Stranger Care: a memoir of loving what isn't ours by Sarah Sentilles

After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system's goal is reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question, evaluate, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their family--even if it means most likely having to give them back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, a phone call finally comes: a three-day old baby girl, named Coco, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home.

"You were never ours," Sarah tells Coco, "yet we belong to each other."

A love letter to Coco, and to the countless children like her, Stranger Care chronicles Sarah's discovery of what it means to mother--in this case, not just a vulnerable infant, but the birth mother who loves her, too. Ultimately, Coco's story reminds us that we depend on family, and that family can take different forms. With "fearless, stirring, rhythmic" (Nick Flynn) prose, Sentilles lays bare an intimate, powerful story, with universal concerns: How can we care for and protect each other? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this planet? And if we're all related--tree, bird, star, person--how might we better live?

404 pages (May 2021)

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Title Read-alikes: Rock Needs River: a memoir of a very open adoption by Vanessa McGrady; A Love-Stretched Life: stories on wrangling hope, embracing the unexpected, and discovering the meaning of family by Jilana Goble; Intertwined: a mother's memoir by Kathleen English Cadmus; The Girl in the Red Boots: making peace with my mother by Judith Ruskay Rabinor; You Carried Me: a daughter's memoir by Melissa Ohden; American Baby: a mother, a child, and the shadow history of adoption by Gabrielle Glaser; When the Bough Breaks: true stories of hope and encouragement of mothers who have had to reinvent their relationships with their children by Nancy Ferraro; Don't You Ever: my mother and her secret son by Mary Carter Bishop; Raising Abel by Carolyn Nash; Little Bandaged Days by Kyra Wilder; House of Sticks: a memoir by Ly Tran; Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison; and Why Didn't You Tell Me?: a memoir by Carmen Rita Wong.

Inheritance: a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love by Dani Shapiro

A new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets--a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery Shapiro recently made about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden story of her own life.

What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.

Inheritance is a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

Timely and unforgettable, Dani Shapiro's memoir is a gripping, gut-wrenching exploration of genealogy, paternity, and love.

247 pages (January 2019)

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Title Read-alikes: Before My Time: a memoir of love and fate by Ami McKay; The Forgetting River: a modern tale of survival, identity, and the Inquisition by Doreen Carvajal; Go Ask Your Father: one man's obsession with finding his origins through DNA testing by Lennard J. Davis; Wild Game: my mother, her secret, and me by Adrienne Brodeur; Futureface: a family mystery, a search for identity, and the truth about belonging by Alex Wagner; When I Was White: a memoir by Sarah Valentine; Aftershocks: a memoir by Nadia Owusu; Why Didn't You Tell Me?: a memoir by Carmen Rita Wong; The Family Outing: a memoir by Jessi Hempel; Unorthodox: the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots by Deborah Feldman; Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain; A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias; and The Tiny One by Eliza Minot.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope

377 pages (April 2020)

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New book explores schizophrenia through the lens of a real family | Your Morning (CTV Your Morning):

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Title Read-alikes: No One Cares About Crazy People: the chaos and heartbreak of mental health in America by Ron Powers; In My Father's House: a new view of how crime runs in the family: by Fox Buterfield; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot; Educated: a memoir by Tara Westover; Rosemary: the hidden Kenndy daughter by Kate Clifford Larson; January First: a child's descent into madness and her father's struggle to save her by Michael Schofield; Golden Boy: a murder among the Manhattan elite by John Glatt; A Lethal Inheritance: a mother uncovers the science behind three generations of mental illness by Victoria Costello; The Collected Schizophrenias: essays by Esmé Weijun Wang; This Fragile Life: a mother's story of a bipolar son by Charlotte Pierce-Baker; The Hospital Always Wins: a memoir by Issa Ibrahim; Follow Me into the Dark by Felicia Sullivan; and Myths about Suicide by Thomas E. Joiner.

The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager

In this luminous memoir, an MIT astrophysicist must reinvent herself in the wake of tragedy and discovers the power of connection on this planet, even as she searches our galaxy for another Earth.

Sara Seager has always been in love with the stars: so many lights in the sky, so much possibility. Now a pioneering planetary scientist, she searches for exoplanets—especially that distant, elusive world that sustains life. But with the unexpected death of Seager's husband, the purpose of her own life becomes hard for her to see. Suddenly, at forty, she is a widow and the single mother of two young boys. For the first time, she feels alone in the universe.

