Ah, WASPs: Those guilt-ridden, uptight, real estate-obsessed traditionalists. In Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town, Sarah Payne Stuart captures the essence of this distinctive culture, tracing both her own childhood in Concord, Massachusetts, and the lives of some of Concord’s famous residents, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.

Stuart shocks herself when, after years in “the Victorian house of my dreams, thirty minutes from Manhattan,” she and her husband Charlie decide to move back to Concord in a fit of adult homesickness.

“Suddenly my best friends living nearby in the city, my fledgling career, and Charlie’s rise at ABC News meant nothing,” she writes. “Suddenly being cool and wearing a leather jacket while nursing my baby in a Greenwich Village restaurant meant nothing—next to the thought of my children floating toy boats on the Concord River while my mother and I looked on.”

She and Charlie settle into one fixer-upper after another, sinking into debt while they raise their young family. Along the way, Stuart makes peace with her family’s history of repression, hurt and mental illness, and realizes the obvious parallels between her own family and other Concordians who have tried to rewrite their histories. (To wit: Despite Alcott’s cozy, seemingly autobiographical portrait of Marmee and her little women, Alcott’s real mother was a shrill martyr and her father a delusional freeloader.)

Stuart writes honestly and lovingly about her aging parents, her childhood, money, the trials of parenthood and keeping her marriage afloat. In other words, everything. Perfectly Miserable is a gorgeously rendered portrait of modern life—and a reminder that some things never change.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, June 2014

It was on a gray December day that 23-year-old Joanna Rakoff, nestled into her couch rereading Persuasion, received the call that she had gotten the job. Fresh out of grad school and without much of a game plan—aside from a deep-rooted desire to become a poet—Rakoff landed a position at one of the most storied literary agencies in New York City, one that represented such literary legends as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Judy Blume.

In her absorbing new memoir, My Salinger Year, Rakoff (A Fortunate Age) recounts her time spent working as an assistant at what she simply refers to as “the Agency.” Even though it was the mid-1990s, the Agency office was a midcentury time capsule, where agents still smoked at their desks and there was nary a computer in sight, and a temple, where priceless first editions lined the endless shelves of books. After learning how to turn on her decades-old Selectric (that’s a typewriter, in case you didn’t know) and adjust the playback speed on her boss’ Dictaphone, Rakoff learned that one of her duties would be answering the fan mail of the Agency’s star client: the reclusive J.D. Salinger.

The letters to Salinger were voluminous, deeply personal and passionate about his works. It didn’t take long for Rakoff to ditch the form-letter response and start composing thoughtful, personalized replies—in secret, of course. The formidable, top-brass agent she worked for (referred to as “my boss”) is part Miranda Priestly, part Amanda Farrow, and deeply devoted to protecting Salinger’s privacy and legacy.

Naturally, there’s more to the book than just Rakoff’s job (and Salinger). There’s Don, her live-in socialist boyfriend with writerly ambitions of his own; there’s the striking contrast of making under $20k a year while living in a city and working in an industry that both revolve around vast amounts of wealth; there’s the universally relatable experience of being young and finding your own path in life.

Told with effortless, pitch-perfect prose, My Salinger Year is a deeply moving but unsentimental coming-into-your-own story that will keep readers thoroughly engrossed through the very last word.

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

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Joanna Rakoff for this book.

As a little girl in Augusta, Georgia, Jessye Norman absorbed the lessons of preparing to do a task well. Every Monday morning as she set off for school, her father would ask her if she had her poem ready to recite, and her mother would exhort Jessye to “stand up straight.” Norman discovered in those years that the act of standing in front of crowds and performing came as naturally to her as “passing around the Ritz crackers with pimento cheese at the end of a program.”

In the same soaring voice that has made her one of the world’s most beloved opera singers, Norman delivers an inspiring memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing!, in which she reveals her deep love for her family and community and the many ways that music is the thread woven through all aspects of her, and our, lives.

