Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

This is an unusual book. It is part memoir, part fiction, part essay and the lines between them are blurry at best. The author says that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last installment of a writing career that spans 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction (much like fellow Booker Prize author John Banville). Another is the author's own mortality--he has been diagnosed with a chronic blood cancer, something permanent and disabling but probably not leading to his ultimate demise. So now for the fiction--at the center is the story of a couple, Jean and Stephen, and their particular, fascinating love story — one Barnes plays with our uncertainty over: is it true, or isn't it? He makes a wry joke about this hybrid form within the book itself, having Jean accuse Julian of writing these blended books when he should just pick fiction or nonfiction. Julian's defense is that he knows exactly what he's doing, and it's true that the author has spent much of his career writing fiction wrapped in nonfiction, or the reverse, exploring memory, history, and the tension between subjective and objective truth. So this is a fitting end but a less than usually satisfying Barnes novel.

The Spinach King by John Seabrook

This is a memoir that chronicles three generations of the author’s family and their South Jersey-based agricultural empire, Seabrook Farms. At the heart of the narrative is the author's great-grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, an autocratic, driven patriarch who revolutionized the frozen-food industry. Often hailed as the "Henry Ford of agriculture," C.F. built the company into the biggest vegetable factory on earth. This is a story of improbable success followed by implosion through his paranoia, greed, and abusive treatment of family members. The emotional core of the book lies in the author's complex relationship with his father, Jack—a stylish, patrician figure and playboy who desperately sought his father's approval. Jack had a lavish life style and hobnobbed with movie stars but further squandered the financial resources of the business. Beyond the family drama, the book does not shy away from the darker history of Seabrook Farms. Seabrook made a fortune during World War II by employing interned Japanese Americans and, later, displaced persons from Europe to staff his massive fields. The book uncovers the company’s controversial labor practices, including a violent 1934 labor strike involving armed vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan. These events paint a complex picture of ingenuity coexisting with labor exploitation.

Woman Of Interest by Tracy O'Neill

The pandemic was like a flood--disasterous for everyone but not an equal opportunity disaster. Those of us in healthcare were run ragged and many of us saw severe suffering. Others were given a lot of time to think, and that is what happened with this author. She was born in South Korea in 1986 and adopted as an infant by an Irish-American couple. Raised in New England, she was not surprisingly taught to love the one you are with, that family is who you choose and not where you came from. Until she was thirty-three, she hadn’t given much thought to learning more about the woman her adoption papers named as Cho Kee Yeon. But during the lockdowns of spring 2020, O’Neill — gripped by the thought that her birth mother might be dying alone in Korea. This is another great story about the power of DNA. For centuries people could lie about it--mostly men who wanted to avoid admitting to infidelity or accepting responsibility for paternity. Now that is simply not possible, and the author uses her DNA to find her relatives and tries to connect with her birth mother.

Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy

This is a very raw memoir written by an author who knows how to tell a story. She left home the moment she reached legal age and never went back. She is here to tell you why. She was born in Shillong in northeastern India to a Bengali Christian father who worked on the tea plantation, and a Malayali mother. Her father was a ne'er do well, and her mother moved to Kerala via Assam and Ooty with her and her older brother, Lalith, when her parents separated. It was a a precarious, nomadic life, living with relatives, and describes taking shelter in her maternal grandfather’s cottage in Tamil Nadu, only to be thrown out because of the property laws of the state, which did not afford daughters inheritance rights. Her mother was a teacher and she demanded even her own children call her Mrs. Roy. She starts a school that grows into a renowned institution where she models her own brand of feminism, unflinchingly confronting matters of gender and sexuality. Mrs Roy challenges the inheritance laws in the Syrian Christian community, suing her brother to obtain an equal share of her father’s estate, and wins the case Mary Roy Etc vs State of Kerala and Others, heard by the Supreme Court of India in 1986. She is sharp, restless and charismatic, a visionary ruling with an iron fist. But in her rage against the patriarchy, she also lashes out at her children. She berates her childrean for the tiniest of foibles and humiliates them in public. She was fearless in her public life but made life miserable for her children, which was confusing and damaging for them. This is unflinching in its subtle but persuasive rant against perpetuating a society that leaves women as second class citizens.

