In a literary marketplace flooded with memoirs, I approached the reading of The Memory Palace with apprehension. The title sounds awfully familiar, and the publisher’s press release makes no apologies, announcing that the book follows “in the footsteps of The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club.” I took a deep breath and prepared for another harrowing tale of how a mother ruined a daughter’s life.

But I set my skepticism aside after reading the first chapter of The Memory Palace, when I discovered that Mira Bartók’s account of her tortured upbringing by a schizophrenic mother is as compelling as the two best-selling memoirs to which it is compared. The book also boasts a strong storyline and eloquent writing. Bartók hooked me with this early passage: “We children of schizophrenics are the great secret-keepers, the ones who don’t want you to think that anything is wrong.”

Norma Herr is a musical prodigy whose schizophrenia slowly takes control of her life. After she gives birth to two daughters, Mira and Rachel, her husband leaves her. As her illness worsens, Norma struggles to raise her children, and fails. Her head is filled with voices, images of dangerous animals and of alien abductors. She threatens to kill herself, and threatens her daughters, too, should they reveal her terrible secret. She keeps detailed diaries and hoards small knickknacks and mementos.

As she reaches adulthood, Mira Herr is able to escape her mother by moving to another town and becoming Mira Bartók, an accomplished artist and children’s book author. (She makes the painful decision to change her name, taking the last name of Hungarian composer Bela Bartók, in order to avoid poison-pen letters, midnight phone calls and unannounced visits from her deranged mother.) But Bartók’s life takes an ironic twist when, at age 40, she is involved in a car accident that affects her memory. Suddenly, she is fighting to retrieve her memories; like her mother, she is engaged in a battle with her brain. When she later discovers her mother is dying of cancer, Bartók ends her estrangement. Finding her mother’s trove of diaries, letters and the arcane items she had collected, Bartók uses them to construct a “memory palace,” and is able to reconstruct portions of her childhood.

Bartók’s story overcame my memoir phobia with a page-turning plot, sophisticated writing and, as a bonus, vivid illustrations from the author. It does indeed deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club, and readers of those memoirs will find The Memory Palace richly rewarding.

By the early 1970s, the comforting idealism of the ’60s was already morphing into terrifying reality, bombarding a generation of young people with visually convincing scenarios of catastrophe and mayhem. “On every movie screen,” Heather Havrilesky wryly bemoans in the introduction to Disaster Preparedness, “airplanes plummeted to the ground, earthquakes toppled huge cities, and monster sharks ripped teenagers to bloody bits.” The world was obviously a precarious place and conventional methods of self-preservation offered no succor. People who “exited calmly with the crowd . . . were always the ones to perish first. Only a small band of survivors willing to plot out their own escape route and battle their way through untold mishaps had any hope of making it out alive.”

So plot she did. Armed with a dark sense of humor, a toughness nurtured by parents unwilling to feed her fairy tales or “comforting myths” and a stoicism stemming from the seeming indifference of a God disinclined to provide the simplest sign of celestial reassurance, Havrilesky formulated her own plans for any emergency, from nuclear war to the taunting of her preteen peers. Droll, insightful and tenaciously honest, Disaster Preparedness chronicles her roller-coaster journey through the confusion of childhood, the devastation of her parents’ divorce and the angst of a teenager coming of age in the ’80s. “In 1986,” she vividly recalls, “heartbreak drove a canary yellow ’78 Pinto with The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ playing in the tape deck. Heartbreak looked just like Damone from Fast Times at Ridgemont High . . . and quoted Pee Wee Herman liberally, even when he was breaking up with me.”

At times hilarious, at times achingly sincere, Disaster Preparedness delivers a fun-to-read memoir laced with frank self-reflection as our heroine marches toward adulthood, doggedly traversing life’s mountains—loss, shame, regret—and begins the thorny search for love. Fans familiar with Havrilesky’s pointed humor from her work as a staff writer at Salon.com and as a commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered” will recognize her candid voice and sharp wit, but will also find complexity, depth and tenderness here as she ultimately renders compassionate, loving portraits of her parents, shares her darkest secrets with best-friend intimacy and wrestles gritty optimism from an uncertain world.

There just might be a God after all, because without divine intervention Keith Richards would not still be alive to have written his autobiography.

Now 67, residing peaceably as a country gentleman in Connecticut after nearly half a century swirling in the gale force winds of a truly international drugs-sex-and-rock-‘n’-roll music career, Richards turns out to be a vastly entertaining chronicler of his own life and legacy, helped along masterfully by “as told to” coauthor James Fox, who deftly captures the gravelly Richards voice, honest as the day is long and laced with authentic Britishisms that help to colorize a surprisingly tight and crisp narrative. Entitled Life, the Richards opus is essentially plotted out chronologically, which should work just fine for those many music fans who may have paid more attention to Richards’ contemporaries—Lennon, McCartney, Jagger—and probably overlooked the particulars of the Rolling Stones’ musical mastermind’s beginnings.

