Randi Davenport’s harrowing new memoir is the kind of book to which the only appropriate response is sympathy. The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes begins, ordinarily enough, with a picnic. But from the first pages, it’s clear that something isn’t right. Davenport’s teenage son, Chase, refuses to walk across a bridge, eat outside with the other picnickers, play Frisbee or sing songs, and his mother is not surprised: “Despite my high hopes, and I had many, there was never any possibility of staying with the others,” for Chase is not capable of it. Since toddlerhood, he has been diagnosed with a long list of conditions, including ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism and epilepsy, among many others. Though it might seem as if Chase’s condition could get no worse, the next day he suffers a psychotic break which leaves him obsessed with terrifying enemies he calls “nailers” and executioners, convinced he is a rock star, unable to recognize his mother and eventually confined to a psychiatric ward.

The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes alternates between the story of Chase’s life up to this moment and his subsequent months in the hospital. Davenport describes how she missed signs of possible mental illness in her ex-husband, Chase’s father, and tried to believe that Chase would be OK, until it was clear that he wouldn’t. She recounts the toll Chase’s illness has taken on his younger sister, Haley, and her efforts to make it up to her, knowing that she can’t. At the same time, she describes Chase’s deteriorating condition, his doctors’ failures to diagnose and treat him effectively and her own desperate attempts to find an appropriate placement for him, after her insurance company refuses to pay for his hospitalization any longer.

Davenport writes in sometimes excruciating detail about the pain that disability and mental illness wreak on entire families. She is a strong advocate, both for her son and for the disabled and mentally ill, arguing that “Our profound unwillingness to care for those among us who cannot care for themselves: that’s the problem.” One hopes this book has helped to alleviate her own pain.

Rebecca Steinitz is a writer in Arlington, Massachusetts.

It’s the ’70s. Laura Bell graduates from college a pretty and promising young woman, but success nevertheless eludes her. While others eagerly and easily trade in their caps and gowns for careers and cars and families, she feels lost, unsure she knows how to make a grab for life’s proverbial brass ring. Comfortable around horses, drawn to a nomadic life and feeling “alone, unmoored and unworthy,” she believes she can hide her young, uncertain self in the wilderness of Wyoming, out among “the sage and rocks and transient lives of the herders.” She leaves the security of her parental home in Kentucky, takes up residence in a “sheep-wagon parked under the bare-branched cottonwoods of Whistle Creek Ranch,” and hopes for an inviolable escape. But the austere existence of a sheepherder holds surprises. “The isolation,” she writes candidly, “. . . tossed sharp splinters of life straight back up in my face, waking me to the crack of thunder, the smell of rain that hadn’t yet hit the ground.”

Part lyrical remembrance of a deeply intense relationship with nature in a sweepingly majestic landscape, part unswerving self-analysis, Claiming Ground delivers both beauty and unabashed reflection. It follows Bell’s journey down many trails: cattle hand, herder, forest ranger, masseuse. We see her as friend, lover, wife, mother, daughter. We witness her awkward progress in tendering tenderness; her anguish in divorce; her devastation in unspeakable loss; her brave willingness to put her battered heart back out there; her honesty. We admire her fortitude in rugged terrain and understand when she gives her all, “believing that a life can be built by hard work and a home created by sheer force.” We cry when she finds out it isn’t so, but take heart because she perseveres. “Time after time, things come together and they fall apart again,” she explains, “like breathing.”

You will find Claiming Ground in the memoir section, but it is not only a looking back; it is a guidepost to the possibilities ahead—the surprises that await us down our own trails.

Linda Stankard claims her ground in New York and Tennessee.

Where to start with Laura Munson’s wise, introspective and maddening memoir, in which she recalls the summer of her husband’s discontent? One moment you’re getting lost in her lovely meditations on the Montana life she and her husband have created with their two young children. The next, you’re ready to take an impromptu road trip to shake some sense into her yourself.

When Munson’s husband tells her he doesn’t love her anymore, her response is, “I don’t buy it.” She calmly vows to stand by while he works through whatever demons are causing the crisis. Take a walkabout in Australia, she suggests. Go to helicopter school. Build a “man cave” over the garage to escape to. Just don’t ruin the good thing we’ve built with our family.

As he stumbles through the summer, flitting in and out of their lives while he fishes, drinks and tries to find himself, Munson and her children have what she calls “a season of unlikely happiness.” She takes pleasure in cooking and setting off fireworks with the kids. And she feels like someone has her back: “Real live angels are showing up all around me like my grandparents and my father are piping them through some mystical realm, right into my life. . . . Even the way the grocery store checkout woman winked at me the other day felt like she was in on it. It’s like they’re saying: Follow your instincts. You are going to be okay, no matter what.”

Based on an essay she first wrote for the New York Times, Munson’s book has some very smart, insightful things to say about marriage, family and her choice to subscribe to what she calls “the end of suffering.” And yet . . . can you really embrace a philosophy that allows a husband to get away with some breathtakingly selfish behavior? Is that enlightened or just naïve? And does it matter if things work out in the end? Whatever your answers, This Is Not The Story You Think It Is will certainly leave you thinking.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.