Things In Nature Merely Grow by YiYun Li

Even when compared to other memoirs that cover the landscape of a personal response to tragedy, this is a standout. I have been a mental health professional for 40 years and I have heard a lot of tragic stories. This stands alone. Her experience is so particularly moving and painful that I would say she really opens her broken heart very wide-- she writes about the suicide of her 19-year-old son, James, in 2024 after having healed --- to an extent --- from the death of her 16-year-old son, Vincent, who did the same in 2017. It’s devastating yet so practical, humbling and numbing that it will take readers down many paths of their own and keep this book on their shelves as a message for grief in all shapes and sizes. Reading through her understated and clear eyed way of living with her pain will help you stop in your tracks and try to face the next time anyone you love upsets you with gratitude. To see them is to have another chance to appreciate them, something she no longer can do. It is a reminder to live each day fully and to try to find beauty even where it might be deeply hidden.

The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong

There is a lot to learn about Korea in this memoir. Today, the South Korean capital Seoul is one of the most modern on the planet while North Korea, historically the more prosperous half of the Korean peninsula, lives on the edge of hunger. It's easy to forget that, in the 1960s, South Korea's per capita GDP was less than that of the socialist paradise to the north, or of countries such as Ghana. Even as late as the 1970s, there was little to choose between living standards in Seoul and Pyongyang. Today, South Korea is the world's 15th largest economy and London worker bees would buzz with envy at the superfast internet connection their counterparts in Seoul enjoy on their air-conditioned subway journeys to work, all courtesy of enlightened government investment. The author and her family moved back to Korea in 1985, and in the course of describing her life there, she also goes on to bust many myths in her highly entertaining account of how South Korea, once one of the world's poorest and least fashionable countries, became a cultural superpower. One is that private enterprise is invariably a more effective driver of growth than government action – 25% of venture capital in Korea in 2012 came from the government – and that government intervention makes people lazy. May we all learn our lesson.

Know My Name by Chantel Miller

This is yet another version of what rape does to those who it is perpetrated on, and how our culture works very hard to excuse the men who are the perpetrators. The read this for a Goodreads challenge, and once again it is a book I would have been unlikely to pick up if not for that. Chanel Miller she writes about her life, including her now highly publicized sexual assault in January 2015 and the events that unfolded after that. The memoir focuses on the day of the assault as well as the court case, People vs. Turner. Turner was convicted of three charges of felony sexual assault. He was sentenced to six months in jail followed by three years of probation. However, he was released after serving half of his sentence for good behavior. Miller’s victim statement was widely published across the world as is a power piece of standalone writing. Miller was known as Emily Doe and her memoir shows her side of the event and how her life was completely transformed by that night. This is a powerful book. I had followed the court case and read the statement but this memoir shows what Miller went through. From being a young adult who worked at a startup to a complete and drastic transformation after the assault, the book does not leave out any detail. We see how Miller pieces together the assault, her despair and anger at the court proceedings, her activism, her day-to-day challenges and victories, her relationships, her mistakes and victories, and the inside view of the legal system. She is very angry at having been made a vicitm--in the eyes of the public, but also in reality, that the person who did that is never going to pay an appropriate price for that damage, and also how she is trying to come to terms with that.

