On its surface, Kristen Iversen’s childhood in suburban Denver was idyllic. She and her three younger siblings had horses to ride, a local lake and a neighborhood filled with kids.

But just under the surface lurked dangers that Iversen doesn’t fully understand until she is much older. Her Scandinavian parents believe in a stiff upper lip. They rarely acknowledge Iversen’s father’s alcoholism, even after he flips the family car on the way to a horse show. Only after years of chronic pain does Iversen discover the incident broke her neck: Her parents never took her to a doctor after the wreck.

Perhaps even more sinister than the Iversen clan’s demons is the threat just upwind from their home: Rocky Flats. Most local families believe Rocky Flats is a factory for household cleaning supplies. The truth is that Rocky Flats is a U.S. Department of Energy facility churning out plutonium “pits” for the thousands of nuclear weapons assembled during the Cold War.

Even a tiny speck of plutonium ingested in a human body can lead to cancer, immune disorders and other long-term health problems. Unbeknownst to those who live downwind from Rocky Flats (and, indeed, to many of the thousands of Rocky Flats employees), the plant is careless in both producing the plutonium pits and handling the resulting radioactive waste. Thousands of leaking barrels of waste seep into the soil and drinking water. Regular fires at the plant—some intentional—release plutonium particles and other toxic material into the air. Yet from the 1950s through the 1970s, public health officials insist Denver and surrounding communities are safe, even as children and adults in Iversen’s neighborhood develop testicular cancer, brain tumors and other health issues.

With meticulous reporting and a clear eye for details, Iversen has crafted a chilling, brilliantly written cautionary tale about the dangers of blind trust. Through interviews, sifting through thousands of records (some remain sealed) and even a stint as a Rocky Flats receptionist, she uncovers decades of governmental deception. Full Body Burden is both an engrossing memoir and a powerful piece of investigative journalism.

While on assignment in China, journalist Amanda Bennett met and fell in love with a complicated man. They married, moved back to the U.S., created a family, and had their reality turned on its ear when her husband, Terence Foley, was diagnosed with kidney cancer. He lived for several years before the cancer metastasized and claimed his life. Throughout his illness, Bennett’s health insurance covered virtually all related expenses. It wasn’t until after his death that she realized the costs came to over half a million dollars, and she began to question where the money went. What exactly is The Cost of Hope?

Bennett’s book is both a memoir of a marriage and a sharp piece of investigative journalism. Physicians disagreed not only about the type of cancer Foley had, but also about his treatment. At one point Bennett asks, “So what’s the box score on the tumor?” and runs down a list including six pathologists, four oncologists and “at least” four hospitals. “The outcome? Nearly four years after his death, I still don’t know what kind of cancer Terence had. Everyone is convinced he is right.”

Bennett finds that different hospitals charge different amounts for the same procedure. She points out that if the cost were spelled out along with the purpose of the procedure, patients might not be so quick to sign off on invasive tests. Bennett doesn’t harbor regrets about trying to prolong her husband’s life; with The Cost of Hope she has not only memorialized him artfully, but turned his experience into a probing look at modern medicine and the choices it forces upon us.

Why do we fall in love with people we barely know?

In her humorous and poignant memoir of a wedding and an earthquake in the Dominican Republic, novelist Julia Alvarez (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents) attempts to answer this question as she tells the tale of a young worker on her coffee plantation, Piti, and his efforts to make a life by traveling from his home in Haiti to work in the neighboring country.

Alvarez’s friendship with Piti begins when, driving past a neighboring farm, she spies him among a group of his friends playing with kites. She snaps a picture of his smiling face and shows him the picture when she returns, and he beams with wonder and gratitude. On subsequent trips from the U.S., Alvarez brings him jeans, a shirt and a bag in which he can carry his belongings as he makes the often dangerous border crossing from Haiti into the Dominican Republic.

Piti soon becomes a worker on the Alvarez coffee farm, and Alvarez grows closer and closer to this young man. One evening after supper and a night of singing with Piti and the other workers at her little house, she makes one of those “big-hearted promises that you never think you’ll be otherwise called on to keep”: She promises that she’ll be there on Piti’s wedding day.

In early August 2009, Alvarez receives a message from Piti informing her that his girlfriend, Eseline, has had a baby and that the two are getting married on August 20. Recalling her promise, Piti eagerly asks if Alvarez and her husband Bill will be attending the wedding. Reluctant at first, for she is scheduled to attend the Intergenerational Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers the week of the wedding, Alvarez realizes that she cannot break her promise, so she and Bill make arrangements to attend Piti’s wedding.