Growing up, she scarcely imagined that she would become a singer; in childhood, she wanted to play the games the boys were playing, like baseball and basketball, and by the time she was in junior high, she had set her sights on a career in medicine. Whatever she does, Norman credits her mother Janie for her strength: “My sense of self was inspired by Janie Norman, her mother, her sister, and the women who came before them—the people of whom I am wonderfully and fearfully made. . . . It is my legacy as a ‘little Norman’—a legacy of strength. A reverence for honesty and a will to speak to inequity when it rears its head.”

Norman profusely thanks her teachers for recognizing a gift that she herself had not acknowledged, and she gratefully recalls Mrs. Sanders, her middle school choral director, and her high school principal, Lloyd Reese, for encouraging and supporting her to participate in the Marian Anderson Vocal Competition in Philadelphia. Although Norman did not win that contest, Sanders took the opportunity to introduce Norman to Dean Mark Fax and music professor Carolyn V. Grant at Howard University, both of whom saw Norman’s tremendous potential and offered her a full scholarship.

Norman plainly and forthrightly shares the struggles she has faced as a black woman singing opera around the world, but it’s her joy that echoes gloriously throughout her book: “Singing gives me many rewards and blessings for all the hard work it requires and on which it depends,” she writes. “Singing, for me, is actually life itself. It is communication, person to person and soul to soul, a physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual expression carried by the breath. Life!”

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, May 2014

Robin Roberts took a leave of absence as co-host of “Good Morning America” in 2012 to face a life-threatening battle with a blood disorder, one that likely was caused by the chemotherapy she endured during a bout with breast cancer five years earlier. In Everybody’s Got Something, Roberts manages to “make her mess her message,” as her beloved mother always advised her to do. Roberts is both astonishingly honest and refreshingly upbeat as she recounts the shock of discovering she once again had to fight for her life.

A hall-of-fame college basketball player, Roberts had always depended on her body to deliver. Yet here she was, searching for a blood marrow donor upon whom she would now depend. Miraculously, her sister Sally-Ann was a near-perfect match, and was willing to travel between her home in New Orleans and Robin’s in Manhattan to undergo the lengthy process needed to allow doctors to harvest blood cells for her baby sister.

In the midst of this health crisis, Roberts’ mother passed away after years of declining health. It’s a crushing blow to Roberts, who spoke to her mom every day after wrapping GMA. But as her mother often told her, everybody’s got something they’re dealing with. Robin returns to New York and dives into a brutal chemotherapy regimen that essentially destroys her immune system so that Sally-Ann’s healthy blood cells can rebuild it.

Roberts, who wrote this book with author Veronica Chambers, exudes warmth and love as she recalls one of the hardest times in her life, giving credit to her GMA co-hosts and her many “dear friends” (she must use this phrase dozens of times throughout the book—girlfriend’s got a lot of friends) for their support. She also opens up about her longtime love, Amber, who nurses her through the illness and shares some of her own caretaking advice in the book.

Delivered with candor and optimism, Everybody’s Got Something is a remarkable book that offers a blueprint for handling crises with grace and faith.

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

Jihad, an Arabic word meaning strife or struggle, has many connotations in our culture, few of them romantic. Yet romance is at the center of Krista Bremer’s moving memoir, My Accidental Jihad, though struggle is a key element as well.

One day while jogging in North Carolina, Krista, a graduate student, met an older Libyan man, Ismail. He was not exactly the person she’d envisioned as Prince Charming. He was graying of hair and yellow of teeth, not to mention that he struck Krista as utterly foreign, completely other. But when she was with him, she felt herself relax, as though she were settling into a deep pool of water. She felt at home. And then, to paraphrase Charlotte Brontë: Reader, she married him.