An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This is a detailed review of the 1960's through the eyes and experience of the author and her husband, who recently died. Let me start by saying that while I did not love this book, most people I know who have read it did. The author is an excellent writer, and her husband of 40 plus years and she had non-overlapping but equally impressive careers that involved the presidents for a bulk of the decade, so it is an intimate look behind the scenes at government in action at a time of great change for the country. My first bone to pick with this is the title--this may have been motivated by trying to tell a story about the love of your life, but that is not at all what it is. It is a recounting of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies from the inside. Dick Goodwin worked with the Kennedy campaign, and then within the White House as Kennedy's speech writer, but also spearheading some of the major public policy projects of the Kennedy administration. There are some fascinating behind-the-scenes insights and observations that are definitely one of a kind perspectives. She went through her husband's voluminous boxes of memorabilia from this era to write this book, and she did so while he was alive, so he could both comment on an clarify as she developed and evaluated the material for the book, and the uniqueness of that comes through clearly. I would recommend it and I might have liked it better if I hadn't just read Robert Caro's The Passage of Power, which minutely covers this era as well.

Awake by Jen Hatmaker

I picked this up because it is on the New York Times 100 Notable Books from 2025. It is a memoir about the author's public break up of her marriage in 2020 after she discovered that her spouse of 20 years was having an affair. There are some things that made this a bit different. The first is that Meanwhile, both Jen and Brandon Hatmaker were Christian celebrities. Brandon Hatmaker was a pastor, and Jen Hatmaker was a frequent speaker at the church they planted together. They starred in an HGTV show about their home renovation, and spoke publicly about international adoption (two of their five children were adopted from Ethiopia). Jen Hatmaker became a popular speaker and writer in her own right, as well as her podcast, For the Love. She wrote about the Bible, marriage, and parenting in a breezy, humorous voice. Her books attracted a following among Christian women seeking a faith that was honest and authentic rather than rigid and rules-focused. Jen Hatmaker had a loss of confidence in her faith after a marriage that was very much rooted in the church blew up in a spectacular and unexpected way, but it wasn't her first public struggle. She suffered from backlash within the evangelical world in 2016 when she began publicly questioning the policies of the first Trump administration and speaking out about racism among white American Christians like herself. Her reputation took a further hit when she talked about fully affirming LGBTQ people and relationships. But in return for cancelled speaking engagements and books pulled from the shelves of religious bookstores, she attracted a new audience of people open to a broader, more inclusive vision of Christianity. In this memoir she acknowledges she is no longer engaged in formal religion but chronicles all the way she has grown and recovered from what her husband did. It is an interesting and well written read.

Group by Christie Tate

I read this as part of a Goodreads challenge and while I did not love it and I might have found it otherwise, because I am slowly but surely reading my way through the Reese Witherspoon book picks and this is one of those as well, it might have taken some time. This is a memoir that the author wrote about her experience with group therapy and how it changes--and saved--her life. She was academically successful but socially constricted and when she went to therapy to address the unhappiness in her life, she was referred to group therapy. The group she joined was one where there was no expectation of confidentiality and every expectation that you would share all aspects of your life with the group. It was a bit shocking for me as a mental health professional, but everyone goes in knowing what's what. There are few of the boundaries you would ordinarily expect--group members can date each other, get married--the therapist even goes to these weddings and he even has the patient over to his house at one point. The boundaries are very permeable. The book takes place over about a five year period of time, and while it includes very little about her professional life, it is quite intimate in the details of her personal life, most particularly her intimate partners. This does have a happy ending, but she has to kiss a few frogs to find her prince. It is a quirky memoir that I liked more once I finished it than I did reading it.

Little Heathens by Mary Armstrong Kalish

This memoir was published in 2007, but the author was in her 80's when she wrote it, and it harkens back to the Iowa of old. It takes place during the Great Depression, but on a farm, which is where my dad also rode out that era (he in New England), so things like starvation were not on the table--you grew and raised your food, and you foraged and preserved and were thrifty but you were not in danger of going hungry. I heard about this on the Parnassus Friday vlog of If You Haven't Read It. It Is New To You--which is a great source for books you would be unlikely to find otherwise, and it was available on ebook and I was traveling, so perfect timing. The book opens with the author's father being banished from their home by her grandparents for an undisclosed transgression, so she grew up fatherless and poor, but she managed to consider herself one of the lucky ones, which is a gift unto itself. The life she describes is very much like my visits to my great grandmother's house in the 1960's, where much of the day revolved around chores and the food was homemade, nothing fancy, but delicious. The butter stayed on the counter after it was churned, the jam was foraged wild strawberries, and the bread was made that morning. The stories I liked most were related to her grandmother and her talent with sewing--there is a movement afoot now within modern quilting to upcycle material, either from thrift stores or your own closet. The author's grandmother took collars off shirts and turned them over so the fraying was hidden and the shirt had a longer life. She also saved bits of thread to use when sewing--nothing wasted--which is a good lesson to learn. There is something lost of this era in the state right now, but maybe it can be recaptured, if and when women become full citizens again and have the right to make decisions about their bodies.