As she struggles to navigate her life after loss, Seager takes solace in the alien beauty of exoplanets and the technical challenges of exploration. At the same time, she discovers earthbound connections that feel every bit as wondrous, when strangers and loved ones alike reach out to her across the space of her grief. Among them are the Widows of Concord, a group of women offering advice on everything from home maintenance to dating, and her beloved sons, Max and Alex. Most unexpected of all, there is another kind of one-in-a-billion match, not in the stars but here at home.

Probing and invigoratingly honest, The Smallest Lights in the Universe is its own kind of light in the dark.

308 pages (August 2020)

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Title Read-alikes: The Disordered Cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein; Lab Girl by Hope Jahren; The Inward Empire: mapping the wilds of mortality and fatherhood by Christian Donian; Wired for Love: a neuroscientist's journey through romance, loss, and the essence of human connection by Stephanie Cacioppo; I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust: a memoir of autism and hope by Valerie Gilpeer; Mother Brain: how neuroscience is rewriting the story of parenthood by Chelsea Conaboy; The Perpetual Now: a story of amnesia, memory, and love by Michael D Lemonick; Little Matches: a memoir of grief and light by Maryanne O'Hara; The Seasons of My Mother: a memoir of love, family, and flowers by Marcia Gay Harden; Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison; Unreliable Truth: on memoir and memory by Maureen Murdock; My Stroke of Insight: a brain scientist's personal journey by Jill Bolte Taylor; and Until I Say Good-Bye: my year of living with joy by Susan Spencer-Wendel.

Crying in H Mart: a memoir by Michelle Zauner

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

256 pages (April 2021)

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Title Read-alikes: The Magical Language of Others: a memoir by E.J. Koh;  Tastes Like War: a memoir by Grace M. Cho;  Seeing Ghosts: a memoir by Kat Chow; Dead Mom Walking: a memoir of miracle cures and other disasters by Rachel Matlow; Beautiful Country: a memoir by Qian Julie Wang;  Family in Six Tones: a refugee mother, an American daughter by Lan Cao; All You Can Ever Know: a memoir by Nicole Chung; Speak, Okinawa: a memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina; House of Sticks: a memoir by Ly Tran; Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?: a memoir by Séamas O'Reilly; A Drop of Midnight: a memoir by Jason Timbuktu Diakité; Dog Flowers: a memoir by Danielle Geller; My Life in the Sunshine: searching for my father and discovering my family by Nabil Ayers.

Red at the Bone: a novel by Jacqueline Woodson

An extraordinary new novel about the influence of history on a contemporary family, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.

Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. Moving forward and backward in time, with the power of poetry and the emotional richness of a narrative ten times its length, Jacqueline Woodson's extraordinary new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of this child.

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the soundtrack of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony-- a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives--even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

208 pages (September 2019)

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Jacqueline Woodson - Red at the Bone and Creating Empathy via Complex Stories | The Daily Show with Trevor Noah:

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Title Read-alikes: Dominicana by Angie Cruz; Transcendent Kingdom; by Yaa Gyasi; God Help the Child by Toni Morrison; The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende; The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan; Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson; The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros; These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card; The Majesties by Tiffany Tsao; and If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim.

Mercies in Disguise : a story of hope, a family's genetic destiny, and the science that rescued them by Gina Bari Kolata

The phone rings. The doctor from California is on the line. "Are you ready Amanda?" The two people Amanda Baxley loves the most had begged her not to be tested--at least, not now. But she had to find out.

If your family carried a mutated gene that foretold a brutal illness and you were offered the chance to find out if you'd inherited it, would you do it? Would you walk toward the problem, bravely accepting whatever answer came your way? Or would you avoid the potential bad news as long as possible?

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times science reporter and bestselling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an almost archetypal family in a small town in South Carolina. A proud and determined clan, many of them doctors, they are struck one by one with an inscrutable illness. They finally discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of events that many saw as providential. Meanwhile, science, progressing for a half a century along a parallel track, had handed the Baxleys a resolution--not a cure, but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease and who did not. And science would offer another dilemma--fertility specialists had created a way to spare the children through an expensive process.

