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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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Raising Raffi

Keith Gessen's narration brings a sense of reassurance to his memoir, which charts a new brand of fatherhood with clarity, humor and pathos.
NonfictionMemoir

Hua Hsu immortalizes a friendship cut tragically short

Interview by Alden Mudge

For 24 years, Hua Hsu has been carrying around a padded envelope stuffed with memorabilia. Things like “a pack of Export A’s with two cigarettes left,” a funeral program, letters, cassette tapes, receipts, punchlines written on napkins, a paperback copy of Edward Carr’s What Is History? Hsu hastily gathered all of these things and more in the aftermath of the murder of his friend Ken, who was killed in a carjacking in 1998, the summer before their senior year at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I’m an archivist at heart,” Hsu says during a call to his home in Brooklyn, New York. When his friend was killed, Hsu says he “just began writing everything down.” His obsessive cataloging even led his college friends to choose him to deliver the eulogy at Ken’s funeral. Hsu has continued poring over his gathered notes and memorabilia ever since, trying to find a way “to capture certain feelings since those days.” But until recently, he says, “it didn’t seem to have any possibility of becoming a narrative.”

Read our starred review of ‘Stay True’ by Hua Hsu.

As he describes in his richly probing memoir, Stay True, Hsu grew up in Cupertino, California, the only child of parents who came to the U.S. in the 1960s for college and to escape a repressive regime in Taiwan. He was an often solitary child who found expression through and distinguished himself with his avid love of music, which he wrote about in vibrant personal zines. At Berkeley, he curated mixtapes for every occasion, like trips in his Volvo with Ken and others to pick up friends from the airport or even just for local food runs. Outside of curating the aesthetics of his personal identity, Hsu spent those years tutoring inmates at San Quentin State Prison, volunteering as a mentor for youths in neighboring Richmond, California, and participating in the growing Asian American-led political movements of the 1990s.

Hsu says he hopes Stay True captures the feeling of that moment. “I want the book to sound like what life was like then. It’s hard to describe to someone who didn’t experience America Online what boredom felt like at the time, or what the pace of life is like if you’re in college pre-internet, or just what it felt like to be at Berkeley. . . . I didn’t want it to be purely nostalgic. I wanted it to feel like you’re just hanging out in this other time.”

“I didn’t want it to be purely nostalgic. I wanted it to feel like you’re just hanging out in this other time.”

Within these descriptions of pre-Y2K Northern California, Ken often seems elusive. Hsu quotes his therapist and another friend who asked him how close he really was to Ken, and foregrounding that question was deliberate, Hsu says. “When you’re young, you’re just living day to day. Then if there’s some kind of fracture or trauma, you’re forced to step out of your context and examine what’s meaningful to you. There’s a way I took this friendship for granted. When I was writing in my journal, I was always returning to how to describe [Ken]: his voice, his laugh, his skin. You’d never have occasion to do something like that if he were still alive. The question of closeness only becomes visible when it’s no longer there.”

Stay True by Hua Hsu

Hsu, who arrived at Berkeley with alternative rock sensibilities and a deliberately oddball style of dress, did not immediately like Ken, a handsome, conventionally dressed, self-assured fraternity member. Ken was a Japanese American whose grandparents had been incarcerated in an internment camp during World War II, but compared to Hsu, Ken had thoroughly assimilated, down to the Abercrombie wardrobe. In this way, Ken seemed to represent to Hsu a different life path—one he was initially skeptical about. “He was comfortable in his own skin,” Hsu says. “He was confident. . . . It started off as something I would just dismiss, and then it became intriguing.”

One of Stay True‘s many fascinating qualities is its examination of the differing ways Asian Americans embrace and reject American culture. In particular, Hsu writes lovingly of his parents’ experiences as new immigrants. At one point, Hsu’s father was able to return to Taiwan to work as a well-paid professional. This being the pre-internet age, he communicated with his son via fax machine while he was in Taiwan, and the fatherly love expressed in those faxes is remarkable. At another point, Hsu describes his mother, no longer among the newest immigrants to her San Jose suburb, almost comically deriding the rudeness of more recent Chinese immigrants to burgeoning Silicon Valley.

“The question of closeness only becomes visible when it’s no longer there.”

But Stay True‘s focus remains on a friendship: its qualities, its vagaries, its lingering questions and impacts, frozen and spotlighted by its traumatic end. After Berkeley, Hsu went on to Harvard, where he continued to obsess over his late friend while feeling “marooned” on the East Coast. These days, he says he “doesn’t feel entirely at home anywhere,” but he’s at least acclimated to the East Coast. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and until recently, he was an associate professor of English and director of American Studies at Vassar College. In 2022, he became a professor of literature at Bard College, teaching writing and Asian literature. He and his wife have a 7-year-old son. Marital strife, he jokes, centers on alternate street parking and who will fulfill the work quota at the food co-op.

