Fond looks back at profound dysfunction have become so commonplace, it’s a wonder there’s not a “crazy parenting” section in bookstores to help the next generation of memoirists get a leg up. At this point, crazy itself is not sufficient reason to publish. In Take This Man, Brando Skyhorse, who won a PEN/Hemingway Award for his first novel (The Madonnas of Echo Park), captures the details of his dysfunctional upbringing with note-perfect language and does so in pursuit of the truth about his family.

Skyhorse was only 3 years old when his Mexican father abandoned the family. His mother, who was also Mexican, decided to assume an American Indian identity for herself and her son. Through five stepfathers and constant upheaval, Skyhorse struggled to mold a father figure out of the con men and failures his mother brought home. While she worked as a phone sex operator, he would be dispatched to drag one man home from a bar, or taken on an outing with another where, instead of riding bumper cars at an amusement park, he was left in the car outside a housing project while undisclosed business was transacted inside. Despite the instability and verbal abuse, he clung to his mother and grandmother until college provided a means of escape. His emotional scars are just beginning to heal as he gets to know his father for the first time—and comes to grips with the realization that his mother’s claim of Native-American heritage was a fantasy.

“My mother had so much pain to share that she had to invent people to hurt,” including a kidnapped daughter and a son who died at age 3, Skyhorse writes.

This is a hard story to take in—a trip to visit the imaginary daughter leads to the revelation that his mother has placed an ad offering her young son for adoption—but it’s impossible to look away. Every hate and hurt on display here is balanced against an equally powerful love. Take This Man looks head-on at every character, including the author; it’s a brave and hopeful story.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ah, WASPs: Those guilt-ridden, uptight, real estate-obsessed traditionalists. In Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town, Sarah Payne Stuart captures the essence of this distinctive culture, tracing both her own childhood in Concord, Massachusetts, and the lives of some of Concord’s famous residents, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.

Stuart shocks herself when, after years in “the Victorian house of my dreams, thirty minutes from Manhattan,” she and her husband Charlie decide to move back to Concord in a fit of adult homesickness.

“Suddenly my best friends living nearby in the city, my fledgling career, and Charlie’s rise at ABC News meant nothing,” she writes. “Suddenly being cool and wearing a leather jacket while nursing my baby in a Greenwich Village restaurant meant nothing—next to the thought of my children floating toy boats on the Concord River while my mother and I looked on.”

She and Charlie settle into one fixer-upper after another, sinking into debt while they raise their young family. Along the way, Stuart makes peace with her family’s history of repression, hurt and mental illness, and realizes the obvious parallels between her own family and other Concordians who have tried to rewrite their histories. (To wit: Despite Alcott’s cozy, seemingly autobiographical portrait of Marmee and her little women, Alcott’s real mother was a shrill martyr and her father a delusional freeloader.)

Stuart writes honestly and lovingly about her aging parents, her childhood, money, the trials of parenthood and keeping her marriage afloat. In other words, everything. Perfectly Miserable is a gorgeously rendered portrait of modern life—and a reminder that some things never change.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, June 2014

It was on a gray December day that 23-year-old Joanna Rakoff, nestled into her couch rereading Persuasion, received the call that she had gotten the job. Fresh out of grad school and without much of a game plan—aside from a deep-rooted desire to become a poet—Rakoff landed a position at one of the most storied literary agencies in New York City, one that represented such literary legends as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Judy Blume.

In her absorbing new memoir, My Salinger Year, Rakoff (A Fortunate Age) recounts her time spent working as an assistant at what she simply refers to as “the Agency.” Even though it was the mid-1990s, the Agency office was a midcentury time capsule, where agents still smoked at their desks and there was nary a computer in sight, and a temple, where priceless first editions lined the endless shelves of books. After learning how to turn on her decades-old Selectric (that’s a typewriter, in case you didn’t know) and adjust the playback speed on her boss’ Dictaphone, Rakoff learned that one of her duties would be answering the fan mail of the Agency’s star client: the reclusive J.D. Salinger.

The letters to Salinger were voluminous, deeply personal and passionate about his works. It didn’t take long for Rakoff to ditch the form-letter response and start composing thoughtful, personalized replies—in secret, of course. The formidable, top-brass agent she worked for (referred to as “my boss”) is part Miranda Priestly, part Amanda Farrow, and deeply devoted to protecting Salinger’s privacy and legacy.

Naturally, there’s more to the book than just Rakoff’s job (and Salinger). There’s Don, her live-in socialist boyfriend with writerly ambitions of his own; there’s the striking contrast of making under $20k a year while living in a city and working in an industry that both revolve around vast amounts of wealth; there’s the universally relatable experience of being young and finding your own path in life.

Told with effortless, pitch-perfect prose, My Salinger Year is a deeply moving but unsentimental coming-into-your-own story that will keep readers thoroughly engrossed through the very last word.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Joanna Rakoff for this book.

Jihad, an Arabic word meaning strife or struggle, has many connotations in our culture, few of them romantic. Yet romance is at the center of Krista Bremer’s moving memoir, My Accidental Jihad, though struggle is a key element as well.

One day while jogging in North Carolina, Krista, a graduate student, met an older Libyan man, Ismail. He was not exactly the person she’d envisioned as Prince Charming. He was graying of hair and yellow of teeth, not to mention that he struck Krista as utterly foreign, completely other. But when she was with him, she felt herself relax, as though she were settling into a deep pool of water. She felt at home. And then, to paraphrase Charlotte Brontë: Reader, she married him.

The memoir tells the story of their marriage in unrelenting candor and gorgeous prose. Intimacy with Ismail forces Krista to evaluate her American life with a critical eye. Do Americans really need so much stuff? She compares Ismail’s gentle and loving care of his few things with the habits of a previous boyfriend, who left piles of designer clothes littered across the floor. Krista is deeply glad to be with Ismail. But does he really have to use a 15-year-old coffee maker? Holidays are also difficult. For Krista, Ramadan is a mystery. She doesn’t like the way it changes her husband, who gets testy while fasting. She finds it hard to support him, to lay a single date and a glass of water neatly on the table for him to break his fast at sundown. Her reservations about Ramadan, though, pale next to his confusion about Christmas. Seeing Christmas through Ismail’s eyes, Krista simultaneously realizes how silly the holiday rituals are, and how terribly attached she is to them.

Years after their rushed nuptials, the pair hosts a belated, extravagant celebration of their love. It’s a dramatic event, full of grand gestures such as a friend who went to great lengths to play a piano outside. The next day, Ismail and Krista return to the site of the party to clean up. As she wipes a stained table, Krista reflects, “Ours will always be a sticky marriage.”

The brilliance of this book is that the author never lets herself or her husband off the hook. Instead, she presents an honest—and at times painful—portrayal of a beautiful union.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.