LOVE & TROUBLE: A MIDLIFE RECKONING by Claire Dederer

The mother of two preteens and happily married to the same man for seventeen years, Dederer finds her libido wrestled awake and compares the experience to when she was coming of age in the 1980s. Tracing similar hungers back through decades of her diary entries, the author compares timeless revelations in these edgy, hilarious, and sometimes sad essays of what it’s like to be a daughter, wife, and mother. A brave and wise memoir I won’t forget

Favorite line(s): Everyone at Oberlin was the weirdest person from his or her senior class in high school. Now picture all these weirdos in a cornfield, with no diversions except our own weirdness and our sordid knowledge we hadn’t gotten into Brown. There was the boy who collected his nail clippings in a pickle jar. There was the girl who’d famously tasted all her bodily secretions. Only at Oberlin would that be a cause for fame. These weirdos were united by their shared and overwhelming desire to become modern dancers. The backup plan? A sensible career in anthropology. I myself was the second-weirdest kid from my high-school senior class (the weirdest was Vanessa, now at Bennington), and while I had no interest in modern dance, I had written more than my fair share of poetry, which is like modern dance for uncoordinated people.

THE ANGEL OF ROME: AND OTHER STORIES by Jess Walter

I love Jess Walter’s writing. It gleams—like Windexed glass. You walk right into it, and bam, the senses come alive with every sentence, the visual behind the words. I read this collection while in Rome. Even though only one story has Rome as a setting, Walter’s work feels grounded in the unfamiliar—as if all the characters are walking through life as outsiders. All twelve stories are filled with complex and richly drawn characters and universal themes. There’s father loss in Mr. Voice, a teacher’s crush on a student’s mother in Magnificent Desolation, two scientists vying for the same academic job and hooking up at a motel during a snowstorm in The Way the World Ends, and my favorite, Town & Country about a son coming out to his father—the opening of this one worth the price of the paperback. 

Favorite line(s): My father’s girlfriend came home from the casino a day early and caught him having sex with the woman across the street. “I thought you were going to be gone another day,” my dad said by way of apology, or explanation, or perhaps just narration. His girlfriend, Ellen, had been away on her annual girls’ weekend in Jackpot, but since these “girls” were all at least seventy, they were forced to cut the trip short when one of them had a heart attack playing keno at Cactus Pete’s. All of which is to say, my father and his girlfriend were not the age you’d expect for this kind of drama. Dad was seventy-three, but he’d lately begun exhibiting signs of dementia, one of which, I was surprised to find out, was this late-in-life promiscuity, an erosion of inhibitions. Dad literally could not remember to not screw the sixty-year-old lady across the street.

TIME’S MOUTH by Edan Lepucki

Mothers abandon daughters. Daughters spend their lives asking why. Add to the storyline cults, time travel, and the juxtapositions of the California landscape, and you’ve got Lepucki’s sprawling delve into generational traumas. Wholly original and cinematographically written, Time’s Mouth is the story of Ray and Cherry, raised by a flock of hippie feminist runaways under the spell of Ursa, the time-traveling matriarch and Ray’s mother. Ray and Cherry fall in love as young adults and flee the commune when Cherry becomes pregnant. Spanning years, the novel traces the lengths these characters go to escape and then revisit their pasts.

Favorite line(s): When Opal got inside the box and hurtled into the past, she was certain that her only true purpose in life was this: to revisit the smallest moments, to resuscitate them. She gave them new life. She held them in her body. She honored them. Reliving them meant they mattered, that they weren’t insignificant. Memories pulsed with life again. That she could access something that everyone else assumed was forever lost—it exhilarated her. If she didn’t tunnel, what was she? Just an eighteen-year-old with a high school diploma and a boring job, hanging around an old house.