Cheryl Strayed wrote about how the death of her mother changed her life in the best-selling Wild. In a similar and yet very different vein, Kelly Corrigan writes about the effects of her mom’s presence in a wonderful new memoir, Glitter and Glue.

In an earlier book, The Middle Place, Corrigan paid tribute to her larger-than-life father, “Greenie.” In contrast to her optimistic cheerleader of a father, Corrigan’s mother has always been a practical, worrying realist. As this steadfast woman once explained to her daughter, “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.”

Corrigan remembers as a child longing for a more lively, upbeat mom, but over the years, she’s come to realize what an essential and anchoring influence this glue has been, especially now that she’s a mother herself.

Corrigan first began truly appreciating her mother in 1992, when she ran out of money during an after-college backpacking trip around the world. She ended up as a nanny for John Tanner, an Australian widower with two children: 7-year-old Milly and 5-year-old Martin. There was also a handsome stepson in his early 20s named Evan, who adds a romantic interest to Corrigan’s Down Under adventure.

As Corrigan takes on a motherly role for the Tanner children, she constantly thinks about their late mother, a cancer victim, as she gains new insight into the challenges her own mother faced raising Corrigan and her two brothers. As she eloquently explains: “God knows, every day I spend with the Tanners, I feel like I’m opening a tiny flap on one of those advent calendars we used to hang in the kitchen every December 1, except instead of revealing Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, it’s my mother. I can’t see all of her yet, but window by window, she is emerging.”

Young Corrigan set out on her journey in search of adventure, but along the way learned that many of life’s greatest rewards occur during everyday moments at home. And while this is indeed a “quiet” book in contrast to Strayed’s wild exploits, Glitter and Glue is both riveting and highly readable. Framed by a tight structure and compelling writing, this memoir is refreshingly non-dysfunctional.

Leah Vincent is a good girl who loves her rabbi father. In her Yeshivish community—a sect within ultra-Orthodox Judaism—she’s a girl “who would never sneak a kosher candy bar that did not carry the extra strict cholov Yisroel certification.”

Vincent yearns for little more than to live devotedly the only life available to her: Follow Jewish laws strictly, marry the right man and have his children. When she leaves her home in Pittsburgh to attend high school in Manchester, England, she meets her best friend’s brother, Naftali. It’s not long before she’s not only aching with lust and love for him, but also beginning to question her religious teachings. She writes letters to Naftali filled with theological questions. When her aunt in Manchester discovers the letters, Vincent’s life spirals out of control, as her parents turn their backs on her because of her “immoral” action of writing letters to a boy. Overnight, she is on her own without any financial or emotional support. 

In Cut Me Loose, Vincent details her harrowing journey as she wanders through harmful relationships and destructive actions, such as cutting her body. As she hits bottom, Vincent realizes that the “life she is trying to craft is doomed to failure.” Although she eventually achieves a measure of redemption, she learns that too much freedom, like too much restriction, has its pitfalls.

Vincent’s compulsively readable memoir draws us into her fears, her few joys and her complete aloneness as she struggles to navigate the course of a new life.

David R. Dow has spent his life dealing with death. He is an attorney who specializes in death penalty issues as a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. He also founded the Texas Innocence Network, which has represented more than 100 death row inmates. Dow picked a good place to practice: Texas has long been the top state for executions.

When you spend your time filing court appeals and clemency petitions for death row inmates—and almost always losing—you learn to embrace life. Things I’ve Learned From Dying, Dow’s latest book, is a guidebook for living life to the fullest. Dow likes to drink, smoke cigars and kayak when the Gulf Coast waves kick up in Galveston. He also embraces the love of his wife, Katya, his son, Lincoln, and their dog, Winona.

Witnessing the execution of a steady stream of clients also has a way of hardening you to death, Dow writes. But the author’s perspective on death suddenly changes when his father-in-law, Peter, is diagnosed with cancer. Meanwhile, Winona, a dog that has been at Dow’s side for almost 13 years, suddenly becomes ill. At the same time, Dow is filing appeals to stop the execution of Eddie Waterman, who was convicted of shooting a man during a home burglary.

Dow lends his perspective on these three lives, and death suddenly evolves from being purely professional to profoundly personal. Dow is fond of his father-in-law, Peter, with whom he has spent countless hours kayaking and hiking. And the sorrow experienced by Dow’s wife makes Peter’s deteriorating condition even more painful. Dow admits that Winona’s declining health is even more heart-wrenching because she has always been at his side, and she is protective of his son. The sadness experienced by 8-year-old Lincoln makes Winona’s downslide more difficult. Conversely, Dow feels little sympathy toward the death row inmate. Ironically, the convict’s fate is the only one that Dow has any opportunity to change.

Things I’ve Learned From Dying would seem like a depressing book to read. But Dow’s sardonic, yet humorous writing softens the edges. And Dow is a gifted author, writing in short, staccato sentences that keep the prose moving with rhythm and pace. Indeed, Things I’ve Learned From Dying really is a book about life, and how one man who deals with death learns to appreciate living.

