Unremarried Widow describes the heart-rending love affair between the author and her military husband, Miles, who died in a horrific helicopter crash while serving overseas. It’s obviously a sad story, and Artis Henderson wisely chooses not to tell it in chronological order. Her narrative begins in the early days of their marriage, then lurches forward to the accident, then back to their meeting, and then even further back to an airplane crash that killed her father. This time travel illuminates the ways in which certain events are forever with us, shaping how we deal with what comes next—and how what comes next will, in turn, shape our perception of what happened before.

Henderson is a bright and ambitious young coed when she meets Miles in a bar. She longs to live abroad and become a writer, but instead she falls for Miles and follows him wherever the U.S. government sends him. She finds herself living on or near military bases, seeking temporary jobs that barely satisfy her. Time is simply something to fill until her lover returns. As a former Army wife myself, I was thoroughly convinced by Henderson’s description of military partnership. The military community can feel at once comforting and suffocating, especially for women, who are always on the sidelines.

When Miles finally does deploy, Henderson makes a break from on-post military life and moves back to Florida with her mom. While she finds a certain kind of rhythm there, in crucial ways she is unsupported when her worst fears become reality.

Henderson is an author unafraid to tackle big issues like love and identity, yet the book rarely feels heavy-handed because we arrive at these topics through her very personal story. Unremarried Widow is an unflinching, honest and raw book that will likely evoke a strong emotional reaction from the reader. It certainly did from me. If you like true love stories (even tragic ones) and good writing, give this book a try. Just be ready to break out the tissues.

The American people are, it seems, a fretful and anxious lot. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting 40 million adults. [These] disorders are highly treatable, yet only about one-third of those suffering receive treatment.”

A lack of treatment is not the issue for Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic, who chronicles his jumpy and jittery journey through life in My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind.

“I have since the age of about two been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. And I have, since the age of ten, tried in various ways to overcome my anxiety,” he writes. In his quest for relief, Stossel has tried a passel of therapies, drugs and alcohol, with little effect (“Here’s what worked: nothing.”). His current therapist, Dr. W., has advocated facing down these mental disturbances head on, and Stossel admits that perhaps writing this book could be “empowering and anxiety reducing.”

Years in the writing and impressively researched, My Age of Anxiety rigorously examines the “riddle” of anxiety, delving into the history of the disorder and its permutations (i.e., depression, performance anxiety, separation anxiety). He cites the thoughts of teachers, medical experts and philosophers through the ages, from Hippocrates to Spinoza to Freud. Along the way, he embellishes his reporting with accounts of his personal trials (many of which are imbued with dark humor).

Stossel’s final chapter on “Redemption and Resilience” is especially poignant. For while the author realizes that the book’s focus might be viewed as narcissistic, he also hopes that divulging his “unhealed wound” might just be “a source of strength and a bestower of certain blessings.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Scott Stossel for My Age of Anxiety.

Badluck Way, Bryce Andrews’ haunting and elegiac memoir of a year spent ranching in Montana, captures the clash between housing development and wilderness regions occurring all over the American West. Luxury game ranches in Montana owned by Hollywood stars are built along migration routes for elk, antelope and wolves. The ecological relationship between predator and prey is complicated—sometimes to tragic ends—when human beings enter the ancient mix.

As a young and idealistic Seattle kid in love with the land, Andrews gains a tough sentimental education as a novice ranch hand on Sun Ranch. Hard days and nights of fence building and cattle herding weather his body and callous his hands; but worth it’s all worth it, enabling him to live “at the center of my heart’s geography.”

Running parallel to Andrews’ story, however, is the story of the Wedge Wolf Pack, which occupies the backcountry of the ranch, surviving primarily off the abundant elk in the area. The reintroduction of wolves to the American West (after having been previously hunted out of existence) has generated much debate between conservationists and ranchers. Some wolf packs have integrated seamlessly into the wild, keeping down the population of deer. Others, like the Wedge Pack, find the presence of slow moving cows in the wolves’ own hunting grounds an easy meal. Andrews finds himself caught between his affinity for the wilderness and the wolves and his profession as a rancher.

The American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote about the experience of killing a wolf, of how seeing the “fierce green fire” die out of its eyes led him to rethink his role as a human predator. Similarly, Andrews is bitterly transformed by his first-hand experience seeing that fire die. Now that wolves are no longer an endangered species in Montana and Idaho, permits are being issued for limited wolf hunts to protect ranchers’ herds. But what are the consequences of killing a wolf?

Andrews honors the men, the land and the animals that populate the Sun Ranch by not smoothing over these complex issues. His memoir recounts both the tough questions and the real and raw grief he feels for the dead wolf. Beautifully written and viscerally honest, Badluck Way introduces a powerful new voice in environmental writing.

When David MacLean woke up on a train platform in India, he had no idea who he was or why he was there. “It was darkness, darkness, darkness, then snap. Me. Now awake,” he writes.

