Alexandra Fuller writes to untangle a knot—usually a knot in her own lived experience. 

“Everyone in my family hates the books I write, they ask me to stop, but I can’t look away. ‘Write novels,’ Dad begged, but real life never stops coming at me, and it pours from my pen more easily than fiction,” she writes. “It’s not only the old adage to write what I know, but also to write what I love. And it’s the artist’s impulse to turn again and again to the same subject until the subject gives up its secrets.”

That’s how the bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight explains why she repeatedly returns to her youth spent in central and southern Africa and her ongoing family ties to the land.

In Travel Light, Move Fast, Fuller focuses her gaze on her father, Tim. She and her mother are by Tim’s side for his sudden demise in a Hungarian hospital. After his death, the pair returns with Tim’s ashes to the Fuller family farm in Africa, where Fuller attempts to help her mom resettle after losing her chaotic, iconic partner of half a century.

Tim Fuller was British, and his family lamented his move to Africa. “Tim Fuller went to Africa and lost everything,” or so went his family lore. But Tim found the life he desired: a woman who would tolerate and even celebrate his flamboyant ways, freedom to travel the land, a family and eventually—at his wife’s urging—a farm of his own.

Fuller carefully picks away at the tangle of her grief by exploring her dad’s life, gliding between her own experience in the present and his raucous past. Travel Light, Move Fast is a sensitive, meticulously wrought portrait of one family’s sometimes-challenging dynamics, set against an unforgiving African backdrop. Fuller’s beautiful prose juxtaposes the grieving process with the lessons she learned from the man whose adventures shaped her.

There’s a jagged longing that animates the relationship between daughters and mothers. A daughter’s desire to please and be loved often cascades into enduring joy or peripatetic bitterness, while a mother’s desire to be loved and emulated often pours into exultant pride or raging resentment. Elissa Altman’s haltingly poignant Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing captures with clear-eyed candor the ways that Altman struggles to love her mother despite her mother’s insistence on creating Altman in her own image.

Altman’s mother, Rita, is a lifelong Manhattanite who buys makeup from Saks or Bloomingdale’s to assuage her loneliness and preserve her image of herself as a beautiful woman who once appeared on television. Rita’s marriage to Altman’s father ended in divorce because she felt like he could never provide for her material needs, and she continues to search for men who can. Rita wants a daughter who resembles her, so she tries to dress her only daughter elegantly and buys her cosmetics that will emphasize her beauty. Altman’s tomboyish approach to life disappoints her mother, and as Altman grows older, she eventually moves out of the city to Connecticut to live with her wife.

The circles of love, longing and loathing widen, punctuated by Rita’s daily calls to her daughter, calling forth Altman’s own anger, regret and love. As Altman so gracefully describes it, “My mother and I have been burning for half a century. . . . We bob and weave; we love and we loathe; we shout and whisper, and the next morning we do it all over again.” When her mother falls and becomes fully dependent on her, Altman feels the rush of “can’t-live-with-her-can’t-not-take-care-of-her” wash over her as she shuttles to Manhattan to care for her mother, who continues to be dissatisfied with her daughter and her daughter’s chosen life.

The beauty of Motherland lies in its embrace of the raggedness of relationships and in its candid acknowledgment that sometimes resolution and reconciliation simply elude us. But that longing for reconciliation itself functions as a form of resolution.