Mark Slouka may be familiar to readers through his award-winning fiction, including Lost Lake, The Visible World and Brewster, a powerful coming-of-age story set in 1968 in Brewster, New York. In his new memoir, Nobody’s Son, Slouka uses his considerable literary talents to tell the searing, haunting story of his life with his Czechoslovakian-immigrant parents.

Slouka’s approach is novelistic, and far from a straight chronological account. He writes, “I believe the record of our time, told as truly as possible, is never, or rarely, chronological,” he writes. “Life is always looping back, revising itself, elaborating itself.”

One of the “loops” Slouka returns to again and again is the story of his mother, a powerful presence in his life. The author works to uncover the hidden forces that shaped her past in Czechoslovakia and, to a large extent, shadowed her future in America: her tortured marriage, a long, secret love affair, struggles with mental health and her complex relationship with her son.

 “You can’t reclaim someone’s past, no matter how fearless your imagination—not really,” Slouka writes. But as he imagines and pictures his mother, for instance, meeting F., the man she truly loved, she comes alive for the reader much the way a character in fiction does. The photographs included here remind us that she was very much a real, and often tortured woman.

“I’ve been writing her all my life,” Slouka says of his mother at one point, noting that his novel The Visible World was “a memoir embedded in a novel; an apt description of my life.”

In a similar way, Nobody’s Son sometimes feels like a novel embedded in a memoir. More than anything, beyond the labels, it is a moving and remarkable reading experience.

On November 13, 2015, the world watched with shock and sorrow as terror erupted at several sites in Paris, including the Bataclan Theater where at least 89 people were killed. Among the dead was Hélène Muyal-Leiris, whose husband, Antoine Leiris, was at home watching their 17-month-old son. Leiris soon posted a Facebook message to the attackers that went viral, beginning, “On Friday night, you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate.”

You Will Not Have My Hate is his account of the immediate days after the attack as he struggled to make sense of his loss. Leiris’ slim memoir is a portrait of raw grief, of trying to keep one’s head above water in a world that no longer makes sense. His son, Melvil, became an anchor amid the tragedy, providing a need for daily routine that kept his father moving forward. The author describes the heartbreak of seeing his wife one last time in the mortuary, the beauty of his son’s innocent smile, and how he sat down at his computer one afternoon to write his famous post: “House, lunch, diaper, pajamas, nap, computer. The words continue to arrive. They come on their own, considered, weighed, but without me having to summon them. They come to me.”

His account ends with Hélène’s funeral and his subsequent visit to her grave with his toddler, as they bravely “go on living alone, without the aid of the star to whom they swore allegiance.”

The book reaffirms Leiris’ profound message that he will raise his son to “defy [the attackers] by being happy and free. Because [they] will not have his hate either.”

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Although his father was a small-time actor (with outsize dreams), Bryan Cranston didn’t pledge himself to Thespis until he was stranded for six rainy days and nights in a picnic area on the Blue Ridge Parkway with only an anthology of plays for entertainment. He was 21 at the time and had already done a smattering of amateur theater. But until this soggy epiphany broadsided him, his focus had been on a career in law enforcement.

It would be another six years of small roles and TV commercials before Cranston found steady work, acting on the ABC soap opera “Loving.” There followed such memorable mileposts as six appearances on “Seinfeld” as self-aggrandizing dentist Tim Whatley, seven seasons as the goofy dad, Hal Wilkerson, on “Malcolm in the Middle” and, most triumphantly, five seasons on “Breaking Bad” as Walter White, the emotionally defeated high school chemistry teacher turned psychopathic drug lord.

Cranston’s memoir, A Life in Parts, is an engrossing blend of stories and tricks of the acting trade. He learns to slaughter chickens, becomes a mail-order minister, motorcycles from coast to coast with his brother, barely survives a crazy girlfriend and proposes marriage in a bubble bath. And that’s just a sampling. 

He advises aspiring actors to stay busy and go the extra mile to secure and inhabit a role, noting that he took rock-climbing lessons to score a candy commercial and clothed himself in live bees for an episode of “Malcolm.” He also explains how he adopted a mindset that turns even unsuccessful auditions into personal victories and presents a numerical scale by which to judge whether or not a part is worth taking. More subtle tips abound.

While there may have been bees on Cranston, there are assuredly no flies. “I never want to limit myself,” he writes. “I want to experience everything. When I die, I want to be exhausted.”

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.