So much has changed in the last 24 years—but creating this book after so much time and deliberation has not brought Hsu catharsis or closure, he says. “That feels too climactic. But it has given me a lot of peace.”

Headshot of Hua Hsu by Devlin Claro

Ever since his friend was murdered in 1998, Hua Hsu has been searching for a way to capture the feeling of their time together.
NonfictionGraphic Memoirs

Kate Beaton’s ‘Ducks’: From crude oil to a refined graphic memoir

Interview by Laura Sackton

In 2005, in order to pay off her student loans, Kate Beaton left her home in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to work on the Alberta oil sands, a vast region in Canada that contains one of the largest deposits of crude oil in the world. During this time, Beaton began writing “Hark! A Vagrant,” a witty, irreverent webcomic about history, literary figures and her own life. The beloved series has been collected into two bestselling books, Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops. 

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Beaton’s first full-length graphic memoir, is a beautiful and nuanced account of her time working in the town of Fort McMurray, as well as at various temporary work camps owned by several oil companies. It directly addresses the sexual harassment and violence that she and others experienced in the oil sands, as well as the toxic masculinity that permeates the work camps. 

We talked with Beaton about the difficulties of capturing the sometimes contradictory realities of such a complicated place.

You started posting “Hark! A Vagrant” 15 years ago. How have you changed as a writer and artist since then?
I’ve changed a lot. I was only 23 when I started making things that would be “Hark! A Vagrant.” I had gone through a lot in some ways, but I was very young and inexperienced, and I look at some of my old work and cringe at it, but this is the same for almost anyone making things in the public eye. Everyone is a young fool for a while, and the world changes around you, and you get older and hopefully not more foolish but the other way around.

Right now I’m 38, and it has been a long time since I was a fresh face on the comics scene. I’m more like the wallpaper or a worn-out chair, but I like being that. No one is surprised I’m here.

Ducks
Read our starred review of ‘Ducks.’

How did writing those comics affect your life in the work camps? Did you have any sense of how your career would unfold?
After I had comics in my life, working in the camps got easier, because I had this thing that was just for me. Before I had that, I lost myself. It was just work and people chipping away at you in a certain way. Then I had comics and I’d go home to my little camp room after work and draw them and put them online, and here I was in a work camp in the oil sands, very alone in many ways, and I was connecting to people who saw me for who I was through my work. I felt like myself. And I didn’t want to give that up or lose that.

As the book begins, you write about the tension between loving your home in Cape Breton and needing to leave it to find work. During your time in the oil sands, some of the most poignant, powerful moments—both good and bad—are the interactions you have with people from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. Talk to me about how you feel about these places. Do you see this memoir as being about Cape Breton as well as about Alberta?
It makes sense that it is. Cape Breton has always exported workers. They leave for where the work is, and they leave together. To Boston, Sudbury, Windsor, Alberta—not always, but often you see it. And when they do, there is a shared history and a connection that is always happening. 

My grandfather went out on harvest trains in the 1930s, from Nova Scotia to the prairies. There were 1,200 people on the train, he said, and there was one car for schoolteachers. Women. Along the way, the men smashed up the train and looted. “They were full of the devil,” he said. How do you think that car of women felt with those 1,200 men? I know how they felt. 

You think your story is new, you think you have something new to say, but really it is all something you are born into. My mother’s family all went to work in the car factories of Windsor, and they would come visit in the summer. And I would watch my aunts go crying into the car to go back and Grandma go silently back into the house with her private sorrow, and I would know that’s going to be me someday—or rather, that this is the choice I will have to make, to stay or to go wherever the work is.

When it really was time for me to go, Alberta was where the work was, and I went. I thought nothing of it at all. And I had no idea, none at all, what I was doing. Then you come home and talk to your relatives about what happened when they left, and they all say the same thing: “We had no idea what we were doing.” “I’ve never been so cold.” “I’ve never been so lonely.” “Thank god I knew this other person from home.”

“Everyone is a young fool for a while, and the world changes around you, and you get older and hopefully not more foolish but the other way around.”

One of the many remarkable things about your memoir is its nuance: You write so honestly about a complicated place. As many readers will likely not have given oil mining much thought beyond “necessary jobs” or “climate destruction,” what do you hope they take away from reading Ducks?
Nuance is not a bad thing to take away. I think it is a book about empathy—however you want to take that, and whomever or whatever you think that comment is about. Then that is what it is about.

You convey so much emotion through your characters” facial expressions, images of massive equipment and views of the surrounding landscape, both natural and human. What’s your drawing process like when bringing scenes from your memory to the page?
Oh, I had a lot of visual references. I can’t just draw an excavator from memory! But I knew what I was looking for in references—that was memory. You see those images again, and you can really smell it and feel it, being out there. I just wanted people to feel like they were there.

There are so many people in the book—by my count, over 40 named characters! What are the challenges or joys of drawing so many different people?
The challenge was that I drew a lot of people the same! And my editors made me go back and change some of them because people were getting confused—haha! But when you have a bunch of guys in hard hats, safety glasses and safety vests, they do start looking alike. So that was challenging for sure. I was mostly concerned that I didn’t mess up on any of them and make people confused. 

Ducks illustration

Illustration from ‘Ducks’ © 2022 by Kate Beaton. Reproduced by permission of Drawn & Quarterly.

Since your time in Alberta, you’ve lived all over Canada, as well as in New York. Now that you’re back in Cape Breton, how does it feel to be home? 
It feels natural. I liked being away in those places. I think it was a healthy thing. I learned a lot from being in cities like Toronto and New York. But I always felt like a peg on a board there too, like a thing that didn’t fit in the picture. Here, I feel like part of the painting.

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your 21-year-old self who has just arrived in Alberta? What would you say to other young women thinking about working in the oil sands?
My advice would be that you can actually ask for better money or apply for a better job. Someone told me that I wasn’t allowed to do either in the first year that I was there, and I believed them. And even the second year that I was there, I didn’t challenge the money that I was being paid, and I was in one of the lowest-paid tiers of people on site. I just didn’t know any better. And we are not really raised to know better or to ask for more when other people have no problem doing that.

Photo of Kate Beaton by Stephen Rankin Photography.

The award-winning comics artist solidifies her reputation for storytelling prowess and remarkable range.

Predator

Ander Monson’s exploration of the 1987 film Predator has the rampant energy and good-natured, aw-shucks humility of a lively conversation in a movie theater lobby.
Nonfiction

Fall 2022 preview: Most anticipated nonfiction

Feature by Christy, Associate Editor

Some of the best historians, scientists, poets and memoirists working today—plus a few multitalented movie and music stars—are ready to dazzle you with their latest works of brilliance.

Scenes From My Life by Michael K. Williams
Crown | August 23

Growing up in an East Flatbush housing project in Brooklyn, New York, Michael K. Williams was a fragile outsider and bullied kid. As he grew older, he progressed from Manhattan dance clubs to a nascent modeling career, then to acting. When the beloved performer died in September 2021, his memoir about this wild life journey, written with author Jon Sternfeld, was nearly finished. Now the posthumously published Scenes From My Life will explore not only Williams’ many iconic television roles, especially Omar from “The Wire,” but also his work as an activist and advocate for young people who get stuck in the school-to-prison pipeline. Scenes From My Life will cement Williams’ legacy as a kind, thoughtful man who used his public prominence to give back to his community.

A Place in the World by Frances Mayes
Crown | August 23

In Frances Mayes’ new collection of essays, she ponders the meaning of “home,” that intangible thing to which countless magazines and blogs are dedicated. The storied author recalls the literal homes where she has taken up residence over the years—from the iconic Italian villa from Under the Tuscan Sun, to the humid and fragrant Georgia town that was the subject of her memoir Under Magnolia, to the North Carolina farmhouse where she and her husband live when they’re not in Italy. She even recalls temporary homes, such as rentals in Mexico and Capri, as well as the sculptures, books, kitchens and fireplaces of her friends’ homes around the world. Tempered by a dash of wistful examination as Mayes enters her 80s, A Place in the World promises to be as nourishing and comforting as a home-cooked meal.

Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv
FSG | September 13

Rachel Aviv’s first book explores questions of self-knowledge and mental health, subjects she’s previously examined in her award-winning journalism for The New Yorker. Strangers to Ourselves offers sensitive case histories of people whose experiences of mental illness exceed the limits of psychiatric terminology, diagnosis and treatment—including the author’s own experience of being the youngest child in the U.S. to receive a diagnosis of anorexia. After being hospitalized for a failure to eat or drink, she met anorexic girls twice her age and learned to mimic their strategies for losing weight. But which came first: the diagnosis or her symptoms? This contradiction between psychiatric terminology and lived experience is the core issue driving Aviv’s book, which also examines Western psychiatry’s long history of ignoring the link between racial violence and mental illness. It’s a sharp, compassionate and necessary investigation, not to be missed.

