What did you have for breakfast this morning? How about on June 11, 1997? You probably can't answer that one. But Jill Price can. If you give her any date from 1980 on, she can tell you not only what she had for breakfast, but every detail of the day—even the day of the week.

The Woman Who Can't Forget tells the story of a most remarkable memory—a memory so complete scientists have never recorded one like it. Price's recall extends back as far as 1974 with amazing clarity. She can even remember events from her 18th month in vivid detail. But if that kind of memory is a blessing, The Woman Who Can't Forget reveals that the blessing is decidedly mixed. Price's memory is perfect at recalling the emotions of her life as well as the facts. Even as she remembers pleasant experiences of love and happiness, she also cannot forget the most minor mistakes, or moments of loss, embarrassment, sorrow or shame. Her struggle to forget led Price to Dr. James McGaugh, a scientist in the field of memory research. Intrigued, Dr. McGaugh and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, studied Price's abilities, confirming the astounding accuracy of her memory and discovering new insights into just how human memory works. Price and Bart Davis have skillfully placed Price's life experiences within the context of that science. Through Price's story, the book becomes a window into the inner workings of the mind, posing intriguing questions and answering others. Why do we remember? Why do we forget? How much do our memories alter over time? Do our minds truly retain the full scope of an experience, or do we reconstruct it every time we "remember"?

The Woman Who Can't Forget is fascinating, whether dealing with the details of Price's life or with the science of the brain, offering glimpses not only into the mysteries of memory but into emotional struggles like depression, anger, forgiveness and even growing up. At times astonishing, at times moving, Price's story is one you won't soon forget. 

Howard Shirley is a writer based in Franklin, Tennessee.

In her latest book, Ann Hood, author of last year's semi-autobiographical novel The Knitting Circle, puts the reader on the harrowing frontlines of every parent's worst nightmare: a crisis involving a child. Comfort: A Journey Through Grief is Hood's account of the death of her daughter, Grace, and the aftermath of her loss. This is an intensely personal, painfully moving collection of essays that take readers to a place no one wants to visit.

Grace was a healthy, vibrant five-year-old when she contracted an especially virulent form of strep that ravaged her internal organs and, in less than 48 hours, took her life. Suddenly Grace was gone, leaving a heartbroken mother, father and eight-year-old brother, Sam. Hood could find no solace. The platitudes issued by well-meaning friends and relatives (recounted in the book's searing first chapter) only made things worse. It was when she learned to knit and joined a knitting group at a local yarn store that she was able to move toward some sort of healing. And, when Hood and her family adopt a new baby, joy finally returns to her life.

Hood's honest recounting of the terrible day and all the terrible days that followed does not spare the reader, instead giving an idea of just what havoc the death of a child causes. Reading what helped her (the dinners, the cards, the listeners, the knitting) might help the rest of us who wonder what to do and what to say when our friends and relatives face loss. Reading Comfort is a wrenching experience, but, when I shared this book with a dear friend who had lost a child, he agreed that Hood talks about loss in the most honest, useful way he has ever read. He was comforted by her words, even as they brought him back to the day when his own daughter died.

There are so many empty phrases that people say to those who have suffered loss, but the real truth is clear to Hood: "Time does not heal. It just passes."

Robin Smith reads, teaches and knits in Nashville.

Novelist Pat Conroy once observed, “A bad childhood is a constantly renewable resource.” No one knows the truth of that better than Augusten Burroughs. Since the 2002 release of his best-selling memoir, Running with Scissors, America’s favorite boy-raised-by-wolves has been mining his chaotic past with equal parts horror and humor. To recap: At 12, Burroughs fled the emotional hell of a cold and cruel father and caring but ditzy mother for the “safety” of his mother’s lunatic shrink, his Valium-gobbling patients and the pedophile next door. A fourth-grade dropout, Burroughs overcame childhood sexual abuse, earned his GED, and at 19 became a New York advertising wunderkind.

