There is a saying: If you remember the 1960s, you must not have been there. If you were, and went on to enjoy—or survive—their segue into the ’70s, Chris Rush’s mesmerizing memoir, The Light Years, may cause some fine flashbacks. But if you know those drug-addled days only by reputation and the sounds of their haze-spawned music, Rush’s detail-laden account of his turbulent adolescence will be quite an eye-opener.

The middle child of seven in a well-off New Jersey family that knew how to party, Rush was an artistic, sexually conflicted misfit. His alcoholic father loathed him, his mother protected him, and his older sister introduced him to marijuana and LSD by the time he was 12—“sacraments,” she called them, not to be confused with heroin or cocaine, which would come later. Rush remembers his acid trips with poetic clarity. Watching an American flag-clad Frisbee player at a party, he saw “stroboscopic trails” following him, “frame by frame by frame. I began to think of the awfulness of the [Vietnam] war, of dead bodies piled in the sun. Maybe the glitter-acid was coming on a little too strong.”

After his father threatened to kill him, Rush left the private school where he was peddling drugs and followed his sister out west—California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming—and into the business of storing and selling drugs. Living in “stash houses” and partaking of the inventory, Rush grew to love tripping in the wild of the mountains, adding hashish to his repertoire, spending months alone and sketching his drug-fueled fantasies. He came down into the hill towns to call his mother collect, to let her know he was alive and to be cautioned not to come home. Lovers and friends along the way seemed as lost as he was.

Today a celebrated Tucson artist, Rush recounts his troubled journey not as a cautionary tale but as a testament to a time when finding a place in the real world could be life-saving. For him, it was learning to bake a pie and sharing it with a friend. For his reader, this redeeming affirmation comes as both revelation and relief.

As a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Megan K. Stack lived a life defined by her career. Like so many women before her, Stack was unprepared for the jolt of trading in that work for the work of motherhood. When she left her job to give birth to her son, Max, in Beijing, Stack realized her new reality.

“I’d slaved and slashed and elbowed to maintain that job, but in the end I’d let it go like a balloon, rolling in my mouth the rare flavor of a bold gamble,” she writes in Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home. 

Stack, whose previous book, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, had imagined quiet days of working on her novel while her newborn son slept, angelic and obedient, until she was ready for him to awaken. She had not imagined colic, hormones and sleep deprivation that was almost physically painful. To add insult to injury, her journalist husband, Tom, “had slipped easily back into his old life while I had been bombed back to some prehistoric version of myself. And I was angry that he had accepted this superior position, this lesser disruption, as sort of a birthright.”

Enter Xiao Li, the first in a series of nannies, cooks and cleaners who help Stack find equilibrium. But like most women who hire help, Stack felt a deep uneasiness that she couldn’t do it all herself. And while Stack paid Xiao Li a good wage, it was for work that took Xiao Li away from her own young daughter. Xiao Li later admits she would sometimes pretend Max was her own baby to take away the sting of separation. It’s an uncomfortable truth that moms who work need help and that help mostly comes from lower-income women. That transaction comes at a price beyond money.

Furthermore, dads seem to navigate these issues without the noose of guilt, and Tom is no exception. He comes across as a bit of a schmuck, complaining about the quality of Xiao Li’s cooking and insisting that he can’t take even half a day off so Stack can finish a draft.

When the family moves to India for Tom’s job, Stack is in charge of setting up the household and finding help while again pregnant. In Delhi, Stack truly becomes aware of the hardships facing the women she employs: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty. She delves into their stories with searing honesty and self-reflection. 

Women’s Work is a brave book, an unflinching examination of privilege and the tradeoffs all women make in the name of family.