"There’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you’re special." 

– Carol Rifka Brunt, "Tell the Wolves I'm Home"

ABANDON ME: Memoirs by Melissa Febos

The writing is sublime. I underlined so many sentences and paragraphs in this book it looked tattooed inside its pages. What a talent. What a storyteller. These essays (memoirs Febos calls them) embrace the reader slowly. We enter into the author’s world of loss and redemption so subtly it feels voyeuristic how intimate the reader and writer become. There is an emotional honesty to Febo’s writing that her subjects: father loss, addiction, loneliness, desire, and love are consumed as if in conversation. This memoir is brave and beautiful.

Favorite line(s): It is a former mill town, but the last mill was shut down after Torrington was devastated by hurricanes in 1955, and the town never stood up again. It has the grim set of all such towns, reminds me of the Rust Belt city where I taught for one year—pawn and tobacco shops with a few ghosted stares from inside. Endless salt- and ice-crusted winters. Gas station coffee drinkers, the few faces leaning over the Lotto counter white and textured by smoke and sorrow. People with bodies slanted like they’ve been walking against the wind their whole lives, because they have.

THE BOOK OF V. by Anna Solomon

Reader forewarned: Do not read this novel in fits and starts like I did between moving and juggling my own writing projects. This excellent book needs your undivided attention—and it’s worth the effort. Narrated by three different women within the sweeping historical landscapes of marriage, the novel transports the reader from the Biblical past to the 1970s to present day. Ester is married off to the King of Persia and loses her family. Vee leaves her sleazy politician husband and moves in with her best friend. Lily wanders through her marriage and motherhood, wondering who she is. Even from the grave, their lives converge in a remarkable way. It’s an important work about how women through the ages have benefitted by reinventing themselves.

Favorite line(s): After the memorial service, an emptiness opens up in Lily. It comes without words; it is sensation only, a physical presence distended with absence. When she wakes it is waiting for her nestled in crevices like a dark moss, and it crouches there, almost politely, until she gets through lunches and shoes and hugs and sees the people out the door. But once she stops moving, to drink her tea or sit on the toilet or stand in the shower, the emptiness unfurls like a great, pungent fern, an elegant slayer of anything that is not it.

I AM I AM I AM: SEVENTEEN BRUSHES WITH DEATH by Maggie O’Farrell

This collection of essays with parts of the body for chapter titles and themed content is a treasure. O’Farrell writes about near-death experiences with unsentimentality, coming at the subject matter with beautiful storytelling mixed with data. She’s written one of the best essays on pregnancy loss I’ve ever read—and I’ve read a lot and written a lot on the topic. OBGYN offices should pass out copies of “Baby and Bloodstream” to grieving patients. Her drowning near misses are written with such precise visuals the reader feels her eyes “shut tight against the salt, streak with technicolour, my teeth snapping together over my tongue. The noise inside a riptide is astonishing, a rushing, deafening rumble of water, air, pressure, force.” There is so much to admire in this memoir, especially this talented author outwitting death many times over to give us these beautiful essays. I loved this book.

Favorite line(s): I’ve never understood the blanket secrecy you’re supposed to apply to early pregnancy. Certainly, I’ve never felt the need to broadcast the news far and wise, but it seems to me that pregnancy at any stage is significant life-changing enough to warrant telling those closest to you. Even if something as devastating as pregnancy-loss happens, wouldn’t you want your close friends, your family to know? Who else would you turn to at such a time? How else do you explain the grief, the stunned pain on your face, the tears, the shock? Because losing a baby, a fetus, an embryo, a child, a life, even at a very early stage is a shock like no other.

NOBODY WILL TELL YOU THIS BUT ME by Bess Kalb

Gone at ninety-years old, Bobby Bell doled out advice and opinion to her granddaughter, Bess, whether she wanted it or not. Written as if Bobby is still counseling from the afterlife, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me is a touching tribute-memoir written by the granddaughter who saved all Bobby’s voice mails. From Bess’s great-grandmother’s escape from anti-Semitism in Russia to her daughter’s (Bobby) ascent into the wealthy suburbs of Westchester County, to her daughter becoming a doctor, to her daughter, Bess’s work as a tv writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, we witness the American Dream in all its complexities within one family of women. It’s funny, sad, and a fantastic read.

Favorite line(s): At the Metropolitan Museum of Art Permanent Collection

GRANDMOTHER: Bessie, I want you to go around these rooms and take this notepad and tell me how many paintings were done by a woman.

(Thirty minutes later)

BESSIE: OK! Eight women.

G: Eight!

Did you write them down?

(Stumbling through pronunciations)

B: Simone Martini, Andrea del Sarto, Camille Corot, Annibale Carracci, Andrea Mantegna, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Camille Pissarro, and Jan Steen.

Grandmother: Oh, honey. Give that here.

(Extracts glasses from giant handbag, looks at the paper)

B: Did I miss any? I saw them all.

G: All of those are men.

B: They have girls’ names.

G: They’re just European names.

B: Did I miss the women?

G: There aren’t any women.

B: It was a trick?

G: It was a lesson.

B: What’s the lesson?

G: If you’re born a man and halfway decent at something, everyone will tell you you’re great. There’s only one woman nearby. Right through here in the American wing.

(Takes hand and walks me into the next gallery)

G: Here she is. Lady at the Tea Table. Mary Cassatt.

B: I like it.

G: Yes, you do. You know how you can tell a Mary Cassatt?

B: How?

G: She was kind to her subjects. She left out their hips.