Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.—P.J. O’Rourke

ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS by Jami Attenberg

This is a powerhouse of a story about how toxicity seeps into families. Victor Tuchman is near death in a hospital in New Orleans. A bad husband to his wife Barbra and an equally awful father to daughter Alex, and son Gary, Victor’s family members recount his abusive influence in “All This Could Be Yours.” Told in sections, Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Everything After, Attenberg allows each character to examine Victor—husband, father, and ex-lover—through their own filtered/unfiltered lense. Some of the secondary characters in the storyline, like Sharon, blend into the rich stew of New Orleans pre and post-Katrina. It’s a wonderful confluence of personalities as they weave in and out of one another’s lives while inhabiting their unique place in the city.

Favorite line(s): You can be happy about a lot of things in your life, yet just one thing can make you miserable. Now Sharon was back in it. Half the pipes on her block froze one winter, and the neighborhood lost power with regularity during hurricane season. One morning her car got shot out, one bullet through the rear window that lodged itself in the back of the driver’s seat, right where her head would have been if she had been driving. As she drove the car to the repair shop, each bump knocked out more shards in the rear window, the tinkling sound as the glass collapsed both satisfying and chilling. Another morning her young cousin Jazmine took a bullet in the leg in the Lower ninth as she walked to catch a bus to her first day of junior year high school. Bullets don’t care what they hit; they just hit. Still, Sharon knew her neighbors, and they greeted one another on the street, and the neighborhood was a living, breathing entity and she loved this city and the flaws defined her even as she had to contend with them. She didn’t mean to overromanticize it. She just knew her own truth.

FRENCH EXIT by Patrick deWitt

If you like dark comedy with an eccentric cast of characters, then “French Exit” is for you. Frances Price finds her husband Franklin dead in their New York City brownstone and leaves him there to bloat while she takes off on a ski vacation. The tabloids have a field day with this bit of news since the couple was well known in social circles as fierce and unforgiving. But this? And why? Frances has her reasons. As a widow, she embarks on a life of free-spending with her son, Malcolm, by her side. The two, with their unusual mother-son relationship, must leave NYC in a hurry and eventually end up in Paris with a bag full of euros and two goals: one, to spend it all, and the other the reader doesn’t find out about until the end. Accompanied by their cat, Small Frank, the pair acquire a hodge-podge group of friends who add to the story’s sense of belonging and home.

Favorite line(s): “Well, for one,” said Frances, “that’s an extremely shitty thing to say to me. Two, the glamour passed a long time ago, and you know very well that it did. And third, three, yes, my life is riddled by clichés, but do you know what a cliché is? It’s a story so fine and thrilling that it’s grown old in its hopeful retelling.” Joan couldn’t help but smile at this. “People tell it,” Frances said. “Not so many live it.”

FIERCE ATTACHMENTS by Vivian Gornick

Gornick’s ode to the mother-daughter relationship sat on my unread shelf for years. I’m sorry I waited so long to read it. The author’s journey through her childhood and adulthood walking the streets of Manhattan with her elderly mother is at once rich with detail and angry in sentiment. There is a strong push-pull pulsating through their connection—of expectations and the altered truths of one another—that move this memoir forward and backward. And in between is Nettie, the young, sexualized neighbor who both the mother and daughter gravitate to. In the lives of these women, the “choice was homemaking or trouble.” Every sentence sings—and zings. And I wanted to weep for all of them.

Favorite line(s): My mother said I needed love to experience life at a high level, but in fact mourning lost love was the highest level of life she had attained. We were all indulging ourselves. Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman’s life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch

Wow, this was a tidal wave of a memoir from start to finish. Beginning with the stillborn death of her daughter, Yuknavitch chronicles her grief of loss, abuse, addiction, and love through her two salvations: swimming and art. The story of this writer’s journey doesn’t look backward or forward but fights it out dog paddling her way through the present. The reader lives just under the tender but thick skin of the author as she loses a swimming scholarship, studies creative writing with Ken Kesey, marries and divorces twice, writes books, and questions every aspect of her life as an artist first and foremost. I loved her honesty. Her bravery. And her words.

Favorite line(s): Whatever it was or was not, there were words, Not just my own. I wrote stories, I wrote books, but the more I wrote the more I saw a door opening behind me, and I saw that if I jammed my motherfucking foot in it, more of us could get through. And that we could make things. Together. What we could make was art. How that mattered.