BOMB SHELTER: LOVE, TIME, AND OTHER EXPLOSIVES by Mary Laura Philpott

The author and her husband hear a pounding in the middle of the night and find their teenage son on the bathroom floor having an epileptic seizure. So begins Philpott’s journey with more questions than answers, more worry than peace. I related to so much in these thirty or so short essays about the vastness of parenthood, the idea of losing those you love, the unsafe world, and saying goodbye to her son as he heads off to college, hoping he makes the right choices. If you believe life is fragile and that good fortune will be met with bad luck around the next corner, then Bomb Shelter will speak to your anxiety with humor, celebration, tragedy, and pathos. It’s all inside these pages.

Favorite line(s): Can you blame me, though? Assigning meaning to events is so satisfying. I want themes, threads, a plot that begins with a question and then proceeds toward resolution. I want people to learn their lessons and change their ways, and for the moral of every story to make us better as a species. But look at the news—full of arbitrary injustices and disasters, human beings treating one another, themselves, and the earth with callousness. I want the world to conform to a story that makes sense, but that desire crashes against the rock of reality again and again.

MY DARK VANESSA by Kate Elizabeth Russell

The narrator of this novel tells a deeply disturbing version of her long relationship with an English teacher that begins at a boarding school when she is fifteen and her teacher thirty-two. It’s got Lolita vibes all over it, but that novel wasn’t front and center while I read Vanessa’s long tale of abuse. Instead—this is the lightning rod inserted into the narrative—she doesn’t believe she was abused. They loved each other, Vanessa believes. And sometimes, the reader gets caught up in the same disassociated thinking. But the genius of the novel is that as the reader, you understand Vanessa’s reasoning, her excuses, and her defense of the relationship even though you know without a doubt the trauma her abuser has inflicted on the shape of her life and the loneliness of acknowledging that damage she only feels in minutes, not years.

Favorite line(s): All summer I work at the auto parts warehouse, filling orders for starters and struts while classic rock radio blares over the white noise of the conveyor belts. Twice a week at the end of my shift, Strane waits for me in the parking lot. I try to dig the grit out from under my fingernails before climbing into the station wagon. He likes my steel-toed boots, the muscles in my arms. He says a summer of manual labor is good for me, that it’ll make me value college all the more. Every so often, anger hits me, but I tell myself what’d once is done—Browick, his role in my leaving , all of it in the past. I do my best not to feel resentful when I remember what he used to say about helping me apply to summer internships in Boston, or when I see his Harvard robes hanging on his closet door, left there from the Browick graduation. Atlantica is a respectable choice, he says, nothing to be ashamed of.

BITTERSWEET by Susan Cain

I found “me” on almost every page of this wonderful ode to the population in love with minor key songs and rainy days spent reading a book. Apparently, there are many of us. Enough to warrant a book that mixes storytelling, research, and memoir into a rich algorithm of “why we experience sorrow and longing, and how embracing the bittersweetness at the heart of life is the true path to creativity, connection, and transcendence.” And the author makes the connection that if our kind doesn’t recognize and name our heartache, we risk “inflicting it on others via abuse, domination, or neglect.” Yowser. It explained so much about family dysfunction. It’s a deep and brutally honest manifesto.

Favorite line(s): At their worst, bittersweet types despair that the perfect and beautiful world is forever out of reach. But at their best, they try to summon it into being. Bittersweetness is the hidden source of our moon shots, masterpieces, and love stories. It’s because of longing that we play moonlight sonatas and build rockets to Mars. It’s because of longing that Romeo loved Juliet, that Shakespeare wrote their story, that we still perform it centuries later. It doesn’t matter whether we arrive at these truths via Pippi Longstocking, Simone Biles, or Saint Augustine—whether we’re atheists or believers. The truths are the same. Whether you long for the partner who broke up with you, or the one you dream of meeting; whether you hunger for the happy childhood you’ll never have, or for the divine; whether you yearn for a creative life, or the country of your birth, or a more perfect union (personally or politically); whether you dream of scaling the world’s highest peaks, or merging with the beauty you saw on your last beach vacation; whether you long to ease the pain of your ancestors, or for a world in which life could survive without consuming other life; whether you yearn for a lost person, an unborn child, the fountain of youth, or unconditional love: These are all manifestations of the same great ache.

NORMAL PEOPLE: ON TRUTH, LOVE, AND HOW I MET MY 35 SIBLINGS by Chrysta Bilton (Audible version)

A wild ride through one girl’s coming of age in the 80s and 90s. Chrysta’s mother, Debra, a lesbian, paid her father $2,000 for his sperm. A sister is born a couple of years later from the same donor, Jeffrey Harrison, who turns out to be Donor 150 in a NYT front page story years later about a cryobank he sold his sperm to, unbeknownst to Debra. Debra struggled off and on with addiction and pyramid schemes from which they were either living in mansions or run-down apartments. Jeffrey was in and out of their lives, depending on his mental health or financial situation. Bilton, the author, narrates the audiobook. With all the chaos of her youth and young adulthood, she methodically tells the story of what a family is and how she came to accept her thirty-five siblings into her life. A crazy story with humor built upon pain.

GIRLHOOD by Melissa Febos (Audible version)

Febos’s essays (Abandon Me, Whip Smart, Body Work) are a combination of reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir. And Girlhood is no exception except for the subject matter, universal to women everywhere. There isn’t an essay topic in this book that doesn’t resonate. Cat calls, come-ons, bodily changes, lurking men, saying yes when you meant no. The stories, statistics, and lasting effects of the “ordinary violations” girls are expected to put up with are gutwrenching and rage-inducing. No one picks at the scab of the subject matter until it bleeds better than Febos. She comes at it with every writer tool, every memory, every experience. Nothing is left to wonder. She’s done it all for us.

LAST CHANCE TEXACO: CHRONICLES OF AN AMERICAN TROUBADOUR by Rickie Lee Jones 

I remember working in a record store at a mall in Kalamazoo when Jones’s debut album, Rickie Lee Jones, came out. Everyone wanted the scoop on the jazzy girl in the beret. We played the album nonstop for customers. She became iconic in a mean-streets meets innocence stylized way—which makes sense in her idolization of West Side Story. This launched her into space with the help of luck, timing, hutzpa, a unique voice, and gobs of lyrical talent. Iconic as Jones’ career appeared, we learn so much in this memoir about why she vanished from the music scene in the 1990s only to resurface here and there at festivals sharing a stage with other luminaries. A childhood mired in poverty led to her living on the streets at various interludes. Then a heroin addiction. The on-again-off-again love affair with Tom Waits—two troubadours in the LA music scene in the 1970s. There’s even a weird encounter meeting her music idol, Van Morrison in Ireland after riding in a car with a leprechaun. Yes, Jones's honest storytelling gives the reader a sense of the realities facing women in the music business when misogyny was front and center on the stage, on the radio, and in the board rooms of record labels. She writes like she sings—with colors tinged in the blues and chock full of memorable characters from her extraordinary life. 

Favorite line(s): Some of us are born to live lives on an exaggerated scale. Even as children, we have a larger suitcase in which to carry all the things that will one day be on our backs. We are cumbersome, beautiful and ugly, fistfighters and bug savers. We are the living words of poems, we little kids who are abused, and we have cut-out rainbows hidden where only we can make wishes upon them. I mean to say, we have imagination, and maybe mine was always active; while others were shining their Sunday shoes, I was capturing a herd of wild horses in my backyard. I must have seemed very . . .wrong.