The memoir tells the story of their marriage in unrelenting candor and gorgeous prose. Intimacy with Ismail forces Krista to evaluate her American life with a critical eye. Do Americans really need so much stuff? She compares Ismail’s gentle and loving care of his few things with the habits of a previous boyfriend, who left piles of designer clothes littered across the floor. Krista is deeply glad to be with Ismail. But does he really have to use a 15-year-old coffee maker? Holidays are also difficult. For Krista, Ramadan is a mystery. She doesn’t like the way it changes her husband, who gets testy while fasting. She finds it hard to support him, to lay a single date and a glass of water neatly on the table for him to break his fast at sundown. Her reservations about Ramadan, though, pale next to his confusion about Christmas. Seeing Christmas through Ismail’s eyes, Krista simultaneously realizes how silly the holiday rituals are, and how terribly attached she is to them.

Years after their rushed nuptials, the pair hosts a belated, extravagant celebration of their love. It’s a dramatic event, full of grand gestures such as a friend who went to great lengths to play a piano outside. The next day, Ismail and Krista return to the site of the party to clean up. As she wipes a stained table, Krista reflects, “Ours will always be a sticky marriage.”

The brilliance of this book is that the author never lets herself or her husband off the hook. Instead, she presents an honest—and at times painful—portrayal of a beautiful union.

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

Dee Williams was living the dream—the American Dream. She had a three-bedroom house with a driveway and a mortgage. She had stopped spending weekends in the mountains with her friends, trading that carefree existence for more adult matters such as rewiring the bathroom. She worked full-time and traveled too much. Then one day, she woke up in the emergency room, diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition. Life was never going to be the same, but not in the usual way these stories go.

Williams’ memoir The Big Tiny tells the story of her ambitious idea to chuck the big house and build her own home—all 84 square feet of it. Like other memoirs about a transformation, Williams describes her moment of inspiration, followed by the hurdles she faces along the way: self-doubt, design questions, letting go of material possessions, hiccups in the building process, physical injury, not to mention where to park the tiny house once it’s finished. The tiny house itself—part of a movement of small dwellings that has been catching on across the country—has a design that is appealingly practical and simple, cleverly arranged and subversive, almost like a child’s playhouse for adults.

What makes this memoir unique is Williams’ voice, with its quirky, self-deprecating humor and emotional transparency. While she constantly pokes fun at her own foibles, she also allows us into her fears as she starts over after a health scare. She also reveals how her tiny home brings her into close community with friends and family, which helps her rediscover a meaningful existence through relationships with others.

The Big Tiny is not a construction manual, but don’t be surprised if it leads you to wonder how you could build a tiny house of your own.

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

Nina Stibbe was 20 years old in 1982 when she moved to London to become the live-in nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, and her sons Sam and Will (whose father is film director Stephen Frears). There was no convenient phone, so Nina began sending quirky, funny letters home to her sister to report on her job.

Now, more than 30 years later, Stibbe has published these letters, mostly unchanged. The result is a collection of entertaining, if not downright hilarious, vignettes of daily life and the comings and goings of a fascinating community. Nina gets to know playwright Alan Bennett, stage director Jonathan Miller and well-known biographer Claire Tomalin, among others.

Stibbe describes her home (“Most of the plates we use for food, and mugs, are antique. Some chipped. Some nice, some spooky”) and her bright, irrepressible charges (“Will is worried about nuclear war. . . . Sam is envious of all the attention Will’s getting over the nuclear war anxiety. He says he’s got an anxiety too, he can’t say what it is, only that it’s a lot worse than Will’s.”). She also chronicles in a matter-of-fact way Sam’s trips to the hospital resulting from serious health issues.

While Nina is a keen observer, we also trace her own coming-of-age journey. Nina finds love not far away and is also encouraged by her new family and friends to set her sights high and pursue an education. When asked, “So have you got all the books on the syllabus?” Nina ruefully admits to her sister: “I didn’t even know what a syllabus was.”

Life as a nanny in this family is never dull. And neither is Stibbe’s heartfelt and funny memoir, which reminds us that while days with children may seem ordinary, helping them grow is one of the most extraordinary things we can do.

