With seven generations of family secrets, two notable English country houses and multiple writers, England’s Sackville-West and Nicolson families have served as material for multiple memoirs. In A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations, Juliet Nicolson—daughter of Nigel Nicolson and granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West—takes her turn at the family trade. With the benefit of hindsight, as well as cabinets of old letters and diaries, Nicolson casts a gimlet eye on family stories extending back to her great-great-grandmother Pepita, the legendary Spanish dancer who entranced a young British diplomat, Lionel Sackville-West, into a passionate, illicit affair.

The patterns Nicolson observes in her family—ardent love affairs, maternal abandonment and the destructive effects of alcoholism—are fascinating in their repetition, showing how families do tend to repeat mistakes across generations. Nicolson’s familial dysfunctions are, however, particularly glamorous, as they involve naughty Victorians, runaway wives and aristocratic privilege.

Her great-grandmother’s life makes for particularly compelling reading, as the young Victoria travels to Washington, D.C. to set up a diplomat’s house for her grieving widower father (Lionel never married Pepita, but their children were legitimized by the family). Victoria’s flirtatiousness was legendary, resulting in a proposal from President Chester Arthur himself. After 14 proposals (at least), she was swept off her feet by a first cousin, named—like her father—Lionel Sackville-West. Her introduction to the “arts of love” is quite spicy, and the story gains much from Nicolson’s access to her own family’s papers.

The author’s elegant and balanced assessment of the women in her family focuses on marriage and domestic life, and a strain of unhappiness that tends to result in middle-aged alcoholic isolation after the fading of the glamour and beauty of their youth. Nicolson’s candor and realism make this legendary family accessible and sympathetic, and her book a compelling work of memoir.

In The Return, Libyan novelist Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men) tells the harrowing story of his search for his father, Jaballa Matar. Early in Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, Jaballa served as a U.N. diplomat, but he was soon accused of criticizing Qaddafi and forced to flee to Cairo with his family. In 1990, while Matar was at university in London, Jaballa was kidnapped by Egyptian secret police and sent to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Matar’s narrative roams through time, moving from his 2012 visit to see family in Tripoli and Benghazi after Qaddafi’s downfall (Matar’s first visit in 33 years), to the distant past—when his grandfather fought against the brutal Italian occupation of Libya. He recounts his efforts to gather scraps of information, meeting with former prisoners who might have seen Jaballa. 

At times, the memoir reads like a spy novel: In the 1980s, Qaddafi’s spies kept tabs not only on Jaballa but also on family members, following Matar’s brother when he was at boarding school. Decades later, Matar connected with Qaddafi’s “reformist” son Seif, who’d promised him an answer about what had happened to Jaballa. Seif put Matar through a series of phone calls and clandestine meetings in London hotels, mixing threats and compliments, meetings that ultimately proved fruitless.

The Return beautifully chronicles the vagaries of life as an exile and the grief of wondering about a father’s suffering. Yes, Matar’s memoir is sometimes bleak in describing the Qaddafi regime’s decades of bizarre repressive actions. But it also offers a portrait of a loving family and a needed window into Libya, not only its troubles but also its beauty, and the many kindnesses Matar encountered there.

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

Chris Forhan’s aching, lyrical memoir excavates both a lost father and a lost era in American history. The middle child in an Irish family of eight, Forhan came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. He recalls spirograph toys and the Beatles, Jell-O and tuna casserole, JFK and the moon landing. These details are important because they help Forhan cinematically recreate the family from which his father absented himself, ultimately by suicide in 1973.

Who was Ed Forhan? This is the central, animating question driving My Father Before Me, a mystery that continues to haunt his adult children. Their family life was riddled with silences: Where did Ed go when he didn’t come home at night? Was his apparent mental illness a result of unchecked diabetes, childhood trauma, bipolar disorder or all (or none) of those factors? His son Chris interviews his mother and siblings, and looks through family photos and newspaper clippings to find answers. 

An award-winning poet, Forhan writes with grace and intelligence about the very process of constructing a memoir. How can he trust his memories of his father, these flashes that may reflect desire more than fact? By bringing in the voices of his siblings and mother, he fleshes out this portrait of a haunted and wounded man, adding heft and color to the fragments of memory. Forhan learns more about Ed’s tragic and lonely childhood, one of the many things the family never spoke of directly.

Ultimately this memoir documents four generations of fathers and sons and tracks the patterns of damaging emotional behavior passed down through the family. Now that Forhan is himself a father to young sons, it is essential to recollect his father, if only to free himself from the burden of his influence. Fortunately for the reader, his journey is beautifully and resonantly captured here.

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