A Blissful Feast by Teresa Lust

The trouble with going to the less traveled spots is that sometimes it is hard to find books that cover said regions. I have an acquaintance who travels extensively and often who swears by travel blogs as a source from which to plan your trips. She travels off the beaten path, and I am seeing the wisdom of her way. So I picked this up because it starts in Piedmont, a region that I am traveling to very soon. The author's maternal grandparents came from the Italian Piedmont, and it's there that she begins her what is part memoir, part recollection of culinary lessons and cultural insights in three parts of the country. The book contains more than 35 recipes for the likes of braised rabbit with white wine and rosemary, breakfast biscotti, and tagliatelle made with fresh eggs, the real instruction comes through the stories Lust tells about the cooks who fed her and whom she worked alongside to learn how to cook regionally in Italy. Ancient and contemporary Italy overlap in her stories of cooks and marketplaces, restaurants and holiday feasts, regional rivalries and evocations of Dante. She went to Piedmont to learn Italian at a language school, and she recounts her struggles when the limitation of her language skills led to challenges in her understanding the conversations she had with the cooks, bakers, and butchers but as her skill improved her stories have more depth and interest. It really stuck with her, because she is now a professor in Italian language study at Dartmouth, and some of the stories towards the end of her book are about trying to take the cuisine of Italy home to New England. I especially appreciated her story of harvesting hops shoots and how perplexing it was for the farms caretaker to understand what she was about. There is a hazard that you're likely to want to make your own trip to Italy, and luckily I had that in hand before I started the book.

Careless People by Sarah Wynne-Williams

I read a review for this memoir of a New Zealander's time at Facebook that characterized it as darkly funny and genuinely shocking to be a fairly good one sentence summation. It comes long after the revelations of Frances Haugen, and I have read it in the wake of the 2.0 version of the Revenge Presidency, and still it unsettles me to to the point that I am not sure where we are heading and what the end of the road holds. This is an insider account of Facebook, which she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever feckless as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes. Including the one that was seeking re-election in the United States at the time--all of which has come to fruition in an astoundingly inhumane, areligious, and profit driven manner. The bottom line, the summation of all that is wrong with the tech bros was a conversation that she had with Zuckerberg about the United States president that he most admires is Andrew Jackson. Jackson is more nuanced as a person than is oft remembered, but the bottom line is that he is responsible for the Trail of Tears. Unforgivable imposition of human suffering and Zuckerberg admires him, despite that or because of it, it matters not in the end. We are all screwed.

The Sweet Life In Paris by David Lebovitz

I am glad that I read this memoir after a recent trip to France that included a several day stop in Paris. I am not a big fan of big cities, and in France my absolute favorite thing to do is to drive around and visit small medieval villages that have great restaurants and enjoy the food and culture. That said, I loved Paris on this recent trip and could finally see why others feel that way. This is a memoir that is already somewhat dated by an author who writes excellent cookbooks (I highly recommend them if you are seeking to cook French food--he was a pastry chef at Chez Panisse for a decade, so his desserts are top notch but his savory food is good too--there are quite a few embedded here that you could try out, but while Dorie Greenspan is my go to American writing about French food, if you want to widen your net, this is a good place to go--or if you are going old school, Julia Child is another option). He moves to Paris, and while he hasn't quite settled there, he doesn't want to go back to San Francisco. Even though he loves and misses Mexican food and BBQ, the tug of Paris has its grip on him. This is a book about his everyday life there, and I really loved were all the anecdotes about daily life in Paris–complete with all its complications, contradictions, and even annoyances. One reviewer complained that the book is not really about a sweet life at all; Lebovitz makes living in Paris look like hard work--which I suspect it is both foreign and difficult but clearly when all is said and done, worth it.

A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry

I have very mixed feelings about this memoir, and the whole thing made me feel old. Reviewers describe this a joyful, and all I could really feel at the end was sad. Neneh Cherry is a mixed race woman who's Swedish mother raised her after her father, from Sierra Leone, left them. Her mother later married jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, And she was raised in Sweden, New York, and London. Her mother her mother, Monika Karlsson, was the constant in her life--she worked as a painter, textile artist, musician and set designer. She was and needed to be thrifty, picking up raw materials at flea markets, creating colorful and fantastical work that augmented folk traditions with cosmic, almost visionary motifs. So her childhood was chaotic, creative, and unpredictable. This book was always going to be interesting even if I didn't love it. Cherry has had a fascinating life – she was brought up by a jazz musician and an artist, has lived in different countries and experienced both real hardship and enduring success. She could just have listed it all and that would have been enough to sell plenty of copies, but she has taken the opportunity to produce something that’s beautifully written – it’s thoughtful, considered and deliberate. She talks about many incredibly tough experiences (a parent with a drug addiction, rape, alcoholism and the grief that led to it, teenage pregnancy, and more), and what’s striking is her tone. She often seems brutally honest, but without ever becoming lurid or undignified. She avoids harsh judgements – even where they’d be pretty understandable – instead acknowledging and describing pain with grace and tenderness, in a way that makes it real and tangible. I am not sure really what to make of it, but it is a remarkable story and reasonably well written.

Food For Thought by Alton Brown

I liked this but I did not love it. That also sums up my feelings about Good Eats, which was a show that my family--five men--liked more than I did. I think the science of cooking was a great hook for them and it did almost nothing for me, although I did not find him annoying, which is not a given for this sort of show. Same can also be said about this book, which really is a collection of ruminations and expositions on a wide range of topics mixed in that mostly adds up to a bit of a memoir. There is a fair amount about what it was like to be him as a child, growing up in the South and largely without a father, how he really struggled in a traditional classroom and he repeatedly tells us this, that he barely got out of high school, but never seems to realize that the way he learns is not the way others learn, and that is where public education failed him. He strikes me as a kinesthetic learner--maybe he has since figured it out. There are a few details about his current life, and the story about what they did during COVID and what he learned about his wife and himself is charmingly told. Then in between there is the part about how he came to be known by all of us, how he more or less stumbled in to what he is now widely known for. This is a better book once I reflect on it, because the story telling is non-linear, but at the end you do emerge with a sense of things about him. If you like food memoirs, this isn't really that, but it is food adjacent and enjoyable with that lens.

The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots by John Swanson Jacobs

The story behind this publication is in some ways cooler than the book itself and perfect for Juneteenth. Schroeder, who wrote the biography of the author that is included in this publication, is a literary historian, and he knew the story of Harriet Jacobs, the abolitionist who famously wrote about her life and abuse while enslaved, her secret relationship with a white politician and her escape to freedom in the 1800s. Schroeder searched a database of historical documents for details on Harriet's son. He wasn't getting far, so he tried another search term focused on Harriet's brother, Johnathan S. Jacobs. That is how he stumbled upon an autobiography by John Swanson Jacobs, first published in Australia in 1855 and largely lost to time - until now. Six hundred thousand despots is a reference to the number of slave owners in the U.S. at the time. John Swanson Jacobs was born in 1815 in Edenton, N.C., and he was born a sixth-generation slave. Today, he's a footnote in the life of his older sister, Harriet Jacobs, who is the best-known Black female author of the 19th century. He was an abolitionist in the U.S. and U.K. He was a gold miner in California and Australia. He was a sailor on four oceans and four continents. And he was an expat for nearly all of his free life. He had become a gold miner after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. He left the U.S. for California, and then for Australia, which was going through its own gold rush at the same time as America's gold rush. And he eventually struck it rich or at least did well in the Australian gold rush. And that gave him a rare moment of time off from the kind of labor that dominated most of his life to go to Sydney and to finish the life story that he had begun practicing in the 1840s as an abolitionist in William Lloyd Garrison's Boston and Frederick Douglass' Rochester. This is a recreation of his autobiography, and then a biography of what we know about him now with the help of time.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