MacLean was hospitalized with severe hallucinations and near total amnesia. Officials assumed he was a foreigner who had taken too many drugs. The truth was that he was suffering from a reaction to an anti-malarial drug called Lariam, commonly used by soldiers and travelers and approved by the Federal Drug Administration after a questionable trial.

A writer, MacLean had traveled to India as a Fulbright Scholar to study local speech patterns for his novel. His parents came from Ohio after he was hospitalized. While he didn’t remember them, he started recognizing things about them: The way his father cried, the way his mother soothed him by pushing her thumb between his eyebrows: “I still didn’t have my memory, but I now had an outline of myself, like a tin form waiting for batter.”

The drug settled into MacLean’s brain and continued altering his chemistry for 10 years. He drank too much, smoked too much and considered suicide more than once.

“Life felt like a too-long race, all spent running in wet concrete, each year a little deeper in: toes, knees, pelvis, chest, neck, death,” he writes.

The Answer to the Riddle Is Me is a spare and unflinching memoir that takes the reader along on MacLean’s messy, one-step-forward, two-steps-back recovery. Based on an essay MacLean wrote for NPR’s “This American Life,” it is haunting on two fronts: His brutally honest recounting of his journey to the brink of suicide and back, and the questions he raises about the use of Lariam in the U.S. military despite its record of serious side effects. (Lariam is no longer the main anti-malarial drug, but it is still being given to some soldiers in Afghanistan. An Army epidemiologist called it the “Agent Orange of our generation” during testimony before a Senate subcommittee in 2012.)

Maclean may never be the same as he was before waking up on that train platform, but 10 years out, he is married and is an award-winning author. He still has days when, he writes, “[I]t seems irresponsible that I’m allowed to cross the street by myself. But this, in comparison to what I’ve been through, is everyday crazy, and everyday crazy is something I can handle.”

Actress Anjelica Huston offers a retrospective on her childhood in Ireland, her adolescence in London and her burgeoning model days in New York City in a vivid new memoir, A Story Lately Told. This first installment of a planned two-book set offers a personal look at Anjelica’s early life, in which her parents—the famous director John Huston and ballet dancer and model Ricki Soma—feature prominently. From a young age, Huston watched these wealthy, glamorous people navigate the worlds of art and culture. She paid attention to the eclectic way her mother decorated their family manor in Ireland, to the way her father directed conversation at the dinner table, to the people who drew her parents’ attention.

Though often criticized as a young girl for being directionless and not terribly focused on her studies, Huston proves an excellent student of the people she admires most. She lingers on alluring details, like the story behind the Monet water lily painting that hung in her childhood home and the clothes her mother wore for a night out. “Anjel is pure artist,” her mother wrote to her father when Huston was only a toddler. As Huston grows older and her parents separate and then divorce, she remains keen to the worlds of fashion and film and eager to make her own way. Huston proves a natural in front of a camera. And with seeming effortlessness, she breaks onto the pages of Vogue as a model.

Because of who she was, Huston met brilliant and quirky people. She was given roles in film (first by her father) and plumy modeling gigs. Yet, all these gifts did not necessarily make discovering her true self any easier, nor did they shield her from making damaging mistakes along the way. This book will be of interest to fans of the Huston family and people who love the places where Huston lived. But, perhaps most intriguing of all, is to see the impacts of nature and nurture, how a splendid and varied upbringing replete with stimulating people and bright opportunities enhanced the world of a sensitive young girl who was born, as her mother said, a “pure artist.”

How’s this for an opener?

“My godfather investigated my father for the FBI and had a scar on the palm of his left hand from a machine-gun bullet shot by Baby Face Nelson. My uncle had ‘Frederick Engels’ for first and middle names. My father went to Mexico and spied on Trotsky for the Communist Party of the United States.”

If you don’t find this introduction to Daniel Menaker’s memoir a spur to keep reading, then the rest of the book holds nothing for you. But those of us possessed of a normal curiosity have by this point already embarked on a wild ride that will provide insider glimpses of the New York publishing world from 1969 onward, with the author serving as one of the scene’s principal participants and sharpest observers.

Menaker first acquaints us with his colorful family and the luminaries who come within its orbit. His mother is an editor at Fortune, where she crosses paths with such talents as John Kenneth Galbraith, Walker Evans and Dwight Macdonald. As a son of ardent leftists, Menaker dutifully attends the fabled Little Red School House in Greenwich Village. He goes on to earn degrees at Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins, teach English at two ritzy private schools and take a job as a fact-checker for the New Yorker.

His tenure at the magazine, bumpy at first, lasts for 26 years, during which time he serves at the pleasure (and occasionally the displeasure) of editors William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown. His description of the microscopic attention devoted to each article the magazine publishes is enough to make a run-of-the-mill copy editor weep.

Never quite at ease after Brown takes the helm of the New Yorker, Menaker accepts the offer of an editorship at Random House, where one of the first books he publishes is the blockbuster political novel Primary Colors. Later, as editor-in-chief, he offers TV’s Diane Sawyer $5 million to write a book. She declines. And so it goes.

While the glittery gossip is fun to read, the book’s most moving passages deal with the death of Menaker’s beloved older brother and his own struggles with lung cancer. Not easy to pigeonhole, this is an amalgam of autobiography and cultural history at its best.

