The Choice is more than an eloquent memoir by Holocaust survivor and psychologist Edith Eva Eger. It is an exploration of the healing potential of choice. When someone chooses to harm us, our sense of self can later be overwhelmed by the memory of that pain. But Eger, who has helped countless trauma patients, believes that we can regain our autonomy by choosing to confront the past—a lesson she learned from her own experience.

When Eger was 16, Josef Mengele, the abhorrent Auschwitz physician, made horrific choices for her. He chose for Eger to live and sent her parents to die. That same day, he chose Eger to dance “The Blue Danube” for his entertainment. Although a prisoner, Eger infused that dance with all the joy that dancing always brought her. Mengele gave her a loaf of bread as a reward for her bravura performance. Eger shared the loaf with the other prisoners, and later, a girl who had eaten that bread chose to help Eger, saving her life as a result. The ability to choose, even though those choices were circumscribed by an electrified fence, gave Eger the strength to survive.

After the war, she repressed these memories to spare others the pain of her experience. Wracked with guilt for having survived when so many perished, Eger watched her marriage crumble. Another choice confronted her: Stay mired in the past, or face it and learn to live in the present. Her journey took her back to Auschwitz, where she unlocked the last and darkest memory of that first day, and forgave not only her tormentors but also, and most importantly, herself.

Eger is not suggesting that she is unscarred by her experience, but that she lives a life filled with grace. The Choice is not a how-to book; it is, however, an invitation to choose to live life fully.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From obscure author to literary legend—that’s the transition Karl Ove Knausgaard has made in recent years thanks to his acclaimed autobiographical work, My Struggle. In that six-volume series, he delivers a meticulously detailed chronicle of his upbringing in Norway and his life as a writer, husband and father.

Knausgaard has a gift for making the quotidian seem compelling. His inclusivity and exactitude of detail, along with his tendency to follow narrative tangents to their exhausted ends, allows him to replicate on the page the nature of his own experience in a way that feels both expansive and microscopic. This effect enlivens his new book, Autumn, the first of four essay compilations, each of which will be named for a season.

Autumn was written as Knausgaard awaited the arrival of his fourth child, Anne, and it serves as a sort of introduction to the material world. Knausgaard offers musings on items encountered during the routine business of living—from plastic bags, bottles and rubber boots to the drum kit he keeps in his office. He also focuses on nature and its power to astonish and on the mysteries of the human body. Whether he’s writing about a rainstorm (“the sound of thunder always heightens the sense of being alive”) or teeth (“miniature white towers in the mouth”), the scrutiny Knausgaard applies to everyday objects renews them for the reader.

The essays in this perceptive collection are no more than a few pages in length, and Knausgaard’s prose style throughout is unembellished and precise. But the book also has an underpinning of tenderness. Of his children, Knausgaard writes, “I want them to relish life and have a sense of its abundance.” In Autumn, he captures that sense—and much more.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You might say New Orleans entered an existential crisis after Hurricane Katrina. People across the country weighed in on the city’s future: Should New Orleans rebuild? Or should it accept that life below sea level, on the coast, wasn’t meant to be?

Anne Gisleson and her fellow members of the Existential Crisis Reading Group could relate. In 2012, seven years after the storm, the New Orleanians banded together to read and discuss works that addressed life’s big questions. Together, they would process through the grief and uncertainty that so often accompany different phases of life.

For Gisleson, grief was not only civic but also deeply personal. In the group’s first month, her father died of cancer. Gisleson’s two youngest sisters, twins Rebecca and Rachel, died by suicide about 15 years earlier, 18 months apart. “Losing a sibling, especially in youth, is a particular blow, a lateral loss of shared history and DNA that lacerates your identity,” Gisleson writes. “Your old narrative is shattered. Your new narrative becomes shapeless, full of confusion and pain. Double that.”

The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading seamlessly melds together Gisleson’s story, New Orleans’ ongoing recovery and existential discovery. It also serves as something of a guide for readers wrestling with their own struggles, with an appendix of works cited for further exploration.

Through each month’s reading and discussion, Gisleson and her companions engage with big, sometimes bleak ideas. And no matter the grief that drew each of them to the group, they remain focused on a shared goal: living.

“This life is our cross,” one member says during the group’s interpretation of the Stations of the Cross (which they dubbed “The Way of the Crisis”). “Here we are together to engage and discuss, duke it out, support each other in our fight with this cross. Here we have gathered in our own ‘Fight Club.’”

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.