When Ingrid Ricks' parents divorced, her devout Mormon mother married an abusive creep who made home the last place Ingrid would ever want to be. Her father was a traveling salesman, always chasing down a dream, and when he invited Ingrid to join him on the road for the summer, she jumped at the chance. When their summer plans went sideways, Ingrid was forced to rely on herself for stability and grow up before she finished high school. Hippie Boy chronicles her abbreviated childhood among adults who had their own share of growing up to do.

Hippie Boy—the title was an affectionate nickname bestowed by Ricks' father, on account of her long, tangled hair—was a best-selling self-published eBook, and deservedly so. Ricks is tough but fair when it comes to describing her family, and her frank honesty lets readers see past any failures to the love that ultimately unites them. Her mother endures a terrible second marriage because she simply doesn't want to be the one in charge of things, but flourishes in every way once she finally throws the bum out. Her father bends the truth when it suits him (“Dad was special that way. He could talk his way out of anything.”) and is flaky and inconsistent, but keeps his word to Ingrid in one crucial instance that shows his good heart clearly. And stepfather Earl? Well, let's just say it's a relief when he gets his walking papers.

Hippie Boy juxtaposes the stifling confines of an abusive and oppressively religious home with the thrill of the open road and its anonymous motels and rest stops. It's a story of family unity and a declaration of independence in one, and a keen, clear-eyed take on both. Fans of Haven Kimmel and Mary Karr should welcome Ricks warmly as a new, distinct voice in memoirs.

Diane Johnson’s wry new memoir, Flyover Lives, is an absorbing exploration of the people and places that have shaped her. The book begins and ends in France, where the acclaimed novelist (Le Divorce) lives with her husband John half the year. In between, her stories take us to Illinois, California, New York and London, and also back in time, when the footsteps of her ancestors led them to the Midwest.

“No one writes much about the center part of our country, sometimes called the Flyover, or about the modest pioneers who cleared and peopled this region. Yet their Midwestern stories tell us a lot about American history,” Johnson writes in the foreword. “Migration patterns, wars, the larger movements, are after all made up of individual human beings experiencing and sometimes recording their lives.”

In this memoir, Johnson records her own growing up in Moline, Illinois, part of a close family. Her childhood was one that some might call idyllic; she describes it as “lacking in drama.”

Her story becomes more dramatic as she gets older and moves away from Moline—marrying and divorcing young, moving to London under false pretenses, writing for Stanley Kubrick. However, her recent past is just part of the book.

Johnson’s curiosity about her forebears led her to research and discover some of the traces they left behind—letters, journals and photographs, tales handed down over the years. Telling their stories of life in the Midwest makes up a good chunk of this memoir. Johnson relates her family history honestly and compassionately. Some of the stories are funny, others heartbreaking. She dwells mainly on her grandmothers’ experience: getting married, moving to the center of a young country, setting up house, having children and sometimes, as in the case of her grandmother Catharine, burying their children. Catharine buried her three daughters in the space of one week after they died of scarlet fever.

By investigating the lives of her ancestors, Johnson finds that there are no “flyover” lives, and that every person has a story worth telling.

Near the end of his entrancing and unsparing memoir, Gary Shteyngart —author of three exuberant, award-winning novels—writes, “On so many occasions in my novels I have approached a certain truth only to turn away from it, only to point my finger and laugh at it and then scurry back to safety. In this book, I promised myself I would not point the finger. My laughter would be intermittent. There would be no safety.”

Shteyngart—being Shteyngart—cannot not be funny. In one example drawn at random from Little Failure, he introduces his Grandmother Polya, with whom he is parked after school every day while his parents work (and whose TV he hopes will provide him with new story ideas for entertaining his classmates, who would otherwise despise the slight, poorly dressed Russian immigrant boy): “Behind every great Russian child, there is a Russian grandmother who acts as chef de cuisine, bodyguard, personal shopper, and PR agent.” He begins another chapter: “The next year I get the present every boy wants. A circumcision.”

But the flip side of this sharp sense of humor—an inheritance from his traumatized Russian Jewish family, he says—is rage. A sweet, sickly, incredibly bright only child born in Leningrad in 1972, Shteyngart became a “kind of tuning fork for my parents’ fears, disappointments, and alienation.” Those fears and disappointments ripened when the family left Russia and came eventually to Queens, New York. Shteyngart’s vividly recounted immigrant’s tale tells a parallel story of family dysfunction and a growing self-hatred that, during his years at Oberlin College, manifested in out-of-control behavior that earned him the nickname Scary Gary and, later, led him to regrettable cruelties visited upon people who tried to help him.

Little Failure is also an account of Shteyngart’s growth as a writer. At important junctures in his life, his ability to write helped him overcome his social awkwardness to gain appreciative attention from his peers. “There is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of . . . the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary,” he says at one point. His need to succeed as a writer led Shteyngart at long last to enter psychotherapy, and the result, as the final chapters show, was transformative. Few writers have written about the soul-scorching experiences of their lives with such wit and ferocity as Shteyngart does in Little Failure. There is certainly no scurrying to safety here.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Shteyngart for Little Failure.

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.”