A meditation on love and grief, on soaring in hot air balloons and crashing into the Earth, Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life is a memoir occasioned by the death of his wife. But unlike the recent memoirs by Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates on the experience of their own bereavements, Barnes waited five years to craft this book, which is marked by a sense of perspective on the tragedy of loss.

Beautifully reticent with personal detail, Levels of Life opens from the outlook of a Victorian hot air balloon. The stories of three pioneering aeronauts—Fred Burnaby, Sarah Bernhardt and Félix Tournachon—offer a literally distanced view of humanity. These aeronauts were among the first people to look down at the Earth from the airy freedom of the sky. But that freedom comes at the cost of the inherent dangers of crashing and burning.

Which brings us to the love stories of the aeronauts. Burnaby loved Bernhardt, declared his love, and was wounded by her rejection. Tournachon was uxorious (an important word for Barnes): in love with his wife for the 55 years of their marriage until the day she died. We aspire to love like we aspire to the heights, but “every love story is a potential grief story,” says Barnes.

The memoir’s third section takes us to Barnes’ own grief story, when 30 years of love are ripped away in an instant by brain cancer. There were only 37 days, Barnes tells us, from his wife’s diagnosis to her death, and the loss forever of her “radiant curiosity.” This is about the only personal detail Barnes tells us, preferring to muse instead upon bigger questions: love, grief, anger, mourning and loneliness—“just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.”

Levels of Life tells a universal story, a patterning of human existence best seen from the air. Julian Barnes is at his best in this subtle and intelligent memoir, even as it narrates the worst.

David Schickler’s memoir, The Dark Path, is about a lifelong balancing act between God and sex. Does one cancel out the other? It opens with 10-year-old David staring at a pretty girl at Mass, a scene that emblematizes his twin obsessions. Religion comes naturally to David, who as a child is drawn to the quiet suburban woods behind his house, and to a dark path through the trees where he talks to God. But more earthly forms of love appeal just as much, as the young David charmingly inquires of each new crush, “Are you my wife?” (Luckily, not out loud.)

What begins as a cute story of boyish tension soon deepens into actual conflict. Witnessing the casual cruelty of teenage sex sends David careening toward the Church, especially during his college years at Georgetown. But the Jesuit brotherhood contains its own hypocrisies, and David is left stranded with neither God nor girlfriend to sustain him. The scenes depicting how his spiritual crisis leads to physical and mental collapse are searing and honest. We witness a loving heart laid waste by the collapse of its belief system.

Although this may sound grim, Schickler’s deft hand with dialogue, scene and humor maintains a light touch, and provides an interesting contrast to the dark night of the soul he undergoes. You can sense his screenwriter’s eye in the scenes set at the boarding school in Vermont where he goes to teach and has a nervous breakdown—his depiction of his students responding to him crying in class is priceless.

So this is a comic memoir, and yet its great strength is the simplicity and gentleness of the heart under examination. The balancing act between God and sex is mirrored by the equilibrium the book maintains between humor and despair. With The Dark Path, Schickler has written a spiritual memoir about love as the common denominator between religious and earthly passions.

Like most children, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák was vaguely familiar with her parents’ background as she was growing up, but didn’t know or understand many details. As in many immigrant homes, the adults discussed those details in what American-born Marianne regarded as “secret” languages—in her family’s case, mostly in Hungarian.

After her parents and other beloved older relatives died, Szegedy-Maszák decided to delve more deeply into the unknowns, aided by a cache of letters from her father to her mother during their difficult courtship. And what a rich story she tells in I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Aladár and Hanna Szegedy-Maszák and their families were people of extraordinary sophistication and stamina who survived persecution by both Nazis and Communists.

Hanna was a member of a hugely wealthy clan descended from pioneering Jewish industrialist Manfred Weiss, the Andrew Carnegie of Hungary. Most of the family converted to Christianity, but that didn’t help them with the Nazis and their vicious Hungarian allies. They survived, but in a way that aroused great resentment among fellow Hungarians: A Himmler aide forced them to sign over their fortune to the Nazis in exchange for being allowed to escape. Unwelcome in Hungary after the war, most went to the U.S., where they again thrived.

Aladár was a Christian, a highly regarded diplomat, who resisted Hungary’s alliance with Germany and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies. When the Germans invaded, he was sent to Dachau. After liberation, he rose from concentration camp prisoner to Hungarian ambassador to the U.S. in an astonishingly short time. Then came the Communist coup in Hungary. Aladár tried mightily to persuade the U.S. to intervene, failed again, and spent the rest of his life in exile.

Their daughter tells their stories with beautiful sensitivity. She is loving but clear-eyed about their flaws and troubles. Her parents lived in middle-class comfort in Washington, D.C., but her father in particular was broken by his political and personal tragedies. Marianne grew up in a household darkened by his depression. Yet through it all, his deep love for his wife endured. Their daughter’s fine memoir highlights a largely forgotten chapter of the Holocaust and honors their memory.