Author: Kendra Winchester

Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister, Liliana, was in college when she was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Decades later, Cristina goes to Mexico City in search of her sister’s case file. But when the police inform her that Liliana’s case file was lost, she decides to make a sort of file of her own, an act to force the world to bear witness to her sister’s life. The rest of the book is memories that Rivera Garza has of her sister while they were growing up. We learn about all the squabbles they had as kids and all the love they shared as they got older. Rivera Garza also interviews Liliana’s friends from college in Mexico City. This way, Rivera Garza creates a collection of snapshots of her sister’s life leading up to the time of her death. This incredible memoir is one of the best memoirs I’ve read this year. It’s truly a stunning testament of sisterly love.

Pushkin has released a new audiobook of Mary Oliver’s incredible essay collection, Upstream. Hala Alyan, Joy Sullivan, and Kate Baer read different sections of the collection, each introducing their portion with some personal thoughts on why they treasure Oliver’s writing. The collection itself is a meditation on the natural world. Oliver writes her prose with a poet’s eye for word choice, each sentence carefully crafted. I’d never read Mary Oliver before, so Upstream was such a perfect choice as an introduction to Oliver’s work. So if you’re looking for a place to start reading Oliver’s extensive backlist, I’d definitely recommend you start with Upstream. And if you’re already familiar with her work, Pushkin’s new audiobook edition of this essay collection is a must listen.

A Living Remedy was one of my most anticipated reads of 2023, so I dropped everything to listen to it as soon as it hit my audiobook app. There’s something about Chung’s prose that captures readers’ attention from the start. After Chung’s father dies, she doubles down on wanting to make the most of the time with her mother. But when her mother’s cancer comes back, Chung knows she’s on borrowed time. Then the pandemic rolls in, and Chung can’t visit her mother because of social distancing. How does one say goodbye over the phone? How does a daughter attend her mother’s funeral virtually? A Living Remedy is a testament to Chung’s love for her parents and living with the grief of losing them. Her writing is so emotionally intimate, and if you lost a family member during the height of social distancing, you can’t help but relate to Chung’s story.

Chambers’ family hails from Eastern Kentucky, and her parents moved from the holler to a bigger town, looking for better opportunities. Chambers makes it into an Ivy League school and is soon surrounded by young adults from incredibly privileged backgrounds. She deals with the backhanded compliments and passive aggressiveness about being from Kentucky. She keeps her head down, does her work, and begins looking for her next move. How will she give back to her community? Chambers illustrates the complex reality of striving for upward mobility while still trying to hold on to and respect her Appalachian roots. Moving away from the region, becoming what’s called a “Expatalachian,” is an emotional journey that every person has to work through themselves. And I appreciate Chambers letting us into her experience as she figures out her place in the world.

Incredible memoirist Melissa Febos writes about crafting a personal narrative. She examines the way telling one’s own story can be deeply psychologically impactful. How does a writer wrap their own mind around their life to be able to share that story with others? Each chapter tackles a different consideration that goes behind writing personal essays and memoirs, giving readers a sort of master class in this area of writing. I found Febos’ perspective on writing personal narratives incredibly insightful. I kept underlining so many different quotes from the book. She gives advice for how to examine your life and figure out which stories to share to best tell your own story. This book is perfect for anyone wanting to improve their own writing, whether that’s just journaling or writing their own memoir.

When Julia Lee was in high school, she witnessed the riots in L.A. Her parents owned a business in a predominantly Black neighborhood. After the white police officers were acquitted of the beating of Rodney King, Lee realized that even though she wasn’t white, she still possessed a type of racial privilege. This experience informs her interest in examining race in literature. Her parents are also working class immigrants, and Lee didn’t grow up with much, but she ends up attending an Ivy League school, where her working class background has never been more apparent to her. Biting the Hand is an intersectional look at Lee’s experience growing up and living as an Asian American woman in the United States. Each essay takes on the topic from a different angle as Lee examines both her experience as a multi-marginalized person who, at the same time, holds a lot of privilege in different areas of her life.

