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Golden Years

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
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Slow Birding

Joan E. Strassmann’s Slow Birding challenges readers to remember that there’s much to observe and learn about even our most quotidian avian neighbors.
NonfictionMemoir

Life on Delay

Review by Rachel Hoge

John Hendrickson’s Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter is the kind of memoir that educates, endears, impacts and devastates, often simultaneously. A journalist and senior editor at The Atlantic, Hendrickson is best known for his 2019 interview with then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The resulting piece had little to do with politics. Rather, Hendrickson’s article centered on Biden’s lifelong stutter and its influence on everything from his childhood to public speaking. The perceptible beating heart of the piece is Hendrickson himself, who tackled the subject of Biden’s stutter in a way only someone on the inside could. Hendrickson also speaks with a stutter, one that he deems severe. Life on Delay picks up after Hendrickson’s article went viral, when he was left to tackle media attention focused on the disability he had spent most of his life trying not to think about.

John Hendrickson shares what happened when he stopped regarding his stutter as an obstacle and started viewing it as a fact.

Although the book is predominantly a memoir, covering everything from adolescent bullying to teenage angst, it also includes a wide selection of interviews with other people who stutter. These conversations highlight Hendrickson’s journey from reluctant stuttering icon to a person at peace with himself and his stutter. His writing is unflinching as he depicts the daily life of someone with a disability only 1% of the U.S. population has. Personal yet informative, Life on Delay delves into the internal poeticism of someone who feels perpetually on the fringe while offering tangible advice regarding what to say or not say to someone with a stutter. By combining his own personal narrative with others’ life stories, Hendrickson provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of stutterers’ lived experiences, including creating music and art, facing childhood trauma, having their own “coming out” experiences and accepting disability as a part of their identity.

Life on Delay is not a disability memoir that focuses on trying to find a cure for stuttering, nor does it fall into the category of sentimental, inspirational stories of overcoming impossible odds. Instead, the book promotes a simple message: Obtaining true peace comes from accepting every part of yourself, including the things that bring you shame. It’s a universal message from a voice that has been misunderstood at best, demeaned and diminished at worst, making its impact on the reader all the more profound.

John Hendrickson’s Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter is a memoir that educates, endears, impacts and devastates, often simultaneously.

Windfall

Erika Bolstad’s heartfelt memoir is also a robust discussion of the environmental implications of America’s never-ending quest for energy—and wealth.
NonfictionMemoir

4 incredible memoirs written by novelists

Feature by Julie Hale

Jami Attenberg (All This Could Be Yours) looks back on her years as a roaming artist in I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. Attenberg has lived an uncompromising life as a writer, and she muses about her choices in this forthright memoir. Frequently crossing the country to promote her books, Attenberg is most at home when she’s on the move. The nature of the creative process and the human need for connection are among the book’s many rich discussion topics.

In I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death, Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet) recalls the harrowing moments that have shaped her as a woman and mother. From an illness that almost claimed her life as a child to a dangerous dive off a cliff in Scotland, O’Farrell details her many near-death experiences. Over the course of 17 chapters, she considers life’s impermanence and the ways in which our bodies betray us. The result is an extraordinary narrative full of poetry and courage.

Akwaeke Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji) delivers a compelling account of their artistic growth and search for identity in Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. Comprised of letters the author writes to friends and colleagues, the narrative is a captivating chronicle of personal transformation. Emezi, who hails from Nigeria, put down roots in New Orleans and has experienced literary success, even as they continued to seek a more authentic existence. Uncertainty and longing animate their correspondence, and Emezi uses the epistolary form to great effect as they question long-held notions of identity, gender and family.

Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing) reflects on the costs of structural racism in Men We Reaped: A Memoir. The death of her brother and a number of male friends inspired Ward to explore mortality and how loss impacts the living. In this searing memoir, she remembers her Mississippi upbringing and the ways in which economic inequality, drugs and societal stressors create an environment in which Black men are needlessly sacrificed. Ward writes with sensitivity about mourning and moving forward, and themes of race, grief and gender will inspire meaningful dialogue among readers.

These revealing memoirs are perfect to read with your book club.