In Dry, his subsequent memoir about his advertising years, and the autobiographical collections Magical Thinking and Possible Side Effects, Burroughs continued his reconnaissance into the no man’s land of his past.

Through this brutal guerrilla war of self-reclamation, Burroughs has long circled but never actually captured his chief adversary. He rectifies the oversight in A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father. Despite its humorous, self-effacing marketing tag (“His first memoir in five years”), this may be Burroughs’ darkest journey yet.

Much of his new memoir takes place before the Running with Scissors days when young Augusten and his poet mother coexisted with his volatile father John Robison, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Burroughs was deeply in need of his father’s affection, yet at every turn he was harshly rebuffed. Deprived even of touch (what Burroughs calls “the Arms”) from his distant dad, he fashioned a scarecrow-like father surrogate to sleep beside. The craziness culminates when his father calls and threatens to kill his son.

What little peace Burroughs ultimately achieves at his father’s bedside comes more as a unilateral cease-fire. Perhaps the best closure he could expect is the realization that this bright apple has in fact fallen far from the tree.

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin.

English journalist Sarfraz Manzoor peeks behind the curry curtain in modern U.K. Pakistani culture in his memoir, Greetings from Bury Park. As the rope in a tug-of-war between two cultures pulling in strikingly contradictory directions, he finds himself in a situation similar to that of Jesminder Bhamra, the young Brit of Sikh descent at the center of Gurinder Chadha's film Bend It Like Beckham. Instead of being infatuated with a now-aging footballer, though, he's infatuated with a now-aging rock icon.

Even for those of us rock fans no farther than a bus ride from the Jersey shore where he ascended to Bosshood three decades ago, Bruce Springsteen has come to represent all things American: hard work, hard play, hard rock. Oh, and one more item, even more precious to a young misfit whose hard-toiling immigrant dad regarded his passion as frivolity at best and wastefulness at worst – freedom. While Manzoor may have taken his obsession with Springsteen's lyrics and lifestyle several leagues beyond simple fandom, he does uncover a simple truth: No engine has sufficient horsepower to permit us to slip the surly bonds of our upbringing.

In some ways, Sarfraz's journey mirrors Springsteen's own: first rebellious, then reflective, finally reconciled. InManzoor's case, the last came a bit too late, as his father passed away the very same day Sarfraz's first byline graced the pages of the Manchester Evening News, proof positive that the Vauxhall assembly line – Manzoor senior's path – wasn't the only road to respectability.

When Manzoor visits America, both pre- and post-9/11, he's forced to confront the fact that his Muslim heritage and his British residency have conspired to tangle him in the roots he once longed to sever, and which now seem more comforting than confining. The mature Manzoor is now living out his own Springsteen lyric: "Some folks got fortune, some got eyes of blue / What you got will always see you through / You're a lucky man."

Thane Tierney's musings on The Boss may be found in the "World of Bruce Springsteen" feature on the Apple iTunes website.

While her Jewish "aunts" played mah-jongg in their Queens kitchen, young Martha Frankel preferred the "uncles" poker games in the living room every Friday night. By age 10, she had learned to read the Daily Racing Form and was accompanying her CPA father to the track. This early entree into gambling would come to haunt Frankel much later in life, when her world turned to Hats & Eyeglasses, a poker term for a losing hand and the title of her candid, conversational and even comical new memoir.

When Frankel's father died just before she started high school, she filled the void with alcohol, drugs and men, and smugly prided herself on never becoming hooked, like some of her relatives. As she developed a loving, stable relationship with her artist husband, she began writing articles for Details magazine and enjoyed immediate success, jet-setting around the world to interview celebrities.

Although Frankel hadn't touched a card since her parents' game nights, she returned to poker in her mid-40s to conduct research for a screenplay. For advice, she turned to a former professional player she knew; to her mother, who earned extra money playing during the Depression; and to Michael, a mentor who encouraged her during her first fearful Wednesday night games. Poker was so immediately thrilling that she refused assignments worth thousands of dollars to practice her game all day. When she needed to pay bills, she built her schedule around her Wednesday night games. And when she was good enough – and she was good all right – she scheduled her Hollywood interviews around lunch, so she could reach the casinos by evening and sleep in the morning.