We have all probably guessed that science is biased against women, but I never realized how truly bad it was until I read Saini’s book. For centuries, scientists have viewed women as the “inferior sex,” and this perspective caused them to come up with a lot of ridiculous scientific theories about women’s bodies. I don’t think any of us will be able to forget that men used to think that women’s uterus roamed their bodies. Saini also dives into scientific research and how using men as the “default test subject” has harmed women over and over through the years. There’s a section about how drug companies exclusively used men when testing new medications, meaning they had no data on how their drug might affect women’s bodies. Admittedly, I rage read this book as I learned more ghastly facts about these ridiculous men. But Saini also leaves us with hope, discussing how more women are entering scientific fields and changing the way that science understands and studies women.

When Abby Norman starts having intense pelvic pain, she’s quickly diagnosed with endometriosis. But even with a diagnosis, her doctors don’t understand why she’s still having intense symptoms. So Norman begins to research her own condition, asking her doctors to consider the research she finds. As Norman shares her experience, she also presents readers with her research, describing the findings she’s discovered while researching endometriosis. Despite the condition being fairly common, doctors still know very little about endometriosis and there’s never enough funding to research to learn more about the disease. As someone who also has had very similar experiences, I deeply connected with this book. Far too often, women are forced to do their own research. We have to visit doctor after doctor, hoping to find that one physician who treats us like human beings, not just problems to be fixed.

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia collects a chorus of voices from Indigenous writers from across the Australian continent. Australia was founded on the rule of terra nullius, or no man’s land, the colonialist idea that the Indigenous peoples had no claim to the land before the settlers arrived. The law wasn’t overturned until the High Court of Australia’s Mabo decision in 1992. And the idea of terra nullius has echoed through the lives of the Indigenous peoples for generations, still greatly impacting them on a daily basis. The writers from this anthology illustrate the many ways Aboriginal peoples live on the continent with their different Native nations and background.

This anthology’s writers are from Australian LGBTQ+ communities, and features a diverse group full of many different sexual orientations and gender identities. Each essay depicts the lives of many different people who came out early in life or later in life. There are people from the country and people from the city. I really appreciated how Law wanted to feature so many different intersections of identity.

E.J. Koh grew up with her grandparents in the U.S. while her parents moved back to Korea to work and send money to their kids. Koh received letters from her mother written in Korean. In the Magical Language of Others is written while Koh is translating her mother’s letters and processing her relationship with her parents who she didn’t see for long stretches of time. Koh has a way of bringing the reader into her state of mind and the intimate process of trying to find a way to communicate with her mother through language and cultural barriers.

Mallory O’Meara tells the story of Milicent Patrick, one of the designers who worked on the monster design for The Creature of the Black Lagoon. O’Meara describes the early years of Patrick’s Hollywood career, giving us a picture of what it was like to be a woman working in the movie industry during the middle of the 19th century. As we learn more of the prospects of women monster costume designers at the time, we also gain more perspective on Hollywood as a whole, delving into the weird career politics happening at the time. I’m usually not interested in the history of Hollywood, but I enjoyed learning more about classic monster costume design and how it developed throughout the 20th century.

The moment I read the description of Erica Berry’s new book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, I knew I needed to read it. Berry frames her look at wolves as symbols of human fear with the story of OR-7, a famous wolf that roamed through Oregon. She expertly ties together her ideas with the wolf, delving into everything from fairytales to her own story as a woman living in a male-centered world. I found myself consumed by this book, exploring Berry’s different ideas, each chapter building upon the last. It’s such a lush, multi-genre book, full of insightful observations and excellent storytelling.

In honor of Nicole Chung’s second memoir coming out this week, I’d thought we’d look at her first book, All You Can Ever Know. Chung grew up as a Korean American adoptee with white parents. Chung’s parents loved her deeply and thought that love was enough. But as she grew, Chung began to realize that her parents didn’t understand what it was like to be Asian American in their mostly-white town. Chung describes her journey, untangling the many threads of her family history and how she came to be given up for adoption. Her experience causes her to think more about the wider world of private adoption and the many problems within the industry. Her writing is direct as she openly describes the complication of loving her parents while also knowing there could have been a lot of things done better about her upbringing as an interracial adoptee. All You Can Ever Know is a stunning memoir that opens up a conversation about private and interracial adoption in America.