The pictures are burned into our collective brains, and the facts are familiar to people all over the world. But five years after 9/11, many of us still want to know: How did those spouses cope? How would I manage if faced with such overwhelming tragedy? The story of how four 9/11 widows coped and healed and found love again is told in Love You, Mean It: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Friendship. Patricia Carrington, Julia Collins, Claudia Gerbasi and Ann Haynes were vibrant young women, almost all of them newlyweds, when their loved ones left for work one September day and never came back. Their shared memoir traces their storybook courtships and marriages, how their lives were wrenched apart after the attack and how fate brought them together as The Widow’s Club based on true understanding and the gruesome bond they share. We’ve learned that life isn’t always easy or predictable or fair, the women write.

As they rebuild lives now vulnerable to horror, and sink into routines where his side of the bed doesn’t exist, they drown their tears together in New York restaurants and bars and heal each other through constant calls and e-mail (the book’s title is taken from a favorite way to sign off). They also take trips to the beach and foreign places where any and all emotions can surface (a trip to the island where Julia eloped with her husband nearly proves too much) and attend yearly memorials at Ground Zero.

It’s impossible to truly understand another’s sorrow, but Love You, Mean It manages to demonstrate the massive personal devastation of the 9/11 attack, and as the women begin to date and even marry again ( Maybe it was ungrateful to pray for more than the enormous amount we’d already been given, they write), the generosity and resiliency of the human heart. Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

In Tattoo for a Slave, 92-year-old novelist Hortense Calisher (A Sunday Jew) renders a personalized history of the last 100 years of the United States. Hailed as a mixture of fiction and autobiography, Calisher’s memoir tells the story of her Southern, Jewish, slave-owning family, beginning with her father’s birth in 1861.

Language, with its potential to be playful, evocative, elusive, nuanced and shocking, is the real star of the book. Calisher’s style has appropriately been compared to that of Vladimir Nabokov; some may also find it reminiscent of John Barth. Calisher hopscotches between memories and related incidents, creating a rich tapestry rather than a driving narrative. The three characters that emerge most vividly are her immigrant mother, her business-tycoon father and her self-engrossed brother. They are distinct individuals, but suggest different facets of the American experience.

Calisher’s mother, Hedwig, represents the survivalism of immigrants: she is unsentimental, opportunistic and contemptuous of the new world in which she finds herself. Calisher’s father, Joe, is the clear hero of the book. Pressured to support a sprawling family, he subordinates his artistic, intellectual interests to become successful in the perfume industry, evincing the classic American tension between culture and commerce. Her brother emerges perhaps the most vividly. He appears to have inherited only the greed and self-absorption of his mother and father with none of their redeeming characteristics. His character points cautiously to the end result of America’s relentless quest for money and personal ease.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Calisher’s portrait of her family and her country is the apparent distance she keeps from her own motherland. She often refers ironically to Amerika, spelled as German immigrants spelled it as if she were describing it from the point of view of a foreigner, rather than someone born in Richmond, Virginia. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.