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.

Blake Bailey has written notable biographies of authors John Cheever and Richard Yates, both difficult and brilliant men. While he was sifting through their lives, he was also reflecting on his own. The Splendid Things We Planned is the resulting portrait, a story of mental illness and addiction and the difficult orbits they force upon the healthy. It’s also a tribute to one family’s best efforts and inevitable failings.

Bailey’s older brother, Scott, was born while his parents were still in college. Re-established in Vinita, Oklahoma, their father parlayed his law school education into ever-increasing job responsibility while their mother followed her intellectual bliss and turned their home into a mini-salon for foreign exchange students and witty gay men. Young Blake took in scenes of infidelity and drug use, but his attention was generally on Scott, a handsome bully whose seemingly limitless potential gradually collapsed under relentless drug use and delusional thinking.

Bailey tells a difficult story with spare language that allows for some dry humor. His father remarries a woman who despises both sons equally, so he largely checks out where they’re concerned for several years. His mother dotes on her oldest boy, ever faithful that he’d turn back into the son she knew. “She missed Scott and wanted to talk about him, simple as that—to speculate about his motives, to retrace our steps to the exact point in time when everything went blooey.” Anyone who has lived with someone similarly ill will find this book painfully accurate when it comes to the mental gymnastics and survivor’s guilt involved.

The family as a whole is an eccentric bunch, and Marlies, Scott’s mother, keeps her dignity and a sense of humor while buying a pistol to defend herself against her son. If The Splendid Things We Planned is a damning portrait of mental illness, it’s also an unforgettable look at a family doing its best in the most trying of circumstances, those where no good outcome exists.

In her memoir, The Ogallala Road, Julene Bair chronicles the last days of her family’s Kansas farm, as well as the bittersweet love affair that feeds her hope of saving the place her folks called home. She makes the case that modern farming practices are inexorably eroding the vast resources her ancestors took for granted, and she mourns the unraveling of the tapestry that once bound together her family, their history and the land they shared.

Twice divorced and worried about her teenage son, Jake, Bair returns to her family’s farm for a visit and meets Ward, a rancher from nearby Smoky Valley. Lonely in middle age, she is thrilled to have a man in her life again, as well as a role model for Jake. Together she and Ward dream about building a life together and working the land Bair has inherited from her parents. From the beginning, however, Bair knows that Ward does not share her passion for land preservation. She begins to wrestle with her family’s part in draining the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides the only source of water for the Western Plains. Eventually, she supports more sustainable use of this precious water source—even as she realizes that her actions will drive a wedge between her and Ward.

Bair’s memoir is a moving and honest account of a woman trying to reconcile parts of herself that seem irreconcilable—daughter, mother, lover, landowner, environmental advocate. In searching for unity within herself, she discovers what she truly values.

One of those guys seemingly born to wear a tux, Robert Wagner proves an expert tour guide in the sometimes dishy, always perceptive You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age.

In recent years, Wagner has come to be known for small screen roles on “Two and a Half Men” and “NCIS”—as well as deadpan appearances in the “Austin Powers” film franchise. He was married to the luminous Natalie Wood (for the second time) at the time of her still-puzzling 1981 death. But Wagner also enjoyed movie stardom in the ’50s and early ’60s. And he has long mingled with the rich and famous, having grown up in swanky Bel Air.

And so, with historian-critic Scott Eyman, R.J., as he’s known, has written what he calls “a mosaic of memory.”

The book was inspired, in part, by the wacky 2002 wedding of Liza Minnelli and David Gest. Though “not exactly a Fellini movie, it was close,” Wagner says, recounting how Liz Taylor kept a church filled with guests waiting, because she didn’t like her shoes; when the ceremony at last concluded, Gest “tried to suck the lips off Liza’s face.” (“Ewww, gross,” whispered actress Jill St. John, Wagner’s wife since 1990.)

To document a lifestyle “that has vanished as surely as birch bark canoes,” Wagner gives us a mix of history and I-was-there recollections. Like the dinner party at Clifton Webb’s home, where guest Judy Garland gave an impromptu serenade at the piano—for nearly an hour—as 15 other attendees gathered ’round. Once a caddy for Fred Astaire, Wagner went on to become a regular golfing buddy; he played softball with John Ford’s “group,” which included Duke Wayne and Ward Bond; and he spent New Year’s Eves at Frank Sinatra’s famed Palm Springs digs.

Wagner tells us about favorite decorators (the gay Billy Haines ruled), fashion trendsetters (the Duke of Windsor), the liveliest and even most unlikely night spots (including how Don the Beachcomber’s came to be), all the while dropping yummy nuggets. (Sinatra’s aftershave was witch hazel, or Yardley’s English Lavender.)

Wagner does it all with grace—never taking overt shots at today’s Hollywood, but making one thing clear: The so-called golden age was no cinematic fantasy.

At first, Carol Wall’s memoir, Mr. Owita’s Guide to Gardening, sounds like a book you might have read before: An unlikely friendship develops between two people who appear to have nothing in common. Giles Owita is an immigrant from Kenya who works part-time as a gardener. Wall is a high school English teacher and writer whose work has graced the pages of magazines like Southern Living. But things are not as they seem. In time, Wall will regard Owita as the greatest professor she has ever had. And you will be convinced she is right.

Their relationship begins predictably. Wall asks Owita to help her reclaim her lawn, an eyesore that is becoming the worst looking yard on the block. He helps her plant a few beds, tend to the grass and (memorably) prune a tree. But soon the relationship veers off script. We see some of the depth that is to come in a letter Owita sends to Wall shortly after viewing her lawn. “I took the liberty of stopping by your compound today, even though your vehicle was not in the driveway. . . . You have a lovely yard. Of particular beauty are the azaleas.” His eloquence impresses the English teacher in Wall, who muses, “Compound. It sounded elegant. Exotic.” It is the beginning of a rich conversation.

Despite their differences in race and background, both Owita and Wall carry family and health burdens that will be lightened by sharing them. Through their friendship, both truly help each other—in real tangible ways that change each other and their community.

I couldn’t put this book down. I found myself liking the principal characters from the opening pages, and my affection for them never wavered. If you enjoy inspirational memoirs or gardening books (or both), this moving account of a life-changing friendship is for you.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Carol Wall for Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening.