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Sidle up to the bar, order a shot of your favorite whiskey, trade friendly greetings and engage in some warm chatter, then listen transfixed as Rosie Schaap, a kind of Irish bard, regales you with tales of the bars in her life, the regulars with whom she has hoisted a few or closed down the place, the moments of love and affection she’s experienced, and the enduring freedom to be herself that “being a woman at home in a bar culture” brings.

In Drinking With Men, Schaap, a cracking good storyteller, takes us along on her journey as she comes of age, follows her heart, falls in and out of love and discovers who she’s meant to be. From sitting on the bar car (at 15 years old) on the Metro-North train, where she discovers her kind of people—commuters drinking enough to get a little buzzed, telling dirty jokes and smoking—through her years as a Deadhead in search of freedom, and into her college and grad school years, when she finds a local bar that serves as more of a community than her college and where the regulars become like family to her, Schaap gets “another kind of education altogether” in the bars she frequents.

Some expand her horizons: Puffy’s is “a protracted, whiskey-soaked lesson in art history and New York culture, a repository of downtown lore and legend.” Some offer a lesson she’d rather not learn: At Else’s in Montreal, she begins to understand that “self-reinvention has a cost, and it is high, and it is terrible.” Each bar teaches her something about the world she loves to inhabit: “There are loud bars where conversation is not a priority. . . . There are quiet bars, lit low and engineered for tête-à-têtes. And at the Man of Kent, which was neither of these things, but a place both brightly festive and undeniably civilized . . . I started to understand, with greater clarity than ever, how to behave in a bar.”

Schaap delivers an affectionate and loving tribute to the bars she has known—with names as varied as Grogan’s Castle Lounge, The Pig, Good World and The Liquor Store—as well as to the many fellow regulars with whom she has become lifelong friends over a pint or a shot.

Sidle up to the bar, order a shot of your favorite whiskey, trade friendly greetings and engage in some warm chatter, then listen transfixed as Rosie Schaap, a kind of Irish bard, regales you with tales of the bars in her life, the regulars with…

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Barely a year after her marriage in 1987, Wendy Plump embarked on the first of three volcanically passionate affairs she would immerse herself in before she and her husband, Bill, began having children. She did so, she freely admits, simply because she wanted to, because it was so exciting, so different from the humdrum of domestic life. But each affair was undercut by such feelings of guilt and the endless fatigue of covering up that she would ultimately confess them to Bill, who would first rage, then adjust. And so their marriage—later undergirded by the birth of two sons—continued to limp along.

Then, in January 2005, friends told Plump that Bill not only had a mistress living nearby in the same town, but that the two of them also had an 8-month-old child. (All these distressing details are revealed in the first chapter.) Plump was aware that Bill had strayed before, just as she had, but this news was devastating. Despite its glaring imperfections, she wanted her marriage to last. By the end of that year, however, Bill had moved out for good.

Plump and her husband had met in college and dated for eight years before they married. After college, she became a newspaper reporter, while he went to work as a financial advisor, a job that involved a lot of travel and which gave them both ample opportunities to find other sexual partners.

Having drawn the general outlines of their infidelities, Plump spends the remainder of her book examining where and how things went wrong. Even so, she doesn’t engage in a lot of blaming or self-excoriation. She still remembers her affairs as glorious interludes, and she understands that her husband’s temptations must have been much the same as her own. She does blame him, though, for steadfastly refusing to discuss his feelings for her or for the other women.

In 2008, Bill lost his job, the upshot of which was that Plump and her two sons had to move from their large home into a tiny rental property. It’s been mostly a downward spiral of disappointments for her ever since. Still, she finds comfort in recalling the vividness of her affairs. “When I am eighty years old,” she muses, “I will sit on my front porch, wherever that may be, and I will have sumptuous memories of these men. I will have to see if that is enough compared with the loss that infidelity has wreaked.”

Barely a year after her marriage in 1987, Wendy Plump embarked on the first of three volcanically passionate affairs she would immerse herself in before she and her husband, Bill, began having children. She did so, she freely admits, simply because she wanted to, because…

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Fresh Off the Boat, the new memoir by rising culinary star Eddie Huang, is one roller coaster of a ride. Written with headlong ferocity, the book takes us from Huang’s early Taiwanese taste bud revelations (“Soup dumplings, sitcoms, one-night stands—good ones leave you wanting more”) to the establishment of his restaurant Baohaus, a realization of his vision for a youth-culture-oriented hot spot in the East Village where no one would “kick you out, call the cops, or serve you shitty 7-Eleven pressed Cubans.”

But it isn’t a swift or easy ride; like many bright, talented, angry and angst-filled young people, Huang struggles to discover and embody his authentic self—a struggle compounded by his Asian upbringing in American culture. He vows to “detox” his identity and cleanse it of everything he doesn’t consciously want or choose. But the fight isn’t only internal; he takes it to the streets, is constantly in trouble and hopscotches through five schools in seven years. At 13 he was already hustling, “running NCAA pools, taking bets on NFL games and selling porno,” and by the time he’s in college it’s skirmishes with the law. One night, the situation gets out of hand and there’s a trip to Orlando’s 33rd Street Jail, and a conviction. Rather than “sit at home on felony parole,” Huang takes a hiatus to Taiwan for a while, where he is relatively free and able to contemplate his future.

By the time he returns, he’s on a mission: finding a place for himself in the world, “or making one.” Food is a lifelong interest, but before Baohaus materializes, Huang “samples” many other venues: hip hop, law school and stand-up comedy among them. But “the sky broke and everything was clear” once he knew he was going to open a restaurant—one that specialized in Taiwanese gua bao and, even more importantly, one that would be the manifestation of his “friends, family, and memories.”

Though much of Huang’s writing is raw and intense, there are dollops of tenderness and zen-like wisdom when he writes about someone or something he loves, such as his mother, his grandmother or well-prepared food: “The best dishes have depth without doing too much. It’s not about rounding up all the seasonal ingredients you can find, it’s about paying close attention to the ones you already have.”

Like the dishes he describes as “jumping off the plate,” Huang’s memoir jumps off the page. Its flavors are “big, deep, kid-dynamite-Mike-Tyson-knock-you-out-of-the-box” intense and will leave you wanting more!

Fresh Off the Boat, the new memoir by rising culinary star Eddie Huang, is one roller coaster of a ride. Written with headlong ferocity, the book takes us from Huang’s early Taiwanese taste bud revelations (“Soup dumplings, sitcoms, one-night stands—good ones leave you wanting more”)…

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Those who have found solace in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story or Sally Ryder Brady’s A Box of Darkness should take note of a new arrival on the shelf: Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman. While more traditional widow memoirs spend pages reflecting on the marriage, remembering the spouse and contemplating the future, Aikman and her gang of midlife widows are most concerned with the final part of the equation. How can one transcend what Aikman calls “the worst thing that could possibly happen”? Not by following the “normal” script for grieving, she soon determines.

When her beloved husband dies, Aikman is totally lost. She skims over the worst of the grief—waking up sobbing at 5 a.m., obsessively remembering the final days of her husband’s life—and cuts instead to a scene of a widow’s support group. She’s there, a year and a half after the death of her husband, looking for camaraderie on the road to healing. Instead, she simply doesn’t fit in (and actually gets kicked out). These widows are lonely and see no alternatives in the future. Aikman, on the other hand, intends to be joyful again.

This attitude informs Aikman’s personal story and the group of widows she eventually brings together. The Saturday night widows, who refer to themselves as the Blossoms, are younger, more interested in sex and romance, and more determinedly forward-moving than your stereotypical widow. They meet every month for a year—at art museums, cooking classes or the spa—and culminate their experience with an international trip. The vibe may be more Eat, Pray, Love than The Year of Magical Thinking, but it is compelling stuff.

Along with the stories of six remarkably resilient and admirable women (ranging from an entrepreneur to a housewife), the book offers an arresting analysis of the literature of grief. Aikman, working with researchers at Columbia University, dismisses typically endorsed platitudes about how grief works (think Kübler-Ross’ five stages) and shares the latest studies, which are far more in tune with the Blossoms’ approach to healing than the depressed widow group from chapter one.

A compassionate, inspirational and deeply personal read, Saturday Night Widows is relevant for a wider audience than the grieving. This book is for anyone who has faced adversity but refuses to let it define them.

Those who have found solace in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story or Sally Ryder Brady’s A Box of Darkness should take note of a new arrival on the shelf: Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman.…

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For fans of searingly honest memoirs, the publication of Susanna Sonnenberg’s She Matters is a cause for celebration. Sonnenberg’s previous book, Her Last Death, explored her tumultuous relationship with her provocative and ultimately destructive mother. This book turns to more nurturing, though occasionally heartbreaking, women in Sonnenberg’s life: her friends.

Comprised of 20 short essays, Sonnenberg’s book discusses all kinds of friendships—those that ended well, ended badly, ended mysteriously or (occasionally) continue today. Her Rolodex of friends includes a writer, a painter, a stay-at-home mom, a rabbi and a massage therapist. I can only imagine what her friends must have thought when they found themselves drawn by her pen; but for readers, the rewards are rich. The book’s honesty, eloquence, laugh-out-loud humor, finely wrought prose and magnificent scope will keep readers eagerly turning the pages.

The Sonnenberg who closes the book is not the same woman we meet on page one. Because the essays are arranged chronologically, readers learn how major life decisions—from embracing motherhood to moving to Montana, from becoming a writer to working in an abortion clinic—have shaped the way she chooses and fosters her friendships. We see how time and change impacted some of her oldest relationships. Given this benefit of space and reflection, Sonnenberg adds asides that deepen some of the early stories. “Had I paid attention,” she says of one friend, “she would have shown me a first real lesson in grief, its disorganizing confusions, its inescapable solitude.”

One of the many things to appreciate about this book is its refusal to bundle each friendship into a neat bow. Instead, these memorable and lovely essays gesture to the real-life intricacies of relationships. They celebrate the many pleasures of knowing and being known. For readers who welcome a complex perspective beautifully rendered in writing, this book is not to be missed.

For fans of searingly honest memoirs, the publication of Susanna Sonnenberg’s She Matters is a cause for celebration. Sonnenberg’s previous book, Her Last Death, explored her tumultuous relationship with her provocative and ultimately destructive mother. This book turns to more nurturing, though occasionally heartbreaking, women…

There are bad mothers and there are alcoholic mothers, and then there are bad, alcoholic, psychotic mothers like Georgann Rea. Add glamour, beauty and a rapidly dwindling divorce settlement, and you’ve got Chanel Bonfire.

A small-town blonde from Kansas City, Georgann married up and out, catapulting herself and her two small daughters from a Midwestern first marriage to the luxuries of life in New York and London. In doing so, she effectively kidnapped the girls, blocking them from any contact with their father and holding them hostage to her volatile moods, her drinking, her florid romantic conquests and her suicide attempts.

Older daughter Wendy tries to protect her little sister Robbie from the worst of it, but she can’t stop the destructive spiral of her mother’s rage: how she breaks their toys, locks them in a closet, flirts with their boyfriends and tells them they’ve ruined her life. A fortuitous connection with a therapist helps Wendy, even as the violence between Robbie and their mother escalates. Little by little, the girls raggedly break away from their mother, although physical separation is easier than mental detachment.

This miracle of a memoir is completely free from self-pity, and it’s surprisingly suspenseful. Written from the point of view of Wendy’s younger self, it unfolds for the reader as it unfolds for the daughters: with no clear resolution in sight. And yet it is clearly the product of a healthy retrospection, driven by a cinematic attention to detail, dialogue and scene. In writing Chanel Bonfire, Wendy Lawless has given up disguising her mother’s craziness in favor of telling the truth as clearly and objectively as is possible to do.

There are bad mothers and there are alcoholic mothers, and then there are bad, alcoholic, psychotic mothers like Georgann Rea. Add glamour, beauty and a rapidly dwindling divorce settlement, and you’ve got Chanel Bonfire.

A small-town blonde from Kansas City, Georgann married up and out, catapulting…

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Now available in paperback, The Pythons: Autobiography by the Pythons is actually a fairly serious look at Britain’s subversive loonies, Monty Python. Members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam (the group’s only American), Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin are Oxbridge-educated, and far more erudite than one would expect considering their penchant for gags involving dead parrots, killer sheep and cross-dressing barristers. Based on diaries and interviews, this illustrated autobiography, written by the BBC’s Bob McCabe, underscores the diligence and creative chemistry behind the lunacy. Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of Howard Hughes: The Untold Story, which would also make a terrific holiday gift.

Now available in paperback, The Pythons: Autobiography by the Pythons is actually a fairly serious look at Britain's subversive loonies, Monty Python. Members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam (the group's only American), Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin are Oxbridge-educated, and far more…

My, my, hey, hey, Neil Young is here to stay in this rambunctious, affectionate, humorous and celebratory memoir of his wild ride through life from the windswept prairies of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in “Mortimer Hearseburg,” his 1948 Buick hearse, to the windblown walls of Topanga Canyon.

With characteristic grace, he invites us to sit in the passenger seat as he drives down the many roads he's veered onto during his remarkable career, stopping along the way to introduce us to his beloved family, the musicians and friends with whom he has created memorable songs for generations, as well as his cars, guitars and ingenious inventions. One is the PureTone player that allows listeners to hear music the way musicians hear it when they're recording; another is the Lincvolt, a repowered 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible that runs on alternative energy sources.

From his first band in Canada, The Squires, to his days with country-rock pioneers Buffalo Springfield, and his short-lived and sometimes contentious association with super group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, to his solo career and ongoing involvement with Crazy Horse, Young has blown through the musical landscape like a hurricane with the force of his creative genius and innovative spirit. Throughout his career, he has embraced various musical styles, tinkering with new sounds and creating enduring songs such as "Cinnamon Girl," "Down by the River," "Helpless," "Heart of Gold," "The Needle and the Damage Done," and "Harvest Moon," among many, many others. Reflecting on the death of his dear friend Ben Keith, the pedal steel guitar player who played with Young from his album Harvest (1972) to late 2009, Young offers his thoughts on the central role of music in his life: "When music is your life, there is a key that gets you to the core. . . . Crazy Horse is my way of getting there. That is the place where music lives in my soul."

Young's life has not always been easy. He recovered after painful treatments from a childhood bout with polio, weathered major epileptic seizures and learned to live with his condition, and raised two sons, Zeke and Ben, with severe physical impairments. Out of this experience with his sons, he and his wife Pegi built The Bridge School that assists children with severe physical conditions and complex communication needs. In the face of such challenges, Young shares his deep gratitude for life: "I accept the extreme nature of my blessings and burdens, my gifts and messages, my children with their uniqueness, my wife with her endless beauty and renewal."

Along this journey, Young offers insights about former band mates, like David Crosby, Graham Nash, Richie Furay and close friend Stephen Stills. "Stephen and I have this great honesty about our relationship and get joy from telling each other observations from our past," he writes.

Young feels like he's massaging his soul when he makes music, and he makes some of his finest music in this lyrical memoir, massaging our souls by hitting just the right chords with his words.

My, my, hey, hey, Neil Young is here to stay in this rambunctious, affectionate, humorous and celebratory memoir of his wild ride through life from the windswept prairies of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in “Mortimer Hearseburg,” his 1948 Buick hearse, to the windblown walls of Topanga Canyon.

With…

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She was a child of divorce at a time when broken families were considered a social stigma. But Nora Johnson was also a child of privilege. Thus, her memoir is set to the clickety-clack soundtrack of the streamliners, specifically the Twentieth-Century and the Chief, passenger trains that took her back and forth between her parents’ disparate homes and lives. "Ma" had a Manhattan apartment. Her father, the esteemed writer-producer Nunnally Johnson, lived in a Beverly Hills mansion. For Johnson, both locales brought bouts of loneliness and uncertainty, and the nagging fear that she didn’t belong at either. Coast to Coast: A Family Romance details her schizophrenic coming of age, while taking the reader on a deft, beautifully written tour of the 1940s and 1950s, as lived by the poor little rich girl.

Born during the Great Depression, Johnson vividly recalls family life during wartime and post-war recovery, the Commie witch hunts that haunted Hollywood, and the "I Like Ike" fervor of the new generation. She describes conversations, decor and fashions, as well as sounds, aromas and even tastes. At the home her father shared with his much younger wife and their children (of whom Johnson was jealous), Tyrone Power showed up to play croquet (first, he stripped off his shirt), and a party guest list included Bogart and Bacall. Anthony Perkins was a childhood friend; Sylvia Plath was a classmate at Smith. And during a shipboard journey, Johnson met the honeymooners Liz Taylor and Nicky Hilton. (While her new hubby played poker, Liz expounded on her love of baby animals and did an imitation of a chipmunk.) But the figure that looms largest in this volume, and Johnson’s life, is her complicated and gifted father, Nunnally. Johnson would go on to achieve success as a novelist and essayist, but she would never escape her father’s omnipresent shadow. Pat H. Broeske is co-author of the best-selling Howard Hughes: The Untold Story.

 

She was a child of divorce at a time when broken families were considered a social stigma. But Nora Johnson was also a child of privilege. Thus, her memoir is set to the clickety-clack soundtrack of the streamliners, specifically the Twentieth-Century and the Chief,…

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After 40 years of marriage, writer Joan Didion did not have a single letter from her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. This was because, with rare exceptions, the pair was together 24 hours a day. They worked together in California hotel rooms on movie scripts or down the hall from one another in their New York apartment on their respective essays and novels. "I could not count the times during an average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him," Didion writes. Returning home alone from the hospital where she has learned Dunne is dead – he collapsed and died as the couple was sitting down to dinner on December 30, 2003 – Didion remembers "thinking that I needed to discuss this with John."

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's slender, intensely personal, deeply moving and stylistically beautiful account of the year following her husband's death. It was a year in which Didion struggled with the belief that she could have and should have done something to prevent her husband's death ("I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."). It was a year in which she was constantly swept into a vortex of memories of the couple's former life. It was a year in which grief came in recursive, paralyzing waves. It was also a year in which the couple's only child, daughter Quintana Roo, was twice in a coma and not expected to live. [Tragically, Quintana died in late August, just weeks before Didion's book was published.]

At the hospital on the night Dunne died, the social worker sent to be with Didion refers to her as "a pretty cool customer." Didion is surely one of the best prose stylists writing today, and her account is almost clinically precise. She is unsparing in her examination of the "derangement" she experienced after her husband's death and during her daughter's illness ("So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries."). But The Year of Magical Thinking is anything but "cool." Instead, the book reverberates with passion and even, occasionally, ironic humor.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," Didion writes. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she offers a powerful, personally revealing description of that place.

After 40 years of marriage, writer Joan Didion did not have a single letter from her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. This was because, with rare exceptions, the pair was together 24 hours a day. They worked together in California hotel rooms on movie scripts…

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In January 2011, a month before he turned 64, Paul Auster began working on Winter Journal, his remarkable meditation on “what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one.” Notice his use of the second person? One of the first pleasures of Winter Journal is its feeling of immediacy, as if we are inside Auster’s head staring with him into memory’s mirror, listening to him talk to himself.

Another great pleasure of the book is the modulated bravado with which he deploys and enlivens age-old literary techniques. In this unconventional memoir, for example, Auster catalogs his memories with all the entertaining artistry of the best medieval poets. He takes an inventory of all the scars on his face and their origins (many having to do with an all-American boyhood on the baseball field). Looking at his right hand and thinking of Keats, he lists all the activities of that hand, from zipping up his pants to wheeling suitcases through airports. He catalogues his travels in the world—and, later, in New York City. He remembers and describes the events and feelings he experienced in the 21 permanent addresses where he has lived from birth to the present.

In less able hands, this could feel like gimmickry. But Auster, author of highly regarded novels such as Sunset Park and The Brooklyn Follies, somehow uses this literary prestidigitation to take a reader very deep into the heart of the matter. He writes movingly about his emotionally complicated mother. His love for his second wife and the central importance of their 30-year marriage glows on almost every page. He uses a brilliant exposition of the 1950 movie D.O.A. to explain how he physically experiences his panic attacks. And near the end of Winter Journal, he describes “the scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed you through the crack in the universe that allowed you to begin again.”

In the end, Auster says to himself: “You have entered the winter of your life.” But this is less elegiac than it sounds. Auster, like all of us, has been scarred by life. But growing old also means that he has accumulated experiences and memories. And memory, experience and love trump scars, pain and disappointment in Winter Journal.

In January 2011, a month before he turned 64, Paul Auster began working on Winter Journal, his remarkable meditation on “what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one.” Notice his use…

In his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens wrote of wanting “to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive”: to confront mortality with the same gimlet-eyed vision he’d brought to his musings on culture, politics and religion. A diagnosis of esophageal cancer while on a book tour for the memoir forced his hand, and in a series of essays for his longtime journalistic home at Vanity Fair, he documented his crossing into the “new land” of the unwell, now assembled into his final essay collection Mortality.

With characteristic brio, intelligence and dry wit, Hitchens engages with his illness and its inevitable outcome head-on, without the consolations of religion or a belief in an afterlife. Given his reputation as an outspoken atheist, Hitchens finds himself the focus of a national prayer campaign: “what if I pulled through, and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.” This tone of comic paradox, quintessentially Hitchens, becomes starkly brave in this context.

These essays explore the lessons and fears of mortal illness, and how this experience radically shifts a person’s identity: “I don’t have a body, I am a body.” Ultimately, the cancer begins to deprive Hitchens of his ability to speak, prompting some of the book’s most moving passages. “To a great degree, in public and private, I ‘was’ my voice,” he acknowledges, and when he thinks of what he wants most to wrest from the hands of death, it is his voice—“the freedom of speech”—that he longs to hold on to.

The literature of illness is marked by the struggle to translate pain into language; in Virginia Woolf’s words, the ill writer must take “his pain in one hand” and a “lump of pure sound in the other” and “crush” them together to create the new idiom of his or her experience. In Mortality, Hitchens has achieved just that, applying all his life’s talents to the challenge of giving voice to the approach of death. These essays are brave and fitting final words from a writer at the end of his journey.

In his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens wrote of wanting “to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive”: to confront mortality with the same gimlet-eyed vision he’d brought to his musings on culture, politics and religion. A diagnosis of esophageal cancer while on…

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The Pew Hispanic Center recently reported that “the U.S. today has more immigrants from Mexico alone—12 million—than any other country in the world has from all the countries in the world.” 

In the last 40 years, these Mexican immigrants, desperate to escape a harsh landscape of grinding poverty, left their homes and families to come to el otro lado, or the “other side,” the name writer Reyna Grande says her people use to refer to the United States.

Grande, an award-winning novelist, has written a courageous memoir, The Distance Between Us, that chronicles her “before and after” existence: her life in Mexico without her parents, and her life in the States as an undocumented immigrant with her alcoholic father and indifferent stepmother.

Grande tells the heart-rending story of how first her father, then her mother, left her and her two siblings to find work and better wages in the U.S. After enduring repeated parental abandonment, fear and physical and emotional deprivation, Grande finally escapes over the border into California with her father and siblings. In Los Angeles, she soon finds a new set of challenges—from the secrecy she must maintain as an illegal immigrant to navigating public school and trying to find love and security in a chaotic home life. She longs for a soul connection to her birthplace—a shack with a dirt floor—under which was buried the umbilical cord of her birth, a “ribbon” that her sister said lessened “the distance between us,” the void of their mother’s continued absence.

Grande’s salvation, however, would come through her discovery of books and writing, and in the friendship of a teacher who gave her a home and mentored her. Unlike her siblings, Grande completed her education and was the first in her family to graduate from college. Her compelling story, told in unvarnished, resonant prose, is an important piece of America’s immigrant history.

The Pew Hispanic Center recently reported that “the U.S. today has more immigrants from Mexico alone—12 million—than any other country in the world has from all the countries in the world.” 

In the last 40 years, these Mexican immigrants, desperate to escape a harsh landscape of…

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