Jessica Wakeman

Each memoirist chooses flashpoints to segment her life: jobs, elections, romantic relationships, rehab stints. In the memoir Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, Jennifer Finney Boylan selects beloved canines as her narrative device and shares the life lessons they imparted in life and death. Yet the heart of the book is about learning self-love and learning to love others well in turn. For someone like Boylan who struggled with her gender identity for most of her life, those victories were hard-won.

Boylan is a contributing New York Times opinion writer, and she has detailed her life’s complex journey in other memoirs. (She is best known for her 2003 bestseller She’s Not There). In Good Boy, she writes about looking to her father for clues on masculinity in a ’70s suburban boyhood. As an adult, she imitated manhood as best she could but wanted desperately to unveil herself and be truly seen. She writes, “When women would say Je t’aime or its equivalent, my first reaction was to think, ‘Yeah, well. That’s only because you don’t know me well enough.’” It was not until her 40s (married to a woman, with two kids) that Boylan came out publicly as trans and learned that she could be loved for exactly who she is. The path was not easy, yet she injects warmth, humor and spirituality into its retelling.

Despite the book’s title, the family’s dogs have not all been “good.” There’s been peeing, jumping, humping and general canine destruction. But people are not “good” all the time either, and Good Boy will be relatable to those who believe dogs can teach us about unconditional love—or at least patient understanding. Though pet stories can veer into the saccharine, rest assured that this memoir does not. Frankly, some dogs don’t seem to have liked Boylan that much (which, as a teen, provided a valuable life lesson about facing unrequited romantic love).

Though it’s a great book for dog lovers, Good Boy isn’t a feel-good story about the unbreakable bond between human and beast. It’s a chronicle about the enduring messiness of humans, and how we’re worthy of love anyway.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jennifer Finney Boylan talks about life, death, self-acceptance and, of course, dogs.

Any book about addiction is actually a book about feelings and the lengths that people who are suffering will go to not to feel them. Erin Khar’s memoir, Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me, is a compassionate account of her illness and will surely be the gold standard for women writing about heroin addiction.

Khar grew up with an economically privileged life of Kardashian-style excess in the Los Angeles ’burbs: horses, new cars and houses, shopping sprees. Emotionally, however, she was impoverished. She was repeatedly traumatized by sexual violence as a child and teen and verbally abused by her mom’s boyfriend: neither parent defended her or was present in any meaningful way. At 8 years old, the author experimented with self-obliteration, taking her grandma’s expired painkillers. By 13, she had tried heroin. When she eventually became addicted in her teen years during the ’90s (incidentally, at the height of “heroin chic” in fashion), her life shaped itself around scoring her next fix. “I wanted more than asleep,” she writes, describing her reason for shooting up. “I wanted to be comatose. I wanted my brain to stop, to completely stop.”

In lesser hands, Strung Out could read like a “poor little rich girl” tale. To be sure, there are moments in the book that are frustrating due to how out of line Khar's experience is with most Americans’ reality (she attends rehab with celebrities, and moves to Paris on a whim). But Khar possesses the necessary self-reflection to identify the points in her life—breakups, deaths, an abortion—where her shame and loneliness deepened and her addiction metastasized. She is also cognizant of and candid about how her parents’ wealth and passing as white (she is half Persian) contributed to her successful recovery.   

While heroin is considered a line that shouldn’t be crossed by many recreational drug users, Khar’s story of choosing to numb-out pain, and the coffin-like trap of shame, is relatable to everyone. Anyone who reads Strung Out will come away with a better understanding of opioid addiction, if not necessarily more empathy for it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Erin Khar and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

Chances are, you know someone who has misgivings about technology. Perhaps this person quit Facebook or downgraded from a smartphone. In Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, these same misgivings are voiced by a former Silicon Valley foot soldier.

Anna Wiener, now a writer for The New Yorker, draws on her anxiety-addled experiences working at several startups during her mid-20s. Her bosses were very young, hoodie-clad men. They ran companies fattened up with venture capital, eager to “disrupt” something, anything. They were encouraged to “move fast and break things,” to “ask forgiveness, not permission.” Recklessness in the name of “optimization” was seen as noble. 

But Uncanny Valley is not a Devil Wears Prada-style takedown of any company or CEO. Instead, Wiener focuses on the startup climate as a whole—giving an insider’s view of San Francisco and the tech-​Manifest-Destiny-minded brogrammers who