Beth Howard’s marriage to her German husband Marcus was passionate but often tumultuous. His job required long hours and frequent relocations, and over the course of six years she often felt that he didn’t pay enough attention to her own needs. During the summer of 2009, they were living apart—Marcus in Germany, where he had just been relocated once again, and Howard in Terlingua, Texas, working on a memoir about her stint as pie baker to the stars in Malibu. But when Howard suggested they make a plan to see each other during Marcus’ vacation in August, he dismissed her; he was too overwhelmed with plans and schedules at work, and didn’t want to think about making any more arrangements. Fed up, she asked for a divorce.

Marcus protested, but she held firm. That August, instead of coming to see her in Texas, Marcus flew to Portland, Oregon, the city they considered their home base, prepared to sign their divorce papers. A few hours before he was to meet with their divorce mediator, he collapsed and died of a ruptured aorta.

“Psychologists call it complicated grief,” she writes. “Complicated grief is when someone you are close to dies and leaves you with unresolved issues, unanswered questions, unfinished business. . . . Complicated grief is when you ask your husband for a divorce you don’t really want, and he dies seven hours before signing the papers.”

Devastated, Howard returned to Portland to grieve and to figure out what to do next. She turned to the most wholesome, healing activity she could imagine: baking pie. Though her initial attempts to find a job as a baker were unsuccessful, she soon met a friend of a friend who suggested that they travel around the country shooting footage for a potential TV series about pie. They started out with a trip around California, interviewing longtime pie makers, making pie with a group of eight- and nine-year-olds, revisiting the pie shop in Malibu where Howard had worked several years earlier and baking 50 pies to hand out on the streets of L.A. for National Pie Day.

The series didn’t get picked up, but the trip had given Howard enough momentum to keep her going on a new path—one that eventually brought her to Iowa, where she had grown up (and where they know a thing or two about pie), to judge the pie contest at the Iowa State Fair. On a whim, one day she visited the American Gothic House, and learned, surprisingly, that it was for rent. She moved in and, naturally, opened up a pie stand.

Howard’s journey may seem aimless at times, but through it all she is an engaging and sympathetic narrator, and the reader is drawn into her story of grief and healing. You will put down Making Piece believing, as Howard does, that “Pie is comfort. Pie builds community. Pie heals. Pie can change the world.” And if you still need further proof, just try out one of the recipes she includes at the end.

Unexpected riches—that's what you'll find if you open I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People, an unassuming memoir that takes up where Marian Cannon Schlesinger left off in her earlier volume, Snatched From Oblivion. There she recreated the world she grew up in: Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early years of the 20th century. Here she memorably resumes her story, beginning with an unfettered string of poignant, last-call impressions of China and Guatemala just before World War II changed everything.

Schlesinger, who will be 100 years old in September, writes about the Peking of a different time, recreating in amazing detail the world of 1935. ("The air rang with the sounds of bicycle bells and the calls of street hawkers, water bearers, coal sellers, and sweetmeats men. . . . One morning I stepped out the front door and ran headlong into a large Siberian camel from the Western Hills, laden with baskets of coal for the stoves.") For sheer beauty and striking observations, these chapters are the most riveting of the book.

Not long after her unforgettable Chinese adventure, she finds herself in Guatemala where the coffee beans and the people are equally fascinating as Schlesinger presents them, with long rewarding anecdotes that make them come alive. Readers may wonder how she can remember so many details after all these years, but one thing is certain: If she retrieved them from old letters or articles of the time, they are worth the excavation.

Still, these stories become a mere appetizer to the main course that follows, the account of her years in Washington in the 1960s. As a landscape artist and portrait painter, she has a life of her own, but her marriage to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., active in the highest political circles of the city, eventually leads her into a larger orbit of national events and people, including the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

A sharp eye for foolishness balances Schlesinger’s tolerant understanding of human foibles, even of the rich and powerful. The sections that touch on the Kennedys, including a whole chapter on "The Kennedy Experience," are candid and just tart enough to be more rewarding than disturbing. (Of Jackie, she writes, "I sensed in her a sardonic tongue and a sharp eye that didn't miss much." And the kidding among the Kennedys and their cohort "was not only a form of communication, but also a way of keeping people off balance and at arm's length. In other words, keeping things under control. As for conversation, it did not exist.")

The appeal of these memoirs is surprisingly immediate, though the events they record are long past. Schlesinger is an acute and likable tour guide to a fascinating time that is so far gone it's almost a different world.

“Your voice is the wildest thing you own,” Brooke Williams tells his wife, author Terry Tempest Williams. In her latest collection, When Women Were Birds, Williams considers the development of this wild voice through a series of 54 short essays.

The book is contemplative, meditative and profound. We journey with Williams and we are not always quite sure where we are going. At the heart of our journey is an enigma: When Williams’ mother died, she left her journals to her daughter. But when Williams began looking through them, she discovered all of them were blank.

The blank journals become, in Williams’ creative hands, a vast canvas for exploring her mother’s voice, and her own voice—and beyond this, the voices of all women. It sounds like a tall order, and it is. But, as you move through the graceful prose, you will find yourself underlining key phrases. Poetic and powerful, these phrases help unlock a topic that is as hard to explain as a blank journal.

To engage such a philosophical theme, Williams’ short essays balance abstract musings with specific scenes. We go on bird-watching trips with her grandmother Mimi. We run into a poet in a copy shop in the middle of the night. We read letters from Williams’ mother. Meanwhile, Williams engages the ideas of artists, activists and writers, on topics as varied as the use of white space, conservation and reproductive rights, to uncover truths that are deeply felt but rarely stated. This is a book that only Terry Tempest Williams could write.

Raised Mormon and half in love with the land she lives on, Williams’ book almost smells like Utah. The dry air and bright sunshine are palpable. Wilderness, in the text, is a metaphor for both the land she loves and her very voice as a woman. Both are untamable. Both are creative. Both are threatened.

If you haven’t read anything by Williams, When Women Were Birds is likely a good place to begin. She has taken an enigmatic inheritance and transformed it into a beautiful meditation that (far from remaining silent) speaks loud and clear.