Family Memoir

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

Hayden Herrera’s parents each married five times; following their desires was more important to them than looking after their children. When Herrera was only three years old, her parents separated, and she and her sister moved from Cape Cod to New York City to live with their mother and their new hard-drinking stepfather. They saw their father only during the summers on the Cape, when they and the other neighborhood children would be left to their own devices by parents who were busy painting, writing, or composing music.

After trying for years to emulate her boomer parents’ 40-year and still-going-strong marriage, Sophie realized that maybe the love she was looking for was down a road less traveled. In this bold, graphic memoir, she explores her sexuality, her values, and the versions of love our society accepts and practices.

Stephen McGann is Dr. Turner in the BBC hit drama series Call the Midwife. His family survived famine-ravaged Ireland in the 1850s. His ancestors settled in poverty-rife Victorian Liverpool, working to survive and thrive. Some of them became soldiers serving on the Western Front. One would be the last man to step off the SS Titanic as it sank beneath the icy waves. He would testify at the inquest. This is their story.

Robert Ragland toiled every day on his family’s Appalachian tobacco farm as a young boy. His father, an impoverished and illiterate sharecropper, spent his earnings on alcohol and beat his children and wife constantly. And Robert couldn’t take one more strike. Meanwhile, Mennonite families had moved to town, providing food and comfort when Robert’s mother broke her leg. Witnessing compassion from these people, Robert wondered: What would it feel like to belong to a group where I was wanted, loved, and appreciated?

Misfit, truant, delinquent. John Robison was never a model child, and he wasn’t a model dad either. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the age of 40, he approached fatherhood as a series of logic puzzles and practical jokes. When his son, Cubby, asked, “Where did I come from?” John said he’d bought him at the Kid Store and that the salesman had cheated him by promising Cubby would “do all chores”. He read electrical engineering manuals to Cubby at bedtime.

A powerful, emotional memoir and an extraordinary portrait of three generations of Tibetan women whose lives are forever changed when Chairman Mao’s Red Army crushes Tibetan independence, sending a young mother and her six-year-old daughter on a treacherous journey across the snowy Himalayas toward freedom.

Will Jawando tells a deeply affirmative story of hope and respect for men of color. As a boy growing up outside DC, Will, who went by his Nigerian name, Yemi, never quite fit in. He was a Black kid with a divorced white mother, a frayed relationship with his biological father, and teachers who scolded him for being disruptive in class. Eventually, he became close to Kalfani, a kid he looked up to. Years after he got the call that Kalfani was dead, another casualty of gun violence, Will looks back on the extraordinary mentors that enabled him to thrive.

Long Lost Family presenter and Radio 5 breakfast show host Nicky Campbell reveals how the simple unconditional love of Maxwell, his Labrador, turned his life around and helped him come to terms with his difficult journey as an adopted child. Dogs have been the common link between the key moments in Nicky Campbell's life: there was Toby, the dog he never knew and who sat devotedly by his cot before his adoption, and then the adorable fox terrier Candy, who arrived soon after he was happily adopted. Nothing could replace the loss of Candy when he died suddenly, when Nicky was 11.

Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s, certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that helped raise her.

In this hard-hitting account of her work representing parents in care proceedings in the Family Court, child protection lawyer Teresa Thornhill conveys the dilemmas inherent in the job and shows how our under-resourced system of child protection – in both its social work and legal aspects – often fails to provide support that could enable the most vulnerable parents to continue to care for their children.

Christine Hemp's debut work of nonfiction, Wild Ride Home, is a brilliant memoir, looping themes of finding love and losing love, of going away and coming home, of the wretched course of Alzheimer's, of cancer, of lost pregnancies, of fly fishing and horsemanship, of second chances, and, ultimately, of the triumph of love and family—all told within the framework of the training of a little white horse named Buddy. Wild Ride Home invites the listener into the close Hemp family, which believes beauty and humor outshine the most devastating circumstances.

When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happens to pluck a library book from the shelf, she has no idea that her life will be irrevocably altered. Recognizing photos of her mother and grandmother in the book, she discovers a horrifying fact: Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant chillingly depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List - a man known and reviled the world over.

Ingrassia lost his mother, two sisters, brother, and nephew to cancer—different cancers developing at different points throughout their lives. And while highly unusual, his family is not the only one to wonder whether their heartbreak is the result of unbelievable bad luck, or if there might be another explanation. Through meticulous research and riveting storytelling, Ingrassia takes us from the 1960s—when Dr. Frederick Pei Li and Dr. Joseph Fraumeni Jr. first met, not yet knowing that they would help make a groundbreaking discovery that would affect cancer patients for decades to come.

When Andrew Bridge was seven years old, he and his mother - a mentally unstable woman who loved her child more than she could care for him - slid deeper and deeper into poverty, until they were reduced to scavenging for food in trash bins. Welfare officials did little more than threaten to take Andrew away, until a social worker arrived with a police escort and did just that while his mother screamed on the sidewalk.

In the summer of 1937, a California crime stunned an already grim nation. Three little girls were lured away from a neighborhood park to unthinkable deaths. After a frantic week-long manhunt for the killer, a suspect emerged. Justice was swift, and the condemned man was buried away with the horrifying story. But decades later, Pamela Everett, a lawyer and former journalist, starts digging, following up a cryptic comment her father once made about losing two of his sisters. Everett unearths a truly historic legal case that included the genesis of modern sex offender laws and the last man sentenced to hang in California.

A. J. Jacobs has received some strange emails over the years, but this note was perhaps the strangest: "You don't know me, but I'm your eighth cousin. And we have over 80,000 relatives of yours in our database." That's enough family members to fill Madison Square Garden four times over. Who are these people, A. J. wondered, and how do I find them? So began Jacobs' three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history.

In this raw and captivating memoir, a woman whose mother had long been a high-functioning alcoholic shares the often overlooked effects of having an alcoholic parent as an adult, as well as the complicated and emotional journey of getting a parent help. Kaplan Grace’s mother was a great mom. She always held down a job and provided for her family. No one would have known that she was struggling with addiction. But when her mother’s closet alcoholism finally spiraled out of control, Kaplan began to understand how deeply addiction impacted her childhood.

Take it from a man whose family background includes brawls, visits from "aliens," star-billing on FBI wanted posters, and, oh yes, an altercation with the Swedish Mafia - families can be brutal! But because we all have one, Louie Anderson has written this honest, funny, and brilliant survival manual for anyone who's ever choked on the F Word.

Jan Wong knows food is better when shared, so when she set out to write a book about home cooking in France, Italy, and China, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. While he wasn’t keen on spending excessive time with his mom, he dreamed of becoming a chef. Ultimately, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. On their journey, Jan and Sam live and cook with locals, seeing first-hand how globalization is changing food, families, and cultures.