This is a peaceful book, one that focuses within rather than without. On the one hand it is a memoir of a time and of a relationship that seems like it might fit better in a children's picture book than in a grown up reflection. It is so beautiful that I felt transported by it. The setting is the English countryside, the time is COVID, and the relationship is between a woman and a hare. Things are in lock down and people are not seeing much of each other. Enter the leveret, a baby hare, which is both a magical interloper and harbinger of transformation. The author finds the creature lying on a country track outside her home, seemingly abandoned. From the outset, she is conflicted about whether to rescue the hare and take her into her home or let nature take it's course. She relents, though she places certain restrictions on their relationship: she does not name the animal, tries not to touch it, and does not, except briefly, confine it (it can leave the house through a specially constructed flap). Over the course of the book they develop a remarkable relationship with its own language; not, of course, a human language, but one of gestures, movements and exhalations (hares, we learn, emit soft, puff-like sounds). Dalton has a zoologist’s eye for detail combined with a poet’s sensitivity to descriptive language; she conjures the beauty, the allure and variation of the hare’s sounds, mouth, eyes and fur, which changes with the seasons and marks the passage of time. Her language is shot with such intense tenderness and emotion--she cares deeply about what happens and as a result, so do we. This is a breath of fresh air in a chaotic time.

Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodges

This is an unusual memoir that has taken me a while to write about, which means that I have been thinking a lot about just what to write. I got it because it was the electronic version of The Community Reads, meaning that my library had unlimited e-books to take out and while it is pretty rare for me to love these books, I usually at least like them and they are always something that I wouldn't have discovered on my own--this book fits that bill. The author was a concert violinist who stopped working as a professional musician because she developed performance anxiety. In the quest to make sense of her life as a musician and the experiences she was having, she has examined it through the twin portals of neuroscience and quantum physics. Rather than dwelling on the purely emotional aspect of dealing with crushingly high personal expectations, she steps outside of herself and looks at how music informs our experience of time, and whether she as musicians was living in time, or whether time lives within her. She doesn't ignore the anxiety and where it comes from for her, and exactly how her anxiety manifests. It would start typically by fixating obsessively on a particular passage that never seemed to go exactly as she wanted, so much so that the actual performance would become temporally distorted. In addition to the temporal dichotomy performers are familiar with – the coexistence of ‘real’ time ‘out there’ and the music’s internal temporal flow – she would experience a sense of accelerating uncontrollably towards the ‘doomed place’, and then at the point of arrival would feel as if time had stopped. I couldn't relate to much of what she was describing about her experience, but it is pretty mesmerizing to read, nonetheless.

The Choice by Edith Eva Eger

The author was a young teenager in Hungary when WWII began. It has been said that the best chance of survival for a European Jew in Nazi occupied Europe lived in Hungary--the extermination came later there than to other countries, but the best chance wasn't very good. The front end of this memoir is a first hand account of what it was like to be there. She and her sister, who had been rivals before being interned at Auschwitz, clung to each other after Mengele personally evaluated them on arrival and sent their mother to the gas chamber and allowed them to live. The second half of the book is about her PTSD and how she struggled over the years to cope with it, sometimes well and often times not very well at all. She ended up, well into middle age, deciding to train as a therapist and to help others claw their way to better mental health, to overcome the immeasurable trauma that they had experienced and live fuller lives. She published this when she was in her 90's and she is still alive at 97--one of the oldest Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany.