Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In her best-selling memoir, Happens Every Day, Isabel Gillies discovered that her husband had left her for another woman. Devastated, she strove mightily to understand his actions when a friend told her cavalierly that such things happen every day.

In the dazzling sequel, A Year and Six Seconds, Gillies, best known for her role as Detective Stabler’s wife on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” charmingly chronicles the jagged ways that people fall out of relationships and the unexpected, and often exhilarating, ways that they fall back into love.

Following her breakup, Gillies grabs her two sons and leaves the idyllic rural life of Lorain, Ohio, and her teaching position at Oberlin College, where her husband teaches English, for her parents’ apartment in New York City, where she herself grew up. Through a series of hilarious and poignant vignettes, Gillies shares with us her mighty struggles to cope with the loss of a relationship that she thought would last forever, the attempts to balance the needs of her two young sons with her own need for love and support, and the feelings of failure and insecurity that arise when she faces her parents. She writes, “It felt like nobody wanted us, and we needed everybody.”

At the height of her struggle to make her new life, Gillies flies back to Ohio to finalize her divorce from her husband, Josiah. Her heart aches, for even though she is familiar with the abstract idea of getting divorced, the very act of getting divorced is emotionally violent. Yet when Gillies returns to New York later that day, the sun is shining, and Central Park West is full of promises and people. At this moment, of course, she starts her new life.

Shortly after her divorce, Gillies meets Peter, a single father, and falls in love in six seconds; one year after they meet, Peter proposes, and soon she embarks on the road to happiness and love. Through her struggles, Gillies admits that “everything that happens in your life, no matter if it is positive or negative, eventually makes sense. Many things are not perfect, but they are good enough, and good enough is all you really need.” Gillies’ moving memoir is sure to inspire others in their struggles to overcome adversity and find new hope through love.

As a young man, Roald Amundsen set out with a friend on an Arctic training exercise, skiing west of Oslo to a mountain range with a plateau that extended to Bergen. While the two hoped to reach their goal in two days, a blizzard, combined with the pair’s lack of preparation for the trip, turned a training exercise into a misadventure that almost ended in tragedy. As a result of this event, Amundsen never again went unprepared into a polar environment.

In South With the Sun, her fast-paced and inspiring chronicle that is part biography and part memoir, Lynne Cox, a seasoned explorer herself who’s already shared her aquatic adventures in the breathtaking Swimming to Antarctica, feels compelled to follow Amundsen’s path. He becomes for her a waypoint along her life’s journey, providing hope, inspiration and guidance as she retraces his steps across the Northwest Passage. From her own adventures along the Amundsen trail, Cox learns that he succeeded where others had failed because he prepared extensively for his journeys and he took calculated risks. In preparation for his journey to Antarctica, for example, Amundsen learned how to sail and navigate and started to earn his skipper’s license. In addition, he learned to listen to the experts on the ship; unlike many of his fellow explorers, he avoided a devastating bout of scurvy during the Belgica expedition to Antarctica simply by following the suggestions of the ship’s physician to eat raw meat.

Cox weaves her own adventures into her narrative about Amundsen. She prepares methodically for her swims on the coast of Greenland, Baffin Island, King William Island and Cambridge Bay in water as cold as 28.8 degrees without a wet suit. As she swims the Chukchi Sea, north of the Arctic Circle, she survives her encounters with masses of jellyfish and feels elated that her swims have taken her into waters that few have ever entered—and that she has traveled through the same Arctic that Amundsen had, a place where one misstep could mean disaster.

On October 31, 2006, the great novelist William Styron died, surrounded by members of his family who tried to ease his journey into the life beyond. For Alexandra Styron, his youngest daughter, this deathbed scene might just as easily have been his family’s attempt to help him write the ending to his story, a “great yarn, furiously told, urgent and grand.” In Reading My Father, Alexandra Styron offers her own riveting tale, similarly “urgent and grand,” of growing up in the ambivalently loving Styron household, in the shadow of the celebrated author of Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Styron’s elegant reflections are as much a search for her father and a memorial to his life and work as they are a quest for redemption, forgiveness or closure. Following her father’s death, Styron goes to Duke University in search of his papers, especially his unfinished manuscript, titled The Way of the Warrior. William Styron had intended this World War II story to explore his own ambivalence about the glory and honor associated with patriotic service, raising questions about the Vietnam conflict in much the same way that The Confessions of Nat Turner raised questions about civil rights. He put aside the manuscript, however, after he awoke from a powerful dream about a woman, a Holocaust survivor, whom he had met in Brooklyn as a young man. Very quickly he began work on Sophie’s Choice and set aside The Way of the Warrior.

This unfinished manuscript acts as Alexandra’s madeleine, leading her into extended reflections on her relationship to her father and the celebrated family in which she grew up. She remembers that dinners at her house were magical affairs with guests from Philip Roth and Arthur Miller to Mike Nichols and Leonard Bernstein. She recalls her father’s deep slide into depression and her early bewilderment at his mood swings. After 1985, and his own chronicle of his depression, Darkness Visible, William Styron found himself sinking further and further into a depression from which he would never recover.

Alexandra Styron’s electrifying memoir reveals her father’s heroic struggles with the black dog of depression, but it also offers us a glimpse of the ways that his daughter so ably mitigated her father’s illness in her own days with him.