Sidle up to the bar, order a shot of your favorite whiskey, trade friendly greetings and engage in some warm chatter, then listen transfixed as Rosie Schaap, a kind of Irish bard, regales you with tales of the bars in her life, the regulars with whom she has hoisted a few or closed down the place, the moments of love and affection she’s experienced, and the enduring freedom to be herself that “being a woman at home in a bar culture” brings.

In Drinking With Men, Schaap, a cracking good storyteller, takes us along on her journey as she comes of age, follows her heart, falls in and out of love and discovers who she’s meant to be. From sitting on the bar car (at 15 years old) on the Metro-North train, where she discovers her kind of people—commuters drinking enough to get a little buzzed, telling dirty jokes and smoking—through her years as a Deadhead in search of freedom, and into her college and grad school years, when she finds a local bar that serves as more of a community than her college and where the regulars become like family to her, Schaap gets “another kind of education altogether” in the bars she frequents.

Some expand her horizons: Puffy’s is “a protracted, whiskey-soaked lesson in art history and New York culture, a repository of downtown lore and legend.” Some offer a lesson she’d rather not learn: At Else’s in Montreal, she begins to understand that “self-reinvention has a cost, and it is high, and it is terrible.” Each bar teaches her something about the world she loves to inhabit: “There are loud bars where conversation is not a priority. . . . There are quiet bars, lit low and engineered for tête-à-têtes. And at the Man of Kent, which was neither of these things, but a place both brightly festive and undeniably civilized . . . I started to understand, with greater clarity than ever, how to behave in a bar.”

Schaap delivers an affectionate and loving tribute to the bars she has known—with names as varied as Grogan’s Castle Lounge, The Pig, Good World and The Liquor Store—as well as to the many fellow regulars with whom she has become lifelong friends over a pint or a shot.

Barely a year after her marriage in 1987, Wendy Plump embarked on the first of three volcanically passionate affairs she would immerse herself in before she and her husband, Bill, began having children. She did so, she freely admits, simply because she wanted to, because it was so exciting, so different from the humdrum of domestic life. But each affair was undercut by such feelings of guilt and the endless fatigue of covering up that she would ultimately confess them to Bill, who would first rage, then adjust. And so their marriage—later undergirded by the birth of two sons—continued to limp along.

Then, in January 2005, friends told Plump that Bill not only had a mistress living nearby in the same town, but that the two of them also had an 8-month-old child. (All these distressing details are revealed in the first chapter.) Plump was aware that Bill had strayed before, just as she had, but this news was devastating. Despite its glaring imperfections, she wanted her marriage to last. By the end of that year, however, Bill had moved out for good.

Plump and her husband had met in college and dated for eight years before they married. After college, she became a newspaper reporter, while he went to work as a financial advisor, a job that involved a lot of travel and which gave them both ample opportunities to find other sexual partners.

Having drawn the general outlines of their infidelities, Plump spends the remainder of her book examining where and how things went wrong. Even so, she doesn’t engage in a lot of blaming or self-excoriation. She still remembers her affairs as glorious interludes, and she understands that her husband’s temptations must have been much the same as her own. She does blame him, though, for steadfastly refusing to discuss his feelings for her or for the other women.

In 2008, Bill lost his job, the upshot of which was that Plump and her two sons had to move from their large home into a tiny rental property. It’s been mostly a downward spiral of disappointments for her ever since. Still, she finds comfort in recalling the vividness of her affairs. “When I am eighty years old,” she muses, “I will sit on my front porch, wherever that may be, and I will have sumptuous memories of these men. I will have to see if that is enough compared with the loss that infidelity has wreaked.”

Fresh Off the Boat, the new memoir by rising culinary star Eddie Huang, is one roller coaster of a ride. Written with headlong ferocity, the book takes us from Huang’s early Taiwanese taste bud revelations (“Soup dumplings, sitcoms, one-night stands—good ones leave you wanting more”) to the establishment of his restaurant Baohaus, a realization of his vision for a youth-culture-oriented hot spot in the East Village where no one would “kick you out, call the cops, or serve you shitty 7-Eleven pressed Cubans.”

But it isn’t a swift or easy ride; like many bright, talented, angry and angst-filled young people, Huang struggles to discover and embody his authentic self—a struggle compounded by his Asian upbringing in American culture. He vows to “detox” his identity and cleanse it of everything he doesn’t consciously want or choose. But the fight isn’t only internal; he takes it to the streets, is constantly in trouble and hopscotches through five schools in seven years. At 13 he was already hustling, “running NCAA pools, taking bets on NFL games and selling porno,” and by the time he’s in college it’s skirmishes with the law. One night, the situation gets out of hand and there’s a trip to Orlando’s 33rd Street Jail, and a conviction. Rather than “sit at home on felony parole,” Huang takes a hiatus to Taiwan for a while, where he is relatively free and able to contemplate his future.

By the time he returns, he’s on a mission: finding a place for himself in the world, “or making one.” Food is a lifelong interest, but before Baohaus materializes, Huang “samples” many other venues: hip hop, law school and stand-up comedy among them. But “the sky broke and everything was clear” once he knew he was going to open a restaurant—one that specialized in Taiwanese gua bao and, even more importantly, one that would be the manifestation of his “friends, family, and memories.”

Though much of Huang’s writing is raw and intense, there are dollops of tenderness and zen-like wisdom when he writes about someone or something he loves, such as his mother, his grandmother or well-prepared food: “The best dishes have depth without doing too much. It’s not about rounding up all the seasonal ingredients you can find, it’s about paying close attention to the ones you already have.”

Like the dishes he describes as “jumping off the plate,” Huang’s memoir jumps off the page. Its flavors are “big, deep, kid-dynamite-Mike-Tyson-knock-you-out-of-the-box” intense and will leave you wanting more!