Rough Sleepers

With a straightforward scrutiny that reveals without judging, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder offers a long, hard look at the lives of homeless people.
NonfictionGraphic MemoirsFamily & Relationships

Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars

Review by Annie Harvieux

In Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars, author Rick Louis tells the story of losing his baby son to a rare neurological illness in 2013. “This is not a story about grief,” Louis writes. “It is just the story of a little boy who was only here for a short while and what he meant to us.”

It spoils nothing to tell readers that Ronan dies; this is revealed at the book’s beginning by showing present-day Louis next to a baby-size vacant space, populated by twinkling stars. The book then moves backward in time, starting with the day Ronan was born and the joy Louis and his wife, Emily, took in him. (Emily published a bestselling memoir about Ronan in 2013 called The Still Point of the Turning World.) However, Ronan’s parents soon began to notice some health concerns, such as Ronan’s difficulty focusing his eyes, and sought medical attention. An ophthalmologist revealed that Ronan had signs of Tay-Sachs disease, a lethal condition that prevents the breakdown of lipids in the brain and nerves. When the diagnosis was confirmed, Louis and Emily had to confront their child’s mortality as they did everything in their power to enrich his life. As Ronan’s health deteriorated due to seizures and breathing difficulties, the uncertainty and strain also deteriorated his parents’ relationship.

Louis imbues this mostly tragic narrative with earnestness, quirk and even humor, paired neatly with (often silly) illustrations of what’s going on in characters’ minds. All the while, Louis holds true to telling the story of his time with Ronan with profound sincerity, reverence and honesty. Never does Louis speculate about what Ronan may have been thinking or feeling, nor does he graft personalization onto Ronan’s suffering. Instead, Louis simply recounts the horror of watching his child suffer while also expressing the pure joy of being a parent to a beautiful and unique person.

This is the first book for both Louis and illustrator Lara Antal, and they make good use of the graphic memoir form by pairing a cinematic, moving tale of family and loss with expressively drawn faces. Viewing the pain in Louis’ and Emily’s faces as they contemplate their child’s death is almost as haunting as watching the life drain from Ronan’s eyes as his disease progresses. Recurring abstract images, such as gently coiling swirls of black and sheets of ombre static, populate backgrounds, faces and even trees. These convey emotional heft in a way that is more gut-centered than paragraphs of prose about a character’s feeling.

In a culture where grief is treated as something to avoid at all costs and dispose of quickly, this book provides a valuable counterpoint. Carrying an eternal love for someone who has died is, for Louis, as vital as it is excruciating. For those who have known profound grief, or those willing to expand their understanding of its nuances, Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars will be a valuable read.

In his debut graphic memoir, Rick Louis tells the story of his son Ronan, who died of Tay-Sachs disease, with profound sincerity, reverence and honesty.

The Rules We Break

Eric Zimmerman has gathered an array of interactive games designed to encourage creative thinking, facilitate collaboration and improve communication.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

A Heart That Works

Review by Alice Cary

“Having your child die is so brutally humbling I struggle to describe it,” writes comedian and “Catastrophe” actor Rob Delaney. And yet he does manage to describe it, and does it well, in his unspeakably admirable memoir A Heart That Works. The comedian’s first book was memorably titled Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. This second, decidedly different, book describes the life of his 2-year-old son, Henry, who died from a brain tumor in 2018.

Life seemed practically perfect for Delaney and his beloved wife, Leah, with their “beautiful little clump of boys”—three under the age of 5. However, Henry became ill at 11 months from an apple-size tumor right next to his brainstem. Instantly, their lives were thrust into another dimension as Henry faced surgery, chemo and 14 months of hospitalization, only for his cancer to eventually return without any safe options for treatment. Delaney recounts the ordeal in searingly honest terms, conveying the intricate cobweb of emotions he experienced, often simultaneously: grief, rage, gratitude, grace and, most of all, love for Henry, their family and the many people who supported them during this time.

“It often felt like we were falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion,” Delaney writes, “with each successive piece of bad news.” Still, they were able to savor sweet moments with Henry and his brothers, even in the face of an additional family tragedy: Delaney’s brother-in-law died by suicide during Henry’s hospitalization. This unexpected death struck hard, especially since Delaney has wrestled with suicidal ideation himself, and since he wasn’t able to reach out as he normally would have because his son had been so ill.

Despite this tsunami of tragedies, there is humor, often black humor, throughout Delaney’s account. “If you can’t have fun dressed as a family of skeletons in a pediatric cancer ward,” he writes, “I don’t know what to tell you.” There are parcels of advice amid his frank, razor-sharp writing as well. Delaney digs deep on every page, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the worst moments of his life. His is truly a heart that works.

Comedian Rob Delaney digs deep in his second memoir, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the life and death of his son.
NonfictionEssays

A Guest at the Feast

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Lovers of Colm Tóibín’s novels (among them Brooklyn, The Master and The Magician) might not know that the Irish author is also a longtime essayist. A Guest at the Feast gathers recent essays that show his full range.

A Guest at the Feast is divided into three sections: personal essays, essays examining the power of the Irish Catholic church and the papacy, and literary essays. The collection’s first essay, “Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall,” opens without fanfare: “It all started with my balls.” Detailing his bout with testicular cancer, Tóibín turns a close eye to its vicissitudes—what he cooked when he couldn’t taste anything, the tedium of chemotherapy, the complications he endured—making the subject funny, fresh and moving.

Part two draws on Tóibín’s youth in a repressive 1960s Ireland, attending a boarding school led by priests later convicted of sexual abuse. His reported essay “The Bergoglio Smile: Pope Francis” offers a more complicated view of the pope and his failures to oppose Argentina’s authoritarian military regime when Francis was a young Jesuit leader. Part three includes an essay on novelist Marilynne Robinson and the way her novels encounter religious belief. “How do you create a religious or a nonsecular protagonist in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book?” he asks, leading the reader through a quick parade of modernist efforts (T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, among others) before settling into Robinson’s novels Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack. This essay, in particular, is a marvel.

But the title essay, “A Guest at the Feast,” is the book’s highlight. This long personal essay (or short memoir) roams through the small Irish town of Enniscorthy, where Tóibín grew up, offering anecdotes about the townspeople and his family, including two about his mother, who was unafraid to confront one of her son’s bullying teachers and who read banned Irish novels in the 1960s. By turns conversational and poetic, the essay also shows the first glimmers of Tóibín becoming a writer. Describing a train journey between Enniscorthy and Wexford, he writes, “In that silvery still afternoon light, for several miles you see no roads and hardly any buildings, just trees and the calm strong river.” 

A Guest at the Feast is a collection that will remind readers of Tóibín’s power as a writer of more than just memorable fiction. His cleareyed, considered critiques of powerful people and vivid personal essays can make readers long for a place they’ve never seen.

A Guest at the Feast is a reminder of Colm Tóibín's power as a writer of more than just fiction.

Koala

With her scientific yet accessible writing style, Danielle Klode makes great strides to advance our knowledge of the largely misunderstood koala.
NonfictionScienceLifestylesArt

The Cosmic Dance

Review by Susannah Felts

Stephen Ellcock has made a name for himself as a digital curator, or “image alchemist.” He ventures deep into visual art archives and surfaces with paintings, drawings, photographs and other images that inspire and intrigue. His fourth book, The Cosmic Dance, is “but a tiny sample of the fruits of ceaseless foraging,” and like his previous volume, The Book of Change, it is as curious a compendium as it is difficult to summarize.

Ellcock takes us on a magic carpet cruise through centuries of art and science via images from medieval art, abstract paintings—you name it—that invoke the cosmos, the spiritual realm, the geological and insect worlds, the human body, geometry and much more. This enchanting book invites readers to muse on the repetition of patterns and the power of symbols, and to discover illuminating connections between visual representation and meaning-making across time and place.

Stephen Ellcock journeys through centuries of art and science via images that invoke the cosmos, the spiritual realm, the human body, geometry and much more.

Women Holding Things

Maira Kalman’s latest tender and revealing book combines free verse and prose with paintings of women holding things both real and intangible.

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