this openness strengthens it, transforming it from one young man’s story to something simultaneously more personal and more universal.

Writing this book was surely as much hard work as biking the 2,500 miles. As Brian says in the afterword, he biked many of the routes over again in an attempt to get everything just right. But I think you will agree that the work was worth it, especially for us readers. We, too, get to fall in love and go on an enormous adventure. We, too, get to think about our big, complicated world and who we want to be. We, too, are inspired to go somewhere.

There are many reasons to love a good misery memoir: In my case, reading about other people’s dysfunctional childhoods offers a sense of community, a sisterhood of resilient Gen Xers who survived a 1970s childhood. Cea Sunrise Person’s engaging new memoir, North of Normal, evokes both the miserable excesses and occasional beauty of growing up in a counterculture family in the wilderness of the Me Decade.

For the Person family, the wilderness was real. Cea’s grandfather Dick was not only committed to living off the land, but highly skilled at doing so and deeply suspicious of Western civilization. He takes his family—grandma Jeanne, baby Cea, her teenage mother and two aunts—from California into the Canadian outback to live in a tipi and survive off game and wild plants. Clothing is optional, sex is out in the open, and much pot is smoked.

This outback idyll of sorts is broken up by Cea’s mother, who follows one man after another into questionable circumstances. Cea is lucky, she is told, to have a mother who loves her, but as Cea grows older she wants the one thing her mother can’t give her: normality. Leaving home at 13, Cea breaks with her family toward independence, which is seen as a betrayal.

While the strength and resilience Cea learns in the wilderness help her survive the predators of the “civilized” world (she goes on to become an internationally successful model), it’s a long journey to normal, whatever that is. There’s not a shred of self-pity here, which makes the depiction of a child adrift in hippie decadence all the more affecting. North of Normal offers readers a well-crafted story and a sensible, clear-eyed narrator.

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

Although he speaks repeatedly of his “two Italies”—a phrase he borrows from the poet Shelley—Joseph Luzzi is neither fully at home among the coarse elements of Calabrian culture his immigrant parents brought with them to America nor within the borders of Italy itself, what with its infuriating mix of high art and low purpose. But it is this unresolved quality of Luzzi’s musings—the back and forth tugging of a splendid mind—that makes this book so alive and such a pleasure to read.

Now director of Italian studies at Bard College, Luzzi was the first of five siblings born in the U.S. His harsh, demanding father, Pasquale, worked in an airplane-parts factory and cultivated a small farm in Westerly, Rhode Island. He never fully assimilated, nor did he seek to. “For my father,” Luzzi observes, “life abroad meant never being able to express himself in the language of the people in charge.”

Luzzi first went to Italy in 1987, when he was a 20-year-old junior at Tufts. He thought he might study art or, at least, try to reconcile the mythic Italy with its pop culture manifestations in America. Over the next 20 years, he visited Italy regularly and found the glories of Dante and Michelangelo juxtaposed with the stifling bureaucracy of Italy’s civil service. Back home, he pondered the larger meanings of The Godfather and “Jersey Shore.”

In 2007, Luzzi’s wife, Katherine, died in a car accident, leaving him with a newborn daughter to raise. He returned to Rhode Island, where his mother, brother and four sisters instantly “turned their lives upside down to help.” His grief kept him away from Italy for the next three years, but in 2012, he took his 4-year-old daughter to Florence, realizing that her concept of Italy will always be a world distant from his. He stresses that he has never viewed himself as “Italian-American.” Rather, he says, “I was Italian and American—a little of each, yet not fully either. . . . It is left to my daughter’s generation to inhabit the hyphen.”

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

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Joseph Luzzi for this book.

Amid the 21st-century glut of overindulgent memoirs, The Removers is a poignant, near-perfect addition to the genre. Andrew Meredith writes of growing up in a crumbling Philadelphia neighborhood, his family quietly imploding in the wake of a scandal that cost his father his university job.

A once promising student, Meredith drops out of various colleges and halfheartedly dates various women throughout his 20s. His zombie existence is punctuated by possibly the worst job in the world: Transporting bodies from houses and hospitals to a funeral home, then cremating them. He is joined in this work by his father, a poet and professor who is reduced to moving bodies to make ends meet. This story is bittersweet, but also frequently, improbably hilarious.

“Philadelphia, you big bitch, throw me a bone,” Meredith writes. “It’s June 1998. I’m twenty-two. I’ve bounced from failure at school to crappy job and back for two years. I spend my time outside the house either dragging the local dead around or getting drunk listening to rock and roll before coming chastely home to sleep ten feet down the hall from my parents. I’ve now handled far more dead women than live ones.”

Meredith is clear-eyed and generous in his storytelling, relaying with skill and honesty everything from his first sexual encounter to his family’s inability to communicate. While he creates a powerful sketch of a very specific time and place—a family in crisis in 1990s Philadelphia—this book will ring true to anyone who ever yearned to grow up, only to find that coming of age is more painful and beautiful than they ever imagined.

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

Young Saroo loves his older brothers, especially Guddu, who at 14 is less and less at home. One night in 1986, Guddu comes back to his family’s poor village in India for about an hour, and 5-year-old Saroo can’t contain his excitement. When Guddu announces that he’s leaving, Saroo declares that he’s going off into the night with his older brother.

And so begins Saroo Brierley’s great misadventure and his 25-year search for home, which he recounts dramatically in A Long Way Home. That night, young Saroo becomes separated from his brother and begins several days of searching, begging and riding the rails in an attempt to find his brother or get back home.

Saroo eventually lands in Calcutta, where he joins the teeming masses of children scavenging for food, running from bullies and searching for a safe place to sleep through one more night. Turned over to the police by a kind teenage boy, he lands in an orphanage, where, for the first time in months, he has food and a clean bed.

It’s not long before a family adopts Saroo, and on September 25, 1987, he flies to Australia to meet the Brierleys and begin his new life in a faraway land. He thrives as Saroo Brierley, excelling in sports and academics. Yet, several questions haunt him: Is his mother still alive in India? What about Guddu? How can he find his way back to his village, since he can’t remember the name of the place or where it’s located?

In a development that made headlines around the world in 2012, Saroo is eventually able to locate his village, principally by poring over satellite images on Google Earth. He reunites with his family in India, yet never abandons his adoptive family in Australia. Instead, he writes that he “is not conflicted about who I am or where to call home. I now have two families, not two identities.”

Though Brierley’s prose lacks polish, his story is undeniably moving and will appeal to any reader captivated by the pursuit of a dream that won’t die.

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

Fond looks back at profound dysfunction have become so commonplace, it’s a wonder there’s not a “crazy parenting” section in bookstores to help the next generation of memoirists get a leg up. At this point, crazy itself is not sufficient reason to publish. In Take This Man, Brando Skyhorse, who won a PEN/Hemingway Award for his first novel (The Madonnas of Echo Park), captures the details of his dysfunctional upbringing with note-perfect language and does so in pursuit of the truth about his family.

Skyhorse was only 3 years old when his Mexican father abandoned the family. His mother, who was also Mexican, decided to assume an American Indian identity for herself and her son. Through five stepfathers and constant upheaval, Skyhorse struggled to mold a father figure out of the con men and failures his mother brought home. While she worked as a phone sex operator, he would be dispatched to drag one man home from a bar, or taken on an outing with another where, instead of riding bumper cars at an amusement park, he was left in the car outside a housing project while undisclosed business was transacted inside. Despite the instability and verbal abuse, he clung to his mother and grandmother until college provided a means of escape. His emotional scars are just beginning to heal as he gets to know his father for the first time—and comes to grips with the realization that his mother’s claim of Native-American heritage was a fantasy.

“My mother had so much pain to share that she had to invent people to hurt,” including a kidnapped daughter and a son who died at age 3, Skyhorse writes.

This is a hard story to take in—a trip to visit the imaginary daughter leads to the revelation that his mother has placed an ad offering her young son for adoption—but it’s impossible to look away. Every hate and hurt on display here is balanced against an equally powerful love. Take This Man looks head-on at every character, including the author; it’s a brave and hopeful story.

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