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

Rob Lowe is dishing, again. Three years after the publication of his surprisingly engaging memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, the former Brat Packer-turned-TV veteran has penned Love Life, a collection of essay-type ruminations that are a mix of the surreal and the serious.

Married for 22-plus years (light years, by Hollywood standards)—wife Sheryl was a make-up artist on one of his films—and the father of two strapping sons, Lowe vividly depicts what it was like to be a 19-year-old Hollywood heartthrob at a Super Bowl soiree held at the Playboy Mansion. There’s Hef, making the rounds in his silk p.j.’s, a can of Coca-Cola in hand. And a den of Bunnies—bored Bunnies—one of whom drags Lowe off into the guest room. He recounts a conversation with a fellow who says he does all the work “up here.” So, says Lowe, you take care of the property? Nope. The guy takes care of the plastic surgery for Playboy. Later, Lowe takes a dip in the legendary Grotto—and has an encounter that leaves him feeling sheepish. Driving home that night, he realizes he didn’t even find out who won the darned game.

He can be clever. Looking back on St. Elmo’s Fire, he attributes the film’s success to “the invention of hair mousse.” Riffing on rivalries between the kids from Malibu (where the teenage Lowe lived) and the blue collar “Kooks” from the Valley, Lowe says it was like a square-off between the kids of Hunter S. Thompson and those of Tom Joad. 

Lowe also provides an eye-opening one-day “class” on filmmaking—which he breaks down by hours and minutes into two and a half pages. (Once the cameras roll at the location shoot, a dog starts barking, preventing any sound recording. Fifteen minutes later, the dog’s owner has been paid $500—to lock his animal in the garage.)

An actor who loves to work, and loves the process, Lowe tells all (with a grin) about the masters of “prop acting” (those performers who love to carry/fiddle around with an object), the art of eating during a scene (James Gandolfini was a master; Danny Glover’s pretty good, too), and how he personally benefited from his work with acting coach Roy London. Know what a “monkey trick” is? Lowe explains, and details his own.

As in the best celebrity memoirs and musings, Love Life is sprinkled with star power. Looking back on a failed TV series called “Dr. Vegas,” Lowe recalls that after being let go, co-star Amy Adams went on to star in Junebug, the movie that put her on the A-list map. “Sometimes you have to get fired to be hired,” he explains.

Here and there Lowe briefly returns to topics covered in his first book, such as his sobriety. But much of the material is fresh—some of it pensive, some of it goofily entertaining. There’s the weirdness of having to shoot additional episodes of a cancelled TV series (NBC’s “The Lyon’s Den”), for the DVD/foreign market. Or the night he and a TV cutie went to the home of his idol, Warren Beatty, and sat with him in his screening room watching Burt Reynolds (!) movies. Beatty went oooh and aaah, and said things like, “Very interesting. He’s using a lot of long lenses.” Afterward they ate ice cream in the kitchen, and the always-smooth Beatty likened Lowe’s date to his former flame, the gorgeous Natalie Wood.

Lowe’s pretty smooth, too. An actor who prides himself on his industry longevity and his ability to go from character actor (a four-year stint on NBC’s “Parks and Recreation”) to leading man (starring as JFK in the National Geographic Channel’s “Killing Kennedy”), he spills secrets and private thoughts with eloquence, rather than meanness. No wonder he’s proven himself to be an industry survivor.

Sometimes things happen in life that change one’s perspective. Literally. For Gail Caldwell, hip surgery made her five-eighths of an inch taller. It was a new view, and she wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

Caldwell had suffered from polio as a child, and for years she attributed her slight limp and growing physical pain to the disease. Though she acknowledged that polio was rough, Caldwell refused to see herself as anything but a survivor. In a new memoir, New Life, No Instructions, she traces how she arrived at this crucial self-perception—the influence of her father, her own stubbornness, the meticulous maintenance of a “tough girl” persona.  But at nearly 60, the jig seems up.

