In 2011, Bess Kalb received a rambling voicemail from her beloved grandmother, Bobby Bell, reminiscing about how she would fly between Florida and New York every week to babysit Kalb as a baby while Kalb’s mother worked. “I was an old lady! But I loved you. And I’d sit there in their terrible apartment by the hospital and I’d watch you. We’d watch TV, we talked, it was fine. Every week for the first year of your life. Can you imagine? You started talking at nine months. You said ‘hi.’”

From that first word on, the dialogue between these two has never stopped, even though Bobby Bell died at age 90 in 2017. At her funeral, Kalb read a transcript of that voicemail as part of her eulogy, and afterward she decided to write a book about her grandmother’s life. However, Kalb, a comedy writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” put a unique spin on the project, using her grandmother’s voice to write the book in first-person. And kudos to Kalb, who pulls off this daring approach brilliantly, allowing readers to hear her grandmother’s inimitable voice in Nobody Will Tell You This but Me: A True (As Told to Me) Story.

In the prologue, Bobby offers a running commentary on her own funeral, noting, “The worst part was the dirt.” Not surprisingly, given Kalb's chosen career, there are laughs galore throughout the book, as when Bobby gives fashion advice, career advice, boyfriend advice or says, “God knows I never wanted you to be a writer. But I knew you would. I told you, Bessie—you should be a teacher. Make a salary. Have the summers off to travel.”

Yet this account runs much deeper than a typical comedy routine. Kalb frequently shares the immense challenge of imagining her grandmother’s voice, writing, “It’s turned me into a riddle, a series of boxes to unlock, pages to riffle through in your mental filing cabinet. Bess, I’m not a riddle—I’m a corpse.”

Calling her book “a matrilineal love story,” Kalb describes the lives of several generations of women, starting with Bobby’s own mother, who immigrated to America alone at age 12 from Russia in the face of religious persecution. These many enthralling tales (along with family photographs) unfold in a carefully structured yet nonlinear fashion (think “This Is Us”). The result is lively and fascinating, funny yet poignant.

Kalb processes her own grief as she writes, sharing how she reacted in the days following her grandmother’s death. With heartbreaking honesty, she notes in her grandmother’s voice, “Ha. You can write all you want, but you’re still at a desk in a world where I don’t exist.”

In a bold stroke of literary bravura, Kalb has turned the formula for writing memoirs inside out, bringing her grandmother’s distinctive voice back to life and sharing it with a legion of lucky readers.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Bess Kalb, author of Nobody Will Tell You This but Me.

When his mother was dying, critic Philip Kennicott drew comfort from repeatedly listening to Bach’s “Chaconne,” a violin solo. The “condensed and obsessive” feeling of the Chaconne complemented his feelings of fear and claustrophobia. After his mother passed, Kennicott put the recording away. But the experience stirred him to return to another canonical work by Bach. Learning to play the “Goldberg Variations,” a set of 27 short pieces that take roughly 40 minutes to play by piano or harpsichord, became a goal of Kennicott’s life, a Sisyphean task.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Philip Kennicott and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

Spanning nearly a decade, Kennicott’s engrossing memoir, Counterpoint, explores his impressions of his mother, his musical development and eventual retreat from the piano, his determination to test himself against the music at this juncture of his life and his encyclopedic knowledge of Bach. There are also soaring descriptions of Bach’s music and the “extraordinary pleasure” that comes from playing it well. Kennicott writes, “On good days . . . the fast passages will feel elegant and infallible, the motion of the fingers both automatic and deliberate, the skips and jumps sure-footed.” One gathers an impression of both Kennicott and, more generally, the devotion that challenging music requires.

Counterpoint offers deep and pleasurable ruminations on how our obsessions—musical and artistic—can contribute to an inner life that is both satisfying and difficult to share. Kennicott wonders at the inner life of his mother and questions why her world, once infused with interests and ambition, seemed to contract as she aged. His ambivalence about his mother, his struggle to progress in the “Goldberg Variations” and his rueful reflections on his musical education are tender vulnerabilities generously shared. But it is Kennicott’s intimate insights into the towering music of Bach, and to the way music speaks to all our lives as we approach our inevitable deaths, that make this book an unforgettable triumph.