Self-expression always happens in a cultural context. For writer and journalist Meredith Talusan, the journey to self-knowledge was long and very culturally influenced. 

Talusan was raised as a boy in an unstable home in the Philippines. As a person with albinism, her pale skin, blond hair and poor eyesight set her apart from her relatives, some of whom spoke Tagalog, some of whom spoke English. As she grew, she gained power through her intellect and self-awareness, earning top marks in school. Eventually she became aware that she harbored deep feelings for boys. Had Talusan stayed in the Philippines, she likely would have embraced the role of “bakla,” a playful, effeminate gay man.

Instead, Talusan’s nuclear family immigrated to California shortly before their home life imploded. In the face of her mother’s addictions and her father’s absence, Talusan buckled down, continued to excel academically and was admitted to Harvard. Here the memoir snaps into a different register, becoming less dreamy and more journalistic as Talusan recalls her intellectual and sexual awakening. Rail-thin and often assumed to be a white boy, Talusan finds a place for herself in Harvard’s gay community by identifying as a twink, a slang term for young gay men who are usually slim and clean-shaven. Talusan cultivates this persona by purchasing trendy outfits and hitting the gym. Eventually she begins dating a man she adores, but she feels incomplete.

Through another friendship with romantic undertones, Talusan realizes what’s missing—she wants the freedom to express her feminine gender identity—and her life changes again. She navigates what gender transition and passing mean for her, ultimately finding yet another cultural identity and means of self-expression.

At each step of her journey, Talusan interrogates the complex intersection of who she feels herself to be and how others perceive her. Through this fearless self-awareness, Talusan demonstrates her intellect, creativity, sexuality and, most of all, a true dedication to expressing her inner self. For anyone who has wondered how their identity is impacted by the ways others see them, Fairest is an extraordinary story of one woman’s self-reckoning.

Each memoirist chooses flashpoints to segment her life: jobs, elections, romantic relationships, rehab stints. In the memoir Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, Jennifer Finney Boylan selects beloved canines as her narrative device and shares the life lessons they imparted in life and death. Yet the heart of the book is about learning self-love and learning to love others well in turn. For someone like Boylan who struggled with her gender identity for most of her life, those victories were hard-won.

Boylan is a contributing New York Times opinion writer, and she has detailed her life’s complex journey in other memoirs. (She is best known for her 2003 bestseller She’s Not There). In Good Boy, she writes about looking to her father for clues on masculinity in a ’70s suburban boyhood. As an adult, she imitated manhood as best she could but wanted desperately to unveil herself and be truly seen. She writes, “When women would say Je t’aime or its equivalent, my first reaction was to think, ‘Yeah, well. That’s only because you don’t know me well enough.’” It was not until her 40s (married to a woman, with two kids) that Boylan came out publicly as trans and learned that she could be loved for exactly who she is. The path was not easy, yet she injects warmth, humor and spirituality into its retelling.

Despite the book’s title, the family’s dogs have not all been “good.” There’s been peeing, jumping, humping and general canine destruction. But people are not “good” all the time either, and Good Boy will be relatable to those who believe dogs can teach us about unconditional love—or at least patient understanding. Though pet stories can veer into the saccharine, rest assured that this memoir does not. Frankly, some dogs don’t seem to have liked Boylan that much (which, as a teen, provided a valuable life lesson about facing unrequited romantic love).

Though it’s a great book for dog lovers, Good Boy isn’t a feel-good story about the unbreakable bond between human and beast. It’s a chronicle about the enduring messiness of humans, and how we’re worthy of love anyway.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jennifer Finney Boylan talks about life, death, self-acceptance and, of course, dogs.

Svenja O’Donnell was never particularly close to her grandmother, Inge, whom she describes as an “aloof, somewhat selfish woman.” Unexpectedly, though, when O’Donnell visited the East Prussian town where her grandmother grew up, Inge suddenly announced during a phone call, “I have so much to tell you.” Thus began what the author calls a “decade of discoveries” into the secrets that lay at her “family’s heart, unspoken, undisturbed, unsuspected for years.” At one point, her normally reticent grandmother even began hearing the voices of her dead friends and family in the form of “waking dreams.” The past had come back to haunt her.

As a seasoned print and television journalist and a former political correspondent, O’Donnell was well-equipped to track down her family’s buried truths. In Inge’s War: A German Woman’s Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler, she lets events unfold chronologically while seamlessly interspersing conversations with her mother and grandmother, both natives of Germany, with her own research and travel to important family landmarks in Europe.

In the midst of World War II, Inge became a young, unmarried mother while her beloved boyfriend was off fighting the war; his father forbade them to marry. Later, as the Russian Army approached, Inge, her toddler (the author’s mother) and her elderly parents escaped just in time to Denmark, where, as Germans, they weren’t well received. The tale of their flight is harrowing, and O’Donnell provides thoughtful commentary every step of the way, observing, “Silence has always dominated women’s experience of war.” She notes that German children like her mother had “to bear the weight of an identity that made them pariahs at birth” and that she herself remembers feeling uneasy during a school trip to a war museum in Normandy, as she was the only half-German student in her class.

Even so, O’Donnell makes no excuses for anyone, noting that many Germans conveniently hid behind the phrase “I did not know” when it came to the realities of the Holocaust. As she notes, the goal of her investigation was “to learn the truth of my family’s story, to recognize in its shifts, its hopes and its flaws, the hybridity that shaped my own identity.”

Mission accomplished—with Inge’s War, O’Donnell has created a story that reads like a novel filled with fascinating history and excellent detective work.

With the success of her novel, Sweetbitter, which spawned a television series, it might seem like Stephanie Danler has led a charmed life. Anyone who reads her fierce, unsparing memoir, Stray, however, will be quickly disabused of that notion.

From a rental house in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon where some members of Fleetwood Mac may have once lived, Danler ranges over the whole of her life as the daughter of two parents who failed in the most essential task: providing their offspring with a safe and loving home. Danler’s mother’s alcoholism is complicated by her near death from a brain aneurysm in her 40s, forcing Danler to confront her obligation to care for someone who repudiates her attempts at care. Her father, who abandoned Danler when she was 3 years old and later brought her into his Colorado home when she was 16, spirals toward ruin in the grip of an addiction to crystal meth, his life a cloud of lies and neglect. Out of this “veritable sea of alcoholism and narcissism,” Danler is flung ashore, ill-prepared for the demands of adulthood.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Stephanie Danler talks to BookPage about returning to California, making peace with a painful past and taking the leap from fiction to memoir.

As if the struggles of her parents’ illnesses and addictions aren’t painful enough, in the wake of her own short-lived first marriage, Danler also finds herself in a destructive affair with a married man she nicknames the “Monster.” As she oscillates between the seemingly irresistible pull of her desire and her understanding of the toxicity of that relationship, she simultaneously draws closer to another man she calls the “Love Interest,” whose self–imposed mission is to introduce her to some of the bleaker features of Los Angeles’ landscape, like a lake that’s turned into a dust bowl, “yet another god forsaken place.”

In Danler’s evocation of California’s complicated history and the darkness that lurks under its sunny exterior, Stray brings to mind the work of Joan Didion, and her frank portrayal of the nightmare of addiction is akin to Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. But in its painful candor and hard-earned wisdom, Stray is every bit its own vivid creation.