Caldwell’s old physical routines (long swims, walks with big dogs, rowing) seem increasingly untenable. And she’s suffered a series of deep losses—her parents, her close friend Caroline (memorialized in Caldwell’s unforgettable Let’s Take the Long Way Home) and her beloved dog, Clementine. Now she’s at a crossroads. How can she keep moving forward when she struggles to even climb her stairs? Then, to Caldwell’s surprise, a new doctor suggests that a total hip replacement would take away the chronic physical pain that has come to dominate her life. And her new puppy, a Samoyed named Tula, fills her with joy. As Caldwell’s physical body changes, new possibilities are presented for her emotional life.

What I like best about this book is its refusal to compartmentalize. We often think of the body as being separated from the mind, and (more importantly) the heart. Caldwell’s story forces us to think otherwise. It interweaves reflections on everything from dogs to disease, from the loss of loved ones to the pleasures and pains of new beginnings. New Life, No Instructions shows us how a lot of little things—shifted perspectives about memories, a new puppy, dear friends and a height increase of just over half an inch—add up to something much more significant: a new life, embarked upon and embraced.

When explosions rocked the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, three people were killed and 260 injured, among them Jeff Bauman. Standing with friends to cheer on his girlfriend, who was running in the race, Bauman saw a man whose appearance and demeanor didn’t fit the crowd leave a backpack and walk away. Bauman was about to suggest to his friends that they move farther up the street when the pack exploded, taking both his legs with it. Stronger is Bauman’s account of his injury and recovery, and a tribute to working-class Boston resilience.

Bauman, with co-author Bret Witter, describes growing up among hard-working, hard-partying relatives and struggling to find his own path. Unable to afford college, he was cooking rotisserie chickens at Costco when the bombing occurred (a co-worker convinced him to keep his employee health insurance, which turned out to be a financial lifesaver). He’s apprehensive at being called a hero despite providing a description credited with helping to identify bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and feels pressured to make appearances at multiple charity events, even though the travel saps energy needed for his own recovery.

Bauman describes feeling no hatred toward the Tsarnaev brothers, just sorrow that they chose to hurt strangers out of a sense of their own futility. Carlos Arredondo, the man who saved Bauman’s life (pictured in a famous AP photo in which he’s running next to Bauman in a wheelchair) had his own life changed by stepping up in a moment of crisis. His personal story is heartbreaking, but his friendship with Bauman seems to offer a glimmer of hope.

Bauman’s frank discussion of the long path to recovery, seeded with doubt, setbacks and small victories, makes Stronger both informative and inspiring.

Heather Seggel reads too much and writes all about it in Northern California.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, April 2014

Frances Mayes’ lyrical memoir of growing up Southern was a long time coming. Worried about upsetting her family, she stopped and started Under Magnolia many times over: “Anytime I felt the impulse to start my Southern opus again, I instead headed for a movie or a new Thai restaurant,” she writes. “I’d go jogging or read a novel until the impulse faded.”

Thank goodness she finally gave in to her impulses to dare alla luce, as the Tuscans say, to give the book to the light. This memoir from the author of Under the Tuscan Sun is a lovely, soul-baring look back at growing up in Fitzgerald, Georgia, the youngest of three daughters. Her family was chaotic, to say the least. Her parents were at war with each other from the first drink of the day, desperately unhappy but unable to make changes.

“I said many things to myself by the age of seven,” Mayes writes. “If I ever get out of here, I will never select unhappiness. When the plate of unhappiness is passed around and more and more is offered, I’ll say no thank you, no. But they wanted seconds, thirds.”

Much younger than her sisters, Mayes bore the brunt of her parents’ dysfunction. Her saving graces were books and Willie Bell, the woman who had been working for the family since before Mayes was born. Less confidant and more co-conspirator, Willie Bell took care of Mayes in her own brusque way: feeding her, advising her to go play outside to escape the toxic house.

Mayes also recalls her cloistered years at Randolph-Macon, the women’s college in Virginia where she cultivated some of her deepest friendships and her deep love of writing. (“We began to forget we were supposed to please men,” she writes. “There weren’t any.”).