What If? 2 by Randall Munroe
Riverhead | September 13

Randall Munroe returns with the answers to more questions that you have probably never asked. (What would happen if the solar system were filled with soup out to Jupiter? If a T. rex were released in New York City, how many humans per day would it need to consume to get its needed calorie intake?) The former NASA roboticist and bestselling author of How To, What If? and Thing Explainer combines scientific prowess with humor and his signature stick figure comics to illustrate complicated physics concepts in the silliest ways possible. But as Munroe writes in the introduction to What If? 2, “The same kind of science is used to answer serious questions and silly ones.” So abandon your pretensions, all ye who enter here, and you’ll be sure to learn something new.

The Year of the Puppy by Alexandra Horowitz
Viking | September 20

Do you ever wish you’d known your dog for its whole life? That you could have met it right after it was born and watched it grow into the dog you know and love today? Dog cognition extraordinaire and bestselling author Alexandra Horowitz (Our Dogs, Ourselves) decided that her family’s next dog would provide the perfect opportunity to study puppy development, and The Year of the Puppy records everything she learned in the first year of that puppy’s life. It’s a heartwarming personal story that seamlessly incorporates captivating science about our beloved canine companions. It’s also a must-read for dog lovers, which probably goes without saying, but we suspect that even cat lovers will find much to enjoy in this endearing scientific memoir.

Stay True by Hua Hsu
Doubleday | September 27

New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu’s memoir is born of trauma. In the summer of 1998, Hsu’s friend and classmate Ken Ishida was murdered in a carjacking just before their senior year at the University of California, Berkeley. Stay True examines the reverberations of a friendship frozen in time by death, while charting a parallel exploration of the experiences of immigration and assimilation that both drew together and pushed apart Hsu, whose parents are immigrants from Taiwan, and Ishida, whose Japanese American family had been in the United States for generations. Ultimately it’s a touching portrait of the years in a young person’s life when every album, every item of clothing is a stake in the ground of their burgeoning identity. Readers who came of age at the turn of the 21st century will be especially rewarded by the pop culture gems studded throughout.

Fen, Bog and Swamp by Annie Proulx
Scribner | September 27

The acclaimed author of The Shipping News, Barkskins and Brokeback Mountain turns her perceptive eye to the calamitous destruction of the world’s peatlands in Fen, Bog & Swamp. Annie Proulx is a lifelong environmentalist but not a scientist, so her language is always accessible as she explains how fens, bogs and swamps differ by water level and vegetation, and how crucial they are to a healthy ecosystem. She ranges widely, both thematically and geographically, and considers plenty of archaeology and literature along the way. She also sprinkles in reminiscences of her own wetland encounters and discusses the interactions between human and peatland throughout history, such as the ritual sacrifices that were later turned up as “bog bodies” by terrified peat cutters. It’s a smorgasbord of information that nature lovers won’t want to miss.

The Sporty One by Melanie Chisholm
Grand Central | September 27

Melanie Chisholm, aka Mel C., aka Sporty Spice, is giving readers everything, all that joy can bring, this I swear. But The Sporty One doesn’t just cover the joyful highs of Chisholm’s life—such as answering an ad in the newspaper at age 22 and landing herself in one of the world’s biggest musical groups, performing at the Olympics and appearing on the covers of countless magazines—but plumbs the darker depths of her life, too, including a lifelong struggle with perfectionism and insecurities about her body. If you’ve ever uttered the phrase “girl power” while wearing platform shoes, this book will be a wonderful bright spot this autumn.

Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
Little, Brown Spark | October 11

Tricia Hersey is the founder of the Nap Ministry, an organization that facilitates workshops and art installations that explore rest as a tool for healing and reconnecting with our humanity. She makes her publishing debut with Rest Is Resistance, a searing indictment of capitalist grind culture. With a background in theology, art and community organizing, Hersey especially addresses the soul-deep weariness of Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved. The system of slavery that treated humans like machines for production, Hersey says, is the same system that drives today’s punishing, profit-driven economic system. Rest Is Resistance is a call to move toward racial justice and community healing by engaging in activities that have nothing to do with productivity, such as daydreaming and napping.

Madly, Deeply by Alan Rickman
Holt | October 18

When iconic actor Alan Rickman died in 2016, he left behind shoes that are virtually unfillable. (Who else could embody roles in Die Hard, Sense and Sensibility and Harry Potter and be perfect in all three?) For those still mourning his loss, Madly, Deeply will provide a wealth of insight to this man and his many charms. The book collects entries from Rickman’s diaries from 1993 to 2015, with some additional snippets from 1974 to 1982, to create an intimate picture of the daily rhythms of his life as they occasionally collided with incredible success and life-changing opportunities. Fans of theater and film will revel in Rickman’s candid witticisms about his co-stars, and their love for his work will deepen as they learn more about this artist’s dynamic life and legacy.

