While her Jewish "aunts" played mah-jongg in their Queens kitchen, young Martha Frankel preferred the "uncles" poker games in the living room every Friday night. By age 10, she had learned to read the Daily Racing Form and was accompanying her CPA father to the track. This early entree into gambling would come to haunt Frankel much later in life, when her world turned to Hats & Eyeglasses, a poker term for a losing hand and the title of her candid, conversational and even comical new memoir.

When Frankel's father died just before she started high school, she filled the void with alcohol, drugs and men, and smugly prided herself on never becoming hooked, like some of her relatives. As she developed a loving, stable relationship with her artist husband, she began writing articles for Details magazine and enjoyed immediate success, jet-setting around the world to interview celebrities.

Although Frankel hadn't touched a card since her parents' game nights, she returned to poker in her mid-40s to conduct research for a screenplay. For advice, she turned to a former professional player she knew; to her mother, who earned extra money playing during the Depression; and to Michael, a mentor who encouraged her during her first fearful Wednesday night games. Poker was so immediately thrilling that she refused assignments worth thousands of dollars to practice her game all day. When she needed to pay bills, she built her schedule around her Wednesday night games. And when she was good enough – and she was good all right – she scheduled her Hollywood interviews around lunch, so she could reach the casinos by evening and sleep in the morning.

Thinking her life couldn't get any better, Frankel discovered online poker and quickly became addicted. No matter that she was losing more money than she could hope to recover, that she was abandoning her family and friends. As Frankel confronts her shame and family tendencies, her raw yet touching storytelling will inspire gambling addicts, their loved ones and those who simply want to know more about this debilitating compulsion.

Angela Leeper is an educational consultant and writer in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

Coming from anyone other than Julie Andrews, name-dropping would seem like bragging. Instead, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years simply offers the recollections of an extraordinary talent whose encounters with the theater and music glitterati of the 1940s, '50s and '60s shaped the formative years of her career. Andrews' writing is refreshing and authentic in its wide-eyed wonder, bolstered by her diaries and journals. Andrews performed with Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady and Richard Burton in Camelot on Broadway, married (and later divorced) legendary set and costume designer Tony Walton, hobnobbed with Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle, was mentored by the musical team of Lerner and Loewe, and became best friends withcomedian Carol Burnett. Walt Disney himself asked Andrews to be his Mary Poppins in what would turn into her Academy Award-winning debut film performance.

But the polished, refined Englishwoman whose accolades include Emmys, Golden Globes, a Kennedy Center Honor and three Tony Award nominations, started in 1935 as the oldest child of divorced parents, poor and poorly educated. When singing lessons from her stepfather opened a new world, Andrews took her big voice on the vaudeville circuit.

At times embracing her success, and at others overwhelmed by the pressure of providing for her family, Andrews honestly and often humorously recounts the seminal moments of her early career. While still in her teens, she sang for royals, debuted on the London stage and made her way to America's Great White Way. She lived in cold-water flats and luxurious apartments, found an island hideaway and struggled to balance the demands of fame and her own desires for security and home.

Always considered a class act by fellow performers, Andrews demonstrates in her memoir just why she's a grand dame of the entertainment world. She surely knows many dark secrets about countless theater, music and film legends, yet chooses to share only the best sides of them, and herself, in Home. Her generous nature shines through every word.

Mary Poppins is the first movie Kelly Koepke remembers seeing.

Masterful storytellers know to hook their audiences quickly, going right to the heart of things. And so goes novelist Isabel Allende (House of the Spirits) in her new memoir, The Sum of Our Days, whose first sentence roundly states: "There is no lack of drama in my life, I have more than enough three-ring-circus material for writing . . ." No paucity indeed; what ensues is an exuberant, unpredictable, melancholic and loving narrative that spans the 13 years after the death of her daughter, Paula. The book was conceived as an intimate letter to Paula, and is largely drawn from the long daily correspondence with Allende's own mother. "I will begin by telling you what has happened since . . . you left us, and will limit myself to the family, which is what interests you," Allende writes.

This story of family and extended family is certain to interest any reader; who doesn't enjoy a good dish of familial drama? The Sum of Our Days, however, may be especially delectable to writers and fans of Allende's fiction, as Allende generously reveals her creative inner world – the genesis of her many books, her fears and superstitions about writing (she must begin a new book only on January 8 of every new year), and the ways in which a diverse, eccentric pack of family, friends and experiences find their ways into her wondrous tales.

Allende does not hold back in recounting her grief over the loss of a daughter, and The Sum of Our Days is tinged with profound sadness in places. It is also a moving, often humorous, recollection not only of family, but also of essential friends, including exotic, warmhearted Tabra and the wittily wise Sisters of Disorder. Finally, this memoir is a lustrous meditation on placing the complexities of love and relationship, spirituality and suffering into a greater context. As Allende writes, "you have to forget facts and concentrate on the truth. . . . Gently, the waters will settle, the mud will sink to the bottom, and there will be transparency."

Alison Hood writes from Marin County, California.