Alvarez’s arduous trip to Eseline’s home reveals the unsettled political and cultural character of Haiti, as various crossings of checkpoints involve bribery and haranguing guards. Once they reach Eseline’s village, the wedding commences and celebrates the new union between the two young people with enchanting singing that the attendees never want to end.

A year later, Alvarez and Bill embark on another, more trying and difficult journey, as they return to Haiti following the disastrous earthquake in search of Piti’s family and friends. Through all the devastation, Alvarez recalls the lesson that her love for Piti and his family have already taught her. Once we have become involved in something, she tenderly and forcefully points out, that relationship transforms us, and we have an obligation to it.

Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her mother is not, immediately, a memoir about her mother. Or at any rate, it’s not only that. Bechdel—whose previous book, 2006’s excellent Fun Home, centered on the volatile presence of her closeted gay father and the funeral home where she grew up—here delves deeply and bravely into her own complicated psyche as well as her mother’s. More than anything, Are You My Mother? is an excavation, digging into Bechdel’s relationship with psycho­analysis and, in particular, with the work of a groundbreaking doctor named Donald Winnicott.

As she struggles to come to terms with her mother, Bechdel writes about the emotional and psychic fallout from her first book, the periods of depression that she and her mother and (she discovers) her grandmother all endured, her difficulties in romantic partnerships with other women and, above all, her yearning for some sign of validation or approval from her mother. In other words—though Bechdel is as scathingly funny as ever—this is not exactly light reading. Even structurally, the book is far from straightforward; it is, as her mother notes in the final chapter, “a meta book.” Each chapter begins with a dream Bechdel recalls, the significance of which becomes clear bit by bit as the story moves along.

Epiphanies in real life don’t necessarily happen in chronological order, and they don’t here, either; often it’s not until she checks a date in one of her old journals that Bechdel realizes how two events fit together, how they inform her view of herself. In flashbacks and “photocopies,” she recreates therapy sessions, diary entries, her father’s letters to her mother, her own conversations and arguments with lovers, memories of plays her mother acted in when Bechdel was a child and relevant writings by Virginia Woolf and the fascinating Winnicott. These form a pastiche, kind of a psychic map, which might have been confusing for the reader except that Bechdel’s narrative control is so strong. And visually, the book is so consistent and the drawings so clean that the pages never look messy or disorganized, despite the level of detail on each.

Though the material she’s working with is incredibly rich and multi­layered, both intellectually and emotionally complex, Bechdel makes it easy to follow her journey inward. You’ll be glad you did.

Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess to her fans) grew up in a small town in rural Texas with a younger sister and many family pets. In college she met the man she would marry. They moved to the suburbs, had a child and eventually bought a house in a town similar to the one she grew up in. Everyone lived happily ever after.

If you squint kind of hard and read between the lines, that’s almost an accurate summary of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. All that’s missing is Lawson’s dad, a taxidermist so enthusiastic about his work he couldn’t be relied on to make sure the animals were dead before tossing them on his children—or wearing them as hand puppets. Then there’s the family’s radon-poisoned well water, which her mother nevertheless bathed the girls in. “My mom was a big proponent of the ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ theory, almost to the point where she seemed to be daring the world to kill us,” Lawson writes.

This is the kind of book where, once you’ve got the lay of the land, a sentence like “[My neighbor] seemed more concerned this time, possibly because I was belting out Bonnie Tyler and crying while swinging a machete over a partially disturbed grave” makes total sense. It might also make you laugh and cry simultaneously, since the grave held Lawson’s beloved pug and she was swinging at vultures who were trying to dig him up. If that doesn’t make you laugh, there’s a story about her multiple miscarriages and the subsequent birth of her daughter that’s an absolute howler. No, seriously. Plus: Chupacabras!

While the subject matter may be in questionable, or unquestionably bad, taste, this book induced convulsive laughter so hard it qualified as a Pilates workout. And the point of the whole enterprise is to not run from but celebrate those things that make each of us want to hide, since we’ve all got them—though maybe not as many or as freaky as Jenny Lawson’s. That’s why she’s The Bloggess and the rest of us just work here. Pretend this never happened? Not possible, and that’s all the more reason to be glad.