Thinking her life couldn't get any better, Frankel discovered online poker and quickly became addicted. No matter that she was losing more money than she could hope to recover, that she was abandoning her family and friends. As Frankel confronts her shame and family tendencies, her raw yet touching storytelling will inspire gambling addicts, their loved ones and those who simply want to know more about this debilitating compulsion.

Angela Leeper is an educational consultant and writer in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

Coming from anyone other than Julie Andrews, name-dropping would seem like bragging. Instead, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years simply offers the recollections of an extraordinary talent whose encounters with the theater and music glitterati of the 1940s, '50s and '60s shaped the formative years of her career. Andrews' writing is refreshing and authentic in its wide-eyed wonder, bolstered by her diaries and journals. Andrews performed with Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady and Richard Burton in Camelot on Broadway, married (and later divorced) legendary set and costume designer Tony Walton, hobnobbed with Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle, was mentored by the musical team of Lerner and Loewe, and became best friends withcomedian Carol Burnett. Walt Disney himself asked Andrews to be his Mary Poppins in what would turn into her Academy Award-winning debut film performance.

But the polished, refined Englishwoman whose accolades include Emmys, Golden Globes, a Kennedy Center Honor and three Tony Award nominations, started in 1935 as the oldest child of divorced parents, poor and poorly educated. When singing lessons from her stepfather opened a new world, Andrews took her big voice on the vaudeville circuit.

At times embracing her success, and at others overwhelmed by the pressure of providing for her family, Andrews honestly and often humorously recounts the seminal moments of her early career. While still in her teens, she sang for royals, debuted on the London stage and made her way to America's Great White Way. She lived in cold-water flats and luxurious apartments, found an island hideaway and struggled to balance the demands of fame and her own desires for security and home.

Always considered a class act by fellow performers, Andrews demonstrates in her memoir just why she's a grand dame of the entertainment world. She surely knows many dark secrets about countless theater, music and film legends, yet chooses to share only the best sides of them, and herself, in Home. Her generous nature shines through every word.

Mary Poppins is the first movie Kelly Koepke remembers seeing.

Masterful storytellers know to hook their audiences quickly, going right to the heart of things. And so goes novelist Isabel Allende (House of the Spirits) in her new memoir, The Sum of Our Days, whose first sentence roundly states: "There is no lack of drama in my life, I have more than enough three-ring-circus material for writing . . ." No paucity indeed; what ensues is an exuberant, unpredictable, melancholic and loving narrative that spans the 13 years after the death of her daughter, Paula. The book was conceived as an intimate letter to Paula, and is largely drawn from the long daily correspondence with Allende's own mother. "I will begin by telling you what has happened since . . . you left us, and will limit myself to the family, which is what interests you," Allende writes.

This story of family and extended family is certain to interest any reader; who doesn't enjoy a good dish of familial drama? The Sum of Our Days, however, may be especially delectable to writers and fans of Allende's fiction, as Allende generously reveals her creative inner world – the genesis of her many books, her fears and superstitions about writing (she must begin a new book only on January 8 of every new year), and the ways in which a diverse, eccentric pack of family, friends and experiences find their ways into her wondrous tales.

Allende does not hold back in recounting her grief over the loss of a daughter, and The Sum of Our Days is tinged with profound sadness in places. It is also a moving, often humorous, recollection not only of family, but also of essential friends, including exotic, warmhearted Tabra and the wittily wise Sisters of Disorder. Finally, this memoir is a lustrous meditation on placing the complexities of love and relationship, spirituality and suffering into a greater context. As Allende writes, "you have to forget facts and concentrate on the truth. . . . Gently, the waters will settle, the mud will sink to the bottom, and there will be transparency."

Alison Hood writes from Marin County, California.