Under Magnolia is a gorgeous, dreamy remembrance of hot Southern afternoons, mothers in red lipstick and Shalimar, Elvis turned up loud to cover up the family troubles that ran deep. An unflinching love song to her simultaneously rich and troubled childhood, it is Mayes’ most generous work yet.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Frances Mayes for Under Magnolia.

On October 29, 1971, Duane Allman, the soulful lead guitarist who wove expressive and fluid guitar solos into the music of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, King Curtis, Derek and the Dominoes and the Allman Brothers Band, died in a motorcycle crash near Macon, Georgia. He left behind an already remarkable musical legacy, a young wife and a 2-year-old daughter named Galadrielle.

With the same musical emotion that her father spun into the songs he played, Allman’s daughter Galadrielle spins a poignant and illuminating portrait of a father she never knew in Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman. The book is part memoir and part biography, as she chronicles not only Duane’s life, but also her own search to discover and appreciate her late father.

Duane named his daughter for Galadriel, the princess of the elves in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, his favorite book. But after her father’s death, Galadrielle’s mother rarely shared stories about Duane, and her only contact with his musical legacy was an annual trip to an Allman Brothers concert. “I didn’t have his clothing or trinkets to treasure and cling to,” she writes. “Most of our pictures of him were the same publicity stills reprinted in the press.”

As she searches for a fuller portrait of her father, Galadrielle gathers stories from her family, Duane’s bandmates (including his brother Gregg) and friends. Her quest reveals a man so immersed in music that his hands played guitar notes even in his sleep.

From her father’s brief life (he was only 24 when he was killed), Galadrielle gleans “bits of wisdom” that she chooses to embrace: “Do what you love and own who you are. Time is precious and death is real. So is Art: it defies them both.”

In the end, writing this book simultaneously opens and closes a chapter in her life. “I want to believe you will stay close to me. I tell myself you live in my blood and bones and you will come when I need you. I will stop seeking you constantly now. I will know you are in me and not out in the world,” she writes. “We are tied together as surely as a string is wound tightly through the tuning peg of a guitar. The connection between us is physical, actual, real.”

Galadrielle Allman’s sweet song to her father brings Duane Allman to life in a way that no other biography will ever be able to do.

It’s hard to know whether to call Boyd Varty’s Cathedral of the Wild a memoir, a true adventure story or a self-help book. All I know is that it made me cry with its hard-won truths about human and animal nature, distilled by Varty from his experiences living on Londolozi, the game reserve his family runs in South Africa.

Londolozi began in 1926 when Varty’s great-grandfather bought the land to use as a hunting destination; when the land passed to Varty’s father and uncle, they began transforming it into a game conservation area. During South Africa’s apartheid era, Londolozi stood out as a place of unity and respect for all people, and it was where Nelson Mandela went to recuperate in 1990 after his imprisonment. It continues to operate today as a safari destination.

The campfire stories Varty recounts of a childhood in the bush are by turns hilarious and harrowing. There’s the deadly black mamba snake slithering over young Boyd’s legs; he’s pounced on by an overenthusiastic young lion; he learns to drive a Land Rover at age 10 while his Uncle John shoots video footage of a charging elephant: experiences that taught Boyd how to keep calm and carry on in a crisis.

The biggest threat to Varty’s family, however, comes not from wild animals but from desperate humans. A violent home invasion in Johannesburg traumatizes the family profoundly and prompts 18-year-old Boyd to leave Africa in search of healing. His quest takes him from Australia to India to the South American rain forest and finally, to a Native-American healing ceremony in Arizona. There he reconnects with his family’s core work: bringing urbanized and hurting people back to a relationship with animals and nature.

Returning to Africa is a journey home for Varty, a path he continues to walk today with his family at the Londolozi game reserve. Reading this book takes the reader on a similar journey, reminding us that our true home is in nature. Both funny and deeply moving, this book belongs on the shelf of everyone who seeks healing in wilderness.