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man by Paul Newman
Knopf | October 18

If any actor in the last 100 years has reached icon status, Paul Newman has. His posthumous memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, grew out of a project that Newman himself initiated in 1986 to compile an oral history of his life by interviewing friends, family, lovers and colleagues about their honest impressions of the beloved actor. In turn, Newman gave his own takes, offering up incredible details about his troubled childhood, introduction to acting, marriage to Joanne Woodward, the death of his son and much more. Newman’s unvarnished recollections of Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor make this book a treasure trove for movie buffs of every ilk.

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff
Little, Brown | October 25

Master biographer Stacy Schiff (Vera, Cleopatra) sets her sights on America’s rocky beginnings in The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. In her sixth book, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author brings to light the radical rabble-rousing of Samuel Adams, who, as it turns out, was much more than just the namesake for a beer. As one of the architects of the Boston Tea Party, Adams played an integral part in spurring America toward revolution. As it chronicles Adams’ journey from a frivolous youth to a rebellious adulthood, Schiff’s sprawling biography will secure Adams a place of significance in our national memory once again.

The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner | October 25

Take a journey into the smallest unit of our bodies with bestselling and Pulitzer Prizewinning author Siddhartha Mukherjee—no Magic School Bus required. In The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene, Mukherjee laid out the moving history of genetics and their effects on our biological destinies, including their influence on cancer. Now in The Song of the Cell, the cancer physician and researcher explores another essential piece of the human story: cells. Covering everything from their discovery in the 1600s through today’s rapidly developing technology for healing and manipulating our maladies on a cellular level, Mukherjee’s latest harnesses some of the most important scientific work being done today and distills it into a beautiful, readable page turner.

Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
Algonquin | October 25

Award-winning author Ross Gay has become something of an authority on joy after his 2015 poetry collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and his bestselling essay collection, The Book of Delights. But his next collection of essays is somewhat sneakily about sorrow. That is, it’s about the ways that sorrow draws us together, causes us to rely on one another and then, rather unexpectedly, squeezes joy out of our togetherness. With playful metaphors and language that skips along like a game of hopscotch, Inciting Joy: Essays promises to deliver heart-swelling insights into life, death and the joyful necessity of interdependence.

And There Was Light by Jon Meacham
Random House | October 25

It’s a big season for new releases from Pulitzer winners! Add Jon Meacham (The Soul of America, His Truth Is Marching On) to the list with And There Was Light, his 720-page biography of Abraham Lincoln. In his 13th book for adults, Meacham explores Lincoln’s moral development, mapping the influences—from Baptist preachers to the books that provided his self-made education—throughout Lincoln’s life that contributed to the 16th president’s eventual status as an antislavery mountain-mover. Along the way, Meacham’s writing is engaging and brisk, telling a familiar story with fresh insights and interesting emphases.

The Grimkes by Kerri K. Greenidge
Liveright | November 8

For less well-trod historical ground, put Kerri K. Greenidge’s reexamination of the Grimke family on your TBR list for this fall. Angelina and Sarah Grimke (the latter of whom was one of the subjects of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Invention of Wings) were white sisters who left their plantation in South Carolina to become abolitionist activists in the North. For many years, they have been upheld as antislavery heroes, but Greenidge takes a closer and more nuanced look at their story and fleshes out the full Grimke family, including its Black members who have so far been overshadowed by their white relatives. Reaching from the 18th century into the 20th, The Grimkes is an exciting, groundbreaking work of biographical history about one of the most important multiracial families in America.

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom by Rabia Chaudry
Algonquin | November 8

From the host of the “Undisclosed” podcast and author of Adnan’s Story comes a memoir about family, food and the push and pull these things have exhibited over Rabia Chaudry’s body. Growing up in a Pakistani immigrant family, Chaudry’s relationship with food was shaped by her parents’ belief in the nutritional superiority of American cuisine. But when she visited family in Pakistan, Chaudry was teased and told that she would never be able to entice a man because of her size. Over the course of her life, she has experienced food as both punishment and joy, and her body as both a wonder and a burden. Fatty Fatty Boom Boom runs the gamut from rejection to acceptance, complicating the dominant narratives around how fat women are expected to feel about their bodies.

The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama
Crown | November 15

Michelle Obama, the mega-bestselling author of Becoming—and, oh yeah, our former first lady—will publish her second book this November. The Light We Carry is full of personal stories and practical wisdom for sharing our light with others and staying afloat when circumstances are tough. Anyone looking for a guide to deeper self-knowledge and steadier connection with their community will benefit from Obama’s newest heartfelt book.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa
Harper | November 29

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Maria Ressa tells her story of fighting fascism in How to Stand Up to a Dictator. As a Filipino American journalist, Ressa has spent her career rooting out lies and misinformation sown by the government of the Philippines. Her memoir charts the risks, consequences and rewards of fighting against authoritarian systems and outlines the ways that social media has made it easier for fascist movements to gain momentum in recent years. Champions of democracy and the free press will find both crucial information and a moving memoir in How to Stand Up to a Dictator.

Weightless by Evette Dionne
Ecco | December 6

Evette Dionne, whose middle grade book Lifting as We Climb was nominated for a National Book Award in 2020, makes her adult debut with Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul. The former editor-in-chief of Bitch Media not only tells her own story as a fat Black woman who has been discriminated against by society and who rarely sees herself represented in pop culture except as comic relief, but she also dismantles the culture of fatphobia that upholds these injustices in public and private spaces. As Dionne writes in the introduction, “Fat people aren’t a problem that needs to be solved. Fatphobia, which creates a world in which we’re all made to believe that thin bodies are better and deserving of better treatment, is the issue—and that’s where my focus lies.”

Discover all our most anticipated books of fall 2022.

Read on. Your new favorite nonfiction book might be waiting for you to discover it.
NonfictionParenting

6 books that should be on every parent’s nightstand

Feature by Sarah McCraw Crow

Whether you’re a brand-new parent to an infant or a grizzled veteran trying to get your teens to actually talk to you, some days you can’t help but wonder if you’re doing it all wrong. These parenting books are here to help.

Good Inside

Good Inside by Becky Kennedy

Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be is the book I wish I’d had when my kids were little. Kennedy, a psychologist, argues for finding the good inside your child when they throw a tantrum or say they hate you. To start, we need a change in perspective, seeing our kids’ behavior as clues to what they need rather than who they are. Using anecdotes from clients and her own family, Kennedy decodes behaviors (lying, squabbling, perfectionism) and offers connection strategies for each. When a parent strengthens their relationship with their child, she writes, they’ll see improved behavior and cooperation. Kennedy also shows how parents can help kids name their emotions. “The wider the range of feelings we can regulate—if we can manage the frustration, disappointment, envy, and sadness—the more space we have to cultivate happiness,” she writes. It’s a warm, good-humored book.

How to Raise an Intuitive Eater

How to Raise an Intuitive Eater by Sumner Brooks and Amee Severson

Food is a common battleground for parents and kids at all stages. Sumner Brooks and Amee Severson’s How to Raise an Intuitive Eater: Raising the Next Generation With Food and Body Confidence link those family battles to diet culture, the messages about weight and appearance that we’re all bombarded with. They connect diet culture, including medical messaging, to shame, mental illness and negativity about food and the body. Eating disorders, the authors note, are among the mental illnesses that are hardest to treat. The good news is that kids are born intuitive eaters, their brains and bodies wired to know when and how much to eat. To build an intuitive eating family framework, the authors offer strategies such as their “add-in, pressure-off” approach: Instead of limiting foods, or labeling some foods bad and others good, focus on adding more variety. And instead of rules and commentary (“You must eat two bites!” “I can’t believe you’re not eating that!”), focus on providing the meal and letting the child decide how much to eat. Though sometimes dense, How to Raise an Intuitive Eater is a thoughtful and comprehensive resource.

The Teen Interpreter

The Teen Interpreter by Terri Apter

In The Teen Interpreter: A Guide to the Challenges and Joys of Raising Adolescents, England-based psychologist and researcher Terri Apter aims to help parents engage with their teens’ struggles. “Try to see what your teen is seeing; try to understand what your teen is feeling,” Apter writes. Drawing on 35 years of studying teens and families, Apter describes some of the biggest challenges for teens and parents through the lens of teen brain development. As the teen brain remodels itself, changing dramatically, so do teens’ relationships, behavior, sense of identity and emotional responses (outbursts, rudeness, grumpy silences). Sometimes it can be tough to decipher what’s normal teen behavior and what might be mental illness, Apter notes. Throughout, The Teen Interpreter threads together research and teens’ stories, along with exercises for parents to communicate better and build stronger relationships with their teens, which in turn can help teens build resiliency through the challenging teen years and into young adulthood. It’s a clear and reassuring guide.

The Sleep-Deprived Teen

The Sleep-Deprived Teen by Lisa L. Lewis

In The Sleep-Deprived Teen: Why Our Teenagers Are So Tired, and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive, journalist Lisa L. Lewis lays out why sleep matters to teens’ well-being: A lack of sleep affects their mental health, their ability to learn and play sports, and their behavior. But paradoxically, it’s tough for teens to get a good night’s sleep (8 to 10 hours) because their body clocks have shifted; they’re biologically primed to wake later in the morning and fall asleep later at night. The Sleep-Deprived Teen opens with the story of the first teen sleep studies at Stanford University, emphasizing how little experts knew about sleep and the teen brain until recently. As the parent of a teen, Lewis helped get the first law in the country passed requiring later school start times. Since then, studies have found that teens who start school later are more likely to show up at school and do better on standardized tests, and less likely to get into car crashes or trouble after school. The last chapters of Lewis’ book even offer a map for parents aiming to change school start times in their own districts.

Raising Antiracist Children

Raising Antiracist Children by Britt Hawthorne

Antiracist and anti-bias educator Britt Hawthorne is also a home-schooling mom of multiracial children, and she draws on research, teaching and her own family’s experiences in Raising Antiracist Children: A Practical Parenting Guide. “Instead of viewing antiracism as a destination,” Hawthorne writes, “see it as a consistent, active practice: a lifestyle.” Part primer, part workbook with activities for different age groups, Raising Antiracist Children breaks down concepts like bias and white immunity to help parents initiate, rather than avoid, conversations on race. If you’re the parent of a child of color, the book can help you encourage their self-confidence. If you’re a white parent, the book can help you see aspects of racism you might not have seen before (for instance, the way our culture assumes white skin is the default). The book’s principles reflect a broader parenting philosophy that includes setting healthy boundaries, building community and following your child’s desire to learn. “Embracing your children’s curiosity will support them in becoming open-minded, science-driven, and empathetic,” Hawthorne writes. “Differences do not divide us, it’s our fear and unfair treatment of differences that do.”

Reading for Our Lives

Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart

The introduction to Maya Payne Smart’s Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan From Birth to Six makes note of a quiet crisis: American basic literacy rates are weak compared to those in other industrialized nations. Parents want to raise readers, but they may not know what to do beyond reading aloud to their children before bed. Reading for Our Lives aims to change that. The book first maps out the milestones and skills—oral language, sound and print awareness, letter knowledge, phonics and spelling—that lead to reading. Smart then offers a range of strategies, games and play suggestions that help parents build those skills organically. For instance, with babies, parents can converse in a number of ways: talk, then pause to listen to their coos; ask them questions; label everyday objects for them. With older kids, parents can play “I spy” with sounds, not just colors. (“I spy something that rhymes with tike.”) Smart’s book is an empowering manual for readers and their kids.

Staying connected with your child makes a difference at every stage. These empowering guides show you how.
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5 books that incorporate religion in surprising ways

Feature by the editors of BookPage

A Hat for Mrs. Goldman

Sophia’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Goldman, knits hats for just about everybody she knows, and Sophia helps by making the pompoms that go on top. “Keeping keppies warm is our mitzvah,” Mrs. Goldman tells Sophia, explaining that “a mitzvah is a good deed.” When Mrs. Goldman gives her own hat away, Sophia wants to knit her something special, but knitting turns out to be harder than she realized. I love this sweet introduction to the Jewish concept of mitzvot. Author Michelle Edwards’ text has lots of delightful little details, like when Sophia notices that a hat she and Mrs. Goldman began knitting together many years ago still smells like chicken soup. But what gets me every time is Edwards’ description of Sophia’s emotions when she realizes the perfect solution to her knitting woes: “Sophia feels her heart grow bigger and lighter, like a balloon.” If ever a book were a mitzvah, it would be A Hat for Mrs. Goldman.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

America

Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher whose obsessive analysis of the effects of unchecked consumerism becomes more prescient with each passing day. In his 1988 essay collection, America, Baudrillard follows Route 66 across the United States toward Death Valley, California, as he seeks to answer a seemingly simple question: What makes an American? The thing that synthesizes American identity, he finds, is faith: from the evangelical fervor of Salt Lake City, to Las Vegas’ ascendant belief in the dollar, to the ever-elusive future of San Franciscan tech lords. Everywhere he looks, Baudrillard finds sprawling cities not built on trade or natural resources but suspended on dust clouds, spinning rivers of capital and an unshakable belief in American mastery over nature, by whatever means. Even if you disagree with Baudrillard’s funny, sometimes biting analysis of the United States, his surprisingly nuanced poetry, complex worldview and foreign perspective still make for a unique and engaging read during these dynamic times.

—Anthony, Editorial Intern

Open Book

Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, I knew that Jessica Simpson had started out singing in church. What surprised me when I read her memoir, Open Book, however, was how much Simpson’s Christian faith still matters to her all these years later. The book opens with the day she decided to stop drinking, after years of using alcohol to quell her anxiety through tough relationships and even tougher career breaks. As she gets honest with friends about her dependency on alcohol, the group decides to pray together to validate Simpson’s decision. This moment of honesty and faith is a good entry point, since these values are Simpson’s guiding lights throughout her memoir. She’s honest with readers about childhood sexual abuse, the demands of record labels, her marriage to Nick Lachey, her relationships with family and the wild ups and downs that have shaped her life’s terrain. At every point, Simpson’s Baptist roots ground her and keep her from straying too far from her authentic self.

—Christy, Associate Editor

The Sparrow

First published in 1996, Mary Doria Russell’s science fiction classic The Sparrow examines organized religion and faith on a cosmic scale. Spanning the years 2014 to 2060, the novel follows an interstellar mission led by skilled linguist and Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz to discover the source of hauntingly beautiful music that was detected on a planet four light-years away. Accompanied by a motley yet qualified group of friends, Emilio feels called by God to explore the planet and make contact with its alien inhabitants, the music makers. But as the trip unfolds, the group’s well-meaning intentions have catastrophic consequences that cause Emilio to have a crisis of faith. Raised Catholic, Russell left the church at an early age, identified as an atheist for several years and later converted to Judaism. This background, combined with her skills as a multilinguist and her career in paleoanthropology, provide a unique perspective from which to tell such a rich, multifaceted story.

—Katherine, Subscriptions

Hana Khan Carries On

Uzma Jalaluddin’s enemies-to-lovers romance Hana Khan Carries On is a joyful homage to the classic 1990s rom-com You’ve Got Mail, with an Indian Canadian family’s halal restaurant subbing in for the Shop Around the Corner. Hana is our leopard-print hijab-wearing heroine, and she dreams of someday telling true stories that honor her Muslim culture and community. The local radio station where Hana interns is hyperfocused on Muslim stereotypes, so she creates an anonymous podcast to express her true thoughts. Meanwhile, her family’s business has run up against a competing restaurant, with an attractive man named Aydin leading the charge. But as romance grows and the restaurants duke it out, the heart of the novel remains with Hana. Despite microaggressions at the radio station and outright racism on the streets of Toronto, she remains strong in her culture and religion, never abandoning these parts of herself. She finds happiness by being her whole wonderful self—a lover, a fighter, a devout Muslim woman, an open-hearted storyteller and a heroine to believe in.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Whether your own approach to religion is devout, irreverent or somewhere in between, you’ll find characters to relate to within these narratives.
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Year of the Tiger

Review by Claire Fallon

Alice Wong’s memoir is a moving addition to her celebrated body of work as an activist, community organizer, media maker and editor of the 2020 anthology Disability Visibility. In Year of the Tiger, Wong creates a collage of blog posts, artworks, interviews and other ephemera with disability at its center, seasoned generously with her quick wit and fierce calls to action. 

Wong emphasizes connection with others as a generative, necessary force in her life, and she incorporates a chorus of voices in these fragments to illuminate the experiences of people who are constantly confronted with a world built without disabled people in mind. In seven thematically distinct sections, Wong collects conversations with artists, activists and thinkers, each offering new perspectives and delights. She chats with W. Kamau Bell about disability representation in the 1999 film The Bone Collector and riffs on reframing ideas of beauty and attraction with the artist and author Riva Lehrer. Though they are often brief, these dialogues and excerpts come together into a kaleidoscopic image of Wong’s life, illuminated by her revolutionary ideas of interdependence and care. Access is love, she says, and love for the disabled community resounds throughout.

Wong’s thoughtful use of multimedia elements—cheeky cat-themed graphics, photographs from her Indiana childhood and a clever crossword puzzle, to name a few—adds playfulness and dimension to Year of the Tiger. She maintains the compelling conviction that pleasure and joy are crucial to activism and liberation, and these offerings demonstrate that belief. They also imbue the book with the scrappy spirit of zine-making, and others looking for creative encouragement will certainly find it here. 

In “No to Normal,” Wong writes, “Every day I experience the very real distance between myself and the nondisabled world, which, by the way, is the default we all exist in,” and this notion is the undercurrent that moves through the entire book. As this stylish memoir demonstrates, each person, disabled or not, can demand more from a world that is largely built without access in mind. Wong wants better for us all, and she will stop at nothing to get there.

In Year of the Tiger, Alice Wong creates a collage of blog posts, artworks and interviews about disability, seasoned generously with her quick wit and fierce calls to action.

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