Growing up in suburban London as the only child of working-class parents, young Keith wasn’t apparently much good academically, but he ended up—lucky for him—in art school, that refuge for English schoolboys with vaguely creative leanings that might ultimately rescue them from a life in the trades or, worse, the military. If music ever saved an immortal soul, it was Richards’. He was good at drawing, apparently, but a career in commercial art would be rejected so long as Keith kept improving on the guitar, which he definitely did.

He knew Mick Jagger when both were but boys, then they later hooked up again hardly out of their teens on the local music scene. Unlike the Beatles, who spent some very scruffy years learning their craft in lowdown Hamburg nightclubs, the early Stones, while definitely scrambling for gigs and attention, were already at the center of things in London. The band’s cultish immersion in American black R&B artistry eventually yielded for them a dedicated big-city following, while manager Andrew Loog Oldham became their version of Brian Epstein, finally embracing their bad-boy looks and demeanor and marketing them effectively as a kind of anti-Fab Four. Worldwide stardom and acclaim were theirs, and the band in various forms has lasted, remarkably, up to the present day.

Even in nearly 600 pages—and sometimes drawing on rare letters and diary entries—Richards can’t cover all the details, but he’s quite good with the essence. To wit: Endless and raucous touring, peripatetic recording dates, drug-taking and related arrests, a longtime relationship with the charismatic wastrel Anita Pallenberg, fatherhood (five kids, one a victim of crib death), the premature passing of fellow artists and friends such as Brian Jones and Gram Parsons, an overview on the band’s financial workings under the exploitative guidance of the sharkish Allen Klein, plus once-over-lightly cameos of the many musicians, roadies, engineers, producers, journalists, photographers, hangers-ons, and celebrity types who helped comprise The World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band’s entourage through the decades.

The warmest words are reserved for an elite few, among them, the late Ian Stewart, a fabulous R&B pianist and thoughtful musician who helped the band cut its early records and stayed a staunch friend and musical supporter until his untimely death from a heart attack in 1985. Also assessed cogently are the many sides of Jagger, the author mincing no words about the famous frontman’s uncanny talents as a lyricist, his ego, his occasionally abrasive ways and his rather possessive tendencies toward his writing partner.

On the purely musical side, Richards offers fascinating tidbits on his playing style, developed initially via his studious copping of licks from Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed records and later enhanced by his exploration of  various open tunings, which brought his expression and writing to surprising new levels.

Intentionally or no, Richards finds humor in his raw material. On Jagger’s solo album She’s the Boss: “It’s like Mein Kampf. Everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it.” On heroin: “Junk really is a great leveler in many ways.” On groupies: “You could look upon them more like the Red Cross.”

The real miracle of  Richards is his survival through serious encounters with hard drugs, especially as he watched many friends and colleagues succumb to their ravages. His reflections on substance abuse seem serious-minded as far as it goes, but the fact is that he partied like a monster and simply happened to be one of the lucky ones.

Later chapters find Richards rather tempered by concerns such as recipes for a favorite dish or two, family pets, a daughter’s wedding and other items on the domestic agenda. That situation guarantees a certain amount of laconic audience interest as the book winds down, but until then,Life is probably one of the best pop music books ever assembled. It’s informative, entertaining, crafted with style—and there’s something reassuring about knowing that its likable author has lived to tell the tale.

Prosopagnosia (“face blindness”) is a rare neurological disorder that inhibits a person’s ability to recognize a face: When Heather Sellers brings her new husband and two stepchildren home to Florida to meet her parents, she notices the “tiny elderly woman” staring at her angrily in the gas station, but literally doesn’t know her own mother. A lifetime of social anxiety and misunderstandings (hugging the wrong man, offending her best friend by walking right past her) isn’t, however, the only perceptual challenge Sellers documents in her stunning memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.

Growing up with a mother who nailed windows shut, who followed suspicious vehicles on the highway and insisted that her daughter walk on her knees to save the carpet, also gave Sellers a thoroughly distorted lens through which to view the world. Amazingly, Sellers was in her late 30s before she developed any sense that her mother was mentally ill; she couldn’t recognize that the disorder and dysfunction in her own childhood was the result of her mother’s paranoid schizophrenic delusions (not to mention her father’s alcoholism and cross-dressing). This sets up a neat parallel between the twin detective stories Sellers narrates: the uncovering of her mother’s illness and the discovery of her own prosopagnosia, both of which create a skewed sense of reality.

Composing a memoir is like composing a life; for Sellers, the process of writing itself helps to correct the distorting mirrors of childhood. As a writer (if not in her messy life), Sellers is confident, a master of her craft. Her memoir is paced like a work of suspenseful fiction, moving back and forth between her childhood and her present-day quest to uncover the truth about herself and her family. A third narrative strand—about the breakdown of her marriage to libertarian Dave, who first helps her to recognize her own perceptual distortions—is equally compelling. Sellers’ balanced approach to these difficult but loving relationships is hard-won and appealing.