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.

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.