COMPOSED by Rosanne Cash

I first fell in love with Rosanne Cash’s literary writing before her songwriting. In Bodies of Water, Cash mixes stories with essays about motherhood and music, loneliness and aging, love and divorce. In Composed, the daughter of country legend Johnny Cash, takes us on a musical tour of her life. From the canon of songs her father insisted she study to her time on the road with her second husband, singer/songwriter John Leventhal, the reader glimpses the transformative power of music in this artist’s life. What I loved best was learning the intimate details of how she composed so many excellent recordings. 

Favorite line(s): In the months since my father’s passing, I had come to understand that the loss of a parent expands you—or shrinks you, as the case may be—according to your own nature. If too much business is left unfinished, and guilt and regret take hold deep in the soul, mourning begins to diminish you, to constrict the heart, to truncate the vision of your own future, and to narrow the creative potential of the mind and spirit. F enough has been resolved—not everything, for everything will never be done, but just enough—then deep grief begins to transform the inner landscape, and space opens inside. You begin to realize that everyone has a tragedy, and that if he doesn’t, he will. You recognize how much is hidden behind the small courtesies and civilities of everyday existence. 

THE CRANE WIFE: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS by CJ Hauser

What if your life didn’t look the way you thought it would? What if you question the stories you’ve carried inside you since adolescence? What if you wanted answers about how to live inside your skin with a new vision? CJ Hauser takes us on the journey to her own awakening in these seventeen vulnerable and sometimes hilarious essays about family, homes, shape-shifting relationships, and grief. I loved this book.

Favorite line(s): Do you know what thrills me in so many of those gothic novels? When a woman sets fire to a house. Sometimes a house feels too haunted, too complicated, to live in anymore. Imagine the cleansing relief of burning the whole thing down. And sure, burning a house down is powerful on the page because in real life it’s almost never the answer. Eventually, you need to find a new house to live in, and all houses have their ghosts. I am done being scared of ghosts, done being scared of women. I am getting better at letting the past hover next to the present without flicking its ears and getting a rise out of it. But I still have the arsonist’s urge. Because no one should have to live at Manderley. Listen: if you find yourself learning how to take care of a haunted house? If you find yourself the lady in charge of its maintenance and upkeep? If you are managing the haunted-ass property in question? That is not your house, girl. Burn that house all the way down. Sometimes the trouble is the structures you’re living inside. Sometimes you are living inside someone else’s trauma.

MIGRATIONS by Charlotte McConaghy

The world is on the other side of climate change. The no-going-back side. Nature is folding and mutating into survival mode. Most animals and sea life are extinct. The year is in the near future, and Franny Stone has been running from her tragic past. In Greenland, she talks her way onto a fishing boat to follow the last migration of Arctic terns as they make their way to Antarctica. Along the way, with storms at sea and the calm beauty of star-filled skies, the reader learns of Franny’s dark secrets and the reasons she is unable to stay in any one place even though her love is deep. Haunting and suspense-filled, Migrations, one of our book club selections, was a surprise hit.   

Favorite line(s): But there won’t be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that’s why I am filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million. It’s a relief to at last have a purpose. I wonder what it will feel like to stop. I wonder where we go, afterward, and if we are followed. I suspect we go nowhere, and become nothing, and the only thing that saddens me about this is the idea of never seeing Niall again. We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it’s right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.