Three months after her father died, Canadian author and artist Kyo Maclear took a DNA test from a genealogy website. Her resulting memoir, Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets, could have taken its subtitle from the test’s disclaimer: “You may discover unanticipated facts about yourself or your family.” Nothing was more unanticipated than the discovery that her beloved father, journalist and documentary filmmaker Michael Maclear, was not her biological father.

Maclear is able to piece together the facts of her biological father’s identity, even the names and locations of her half siblings. But she knows she is unable to uncover the truth of her origins—the hows and whys of her birth—without the help of her mother, her father’s unruly, Japanese ex-wife. And that is where her quandary lies, because her mother is firmly rooted in the present with no interest in reconstructing the past. Furthermore, even if her mother wanted to tell Kyo the entire story of her origins, her ability to piece it together fades as she gradually succumbs to dementia.

As Maclear probes more deeply into her the intertwined story of her three parents—her mother, her father, and her biological father—more questions are raised than can possibly be answered. What is identity? What obligations do we have to people who happen to share our DNA? As her mother’s memory fades, these questions become deeper, more personal. Reconciliation seems impossible to Maclear, though, when the other person will not or cannot break the lifelong silence. Challenging the idea that our life story follows an arc, Maclear instead posits life as a free-form construction of patches of memory, actions and silences.

Maclear’s writing is poetic in the best sense. Using the image of her mother’s wild, rambling garden as a foundation, Maclear examines these questions in detail, without proposing a pat answer to any of them because, ultimately, they are unanswerable. Instead, Maclear allows the reader to struggle with them as she did, granting her audience the space and silence to reconcile the gaps and secrets in their own lives.

With five novels to her credit, Martha McPhee has well-established credentials as a storyteller. In her memoir, Omega Farm, she drops the veil of invention to share an intensely personal tale of her attempt to reclaim a troubled past amid a ceaselessly demanding present.

In mid-March 2020, McPhee, her husband and fellow writer, Mark, and their children Livia and Jasper, decamped from their New York City apartment to the eponymous farm—a 45-acre property about 10 miles outside her birthplace of Princeton, New Jersey—to escape the COVID-19 pandemic and help provide care for her mother, well-known photographer Pryde Brown, whose decade-long dementia was deepening. McPhee, the youngest of four children of Brown and famed New Yorker writer John McPhee, had spent most of her childhood at the farm after her parents divorced when she was four and her mother began a romantic relationship with Dan Sullivan, the farm’s owner, that lasted until his death in 1994.

McPhee’s memoir takes stories of growing up amid the “big sprawling chaotic mess” of Omega Farm with her three sisters, Sullivan’s five children and a 10th child produced from the Sullivan-Brown union, and seamlessly connects them to reflections on how the echoes of those experiences complicate her struggles with the demands of caregiving and her own present-day familial relationships. Sullivan, an unlicensed Gestalt therapist, is “something of a con man, [a] serial philanderer,” and a charismatic, if sometimes disordered figure. It soon becomes clear that Sullivan’s repeated sexual abuse of his stepdaughters lies at the core of her difficulty coming to terms with her memories.

If all this weren’t enough, urbanite McPhee is called upon to shoulder the burden of superintending a haphazardly cared-for property that includes a 35-acre forest. While confronting an unruly strand of bamboo and a failed septic system, she learns that Omega Farm’s population of ash trees has been infested with a devastating pest: the emerald ash borer. Soon, she devotes herself to the task of forest preservation, dealing with a land steward, unscrupulous loggers and the management hunter she hires to help suppress the ravenous deer population. Throughout, McPhee candidly discloses the frustrations and satisfactions of this worthy but all-consuming project.

McPhee is an efficient, graceful writer, who makes no effort to spare her own flaws even as she searches for the roots of her mature turmoil in the shortcomings of adults who failed in the fundamental task of protecting her younger self. In barely three years since its onset, the COVID-19 pandemic already has produced a small shelf of impressive memoirs. Martha McPhee’s Omega Farm easily earns itself a place in that collection.