A work of narrative nonfiction in the tradition of the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Mercies in Disguise is the story of a family that took matters into its own hands when the medical world abandoned them. It's a story of a family that had to deal with unspeakable tragedy and yet did not allow it to tear them apart. And it is the story of a young woman--Amanda Baxley--who faced the future head on, determined to find a way to disrupt her family's destiny.

262 pages (March 2017)

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Title Read-alikes: The Family Gene by Joselin Linder; Against Medical Advice by James Patterson; Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich; The Angel and the Assassin by Donna Jackson Nakazawa; The Breakthrough by Charles Graeber; Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius; The Philadelphia Chromosome by Jessica Wapner; The Lost Family by Libby Copeland; Happiness by Heather Harpham; Chasing My Cure by David Fajgenbaum; My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me by Jason B. Rosenthal; A Mind Unraveled by Kurt Eichenwald; and Sophie and the Rising Sun by Augusta Trobaugh.

Bettyville: a memoir by George Hodgman

A witty, tender memoir of a son’s journey home to care for his irascible mother—a tale of secrets, silences, and enduring love.

When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself—an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook—in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living?

When hell freezes over. He can’t bring himself to force her from the home both treasure—the place where his father’s voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who speaks her mind but cannot quite reveal her heart, has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay.

As these two unforgettable characters try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty’s life and his own struggle for self-respect, moving readers from their small town—crumbling but still colorful—to the star-studded corridors of Vanity Fair. Evocative of The End of Your Life Book Club and The Tender Bar, Hodgman’s debut is both an indelible portrait of a family and an exquisitely told tale of a prodigal son’s return.

278 pages (March 2015)

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George Hodgman discusses the reversal of parental/child roles (PBS NewsHour):

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Title Read-alikes: Mama's Boy: a story from our Americas by Dustin Lance Black; Dangerous When Wet: a memoir of booze, sex, and my mother by Jamie Brickhouse; Like Crazy: life with my mother and her invisible friends by Dan Mathews; All Gone by Alex Witchel; Moving Miss Peggy: a story of dementia, courage, and consolation by Robert Benson; This Is How You Say Goodbye: a daughter's memoir by Victoria Loustalot; Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast; Another Country: navigating the emotional terrain of our elders by Mary Pipher; Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf; Learning to Sit in the Silence: a journal of caretaking by Elaine Marcus Starkman; Happens Every Day: an all-too-true story by Isabel Gillies; I'll Be Seeing You: a memoir by Elizabeth Berg; and Blue Nights by Joan Didion.

All the Wrong Places: a life lost and found by Philip Connors

The prize-winning author of Fire Season returns with the heartrending story of his troubled years before finding solace in the wilderness.

In his debut Fire Season, Philip Connors recounted with lyricism, wisdom, and grace his decade as a fire lookout high above remote New Mexico. Now he tells the story of what made solitude on the mountain so attractive: the years he spent reeling in the wake of a family tragedy.

At the age of twenty-three, Connors was a young man on the make. He'd left behind the Minnesota pig farm on which he'd grown up and the brother with whom he'd never been especially close. He had a magazine job lined up in New York City and a future unfolding exactly as he’d hoped. Then one phone call out of the blue changed everything. All the Wrong Places is a searingly honest account of the aftermath of his brother's shocking death, exploring both the pathos and the unlikely humor of a life unmoored by loss.

Beginning with the otherworldly beauty of a hot-air-balloon ride over the skies of Albuquerque and ending in the wilderness of the American borderlands, this is the story of a man paying tribute to the dead by unconsciously willing himself into all the wrong places, whether at the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal, the gritty streets of Bed-Stuy in the 1990s, or the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. With ruthless clarity and a keen sense of the absurd, Connors slowly unmasks the truth about his brother and himself, to devastating effect. Like Cheryl Strayed's Wild, this is a powerful look back at wayward years—and a redemptive story about finding one's rightful home in the world.

243 pages (February 2015)

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Title Read-alikes: The Splendid Things We Planned by Blake Bailey; Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene; Blue Nights by Joan Didion; After Visiting Friends: a son's story by Michael Hainey; Levels of Life by Julian Barnes; Spoiler Alert by Michael Ausiello; Life After Suicide by Jennifer Ashton; Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg; Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger; The Light of the World: a memoir by Elizabeth Alexander; Bastards by Mary Anna King; What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas; and Missing: a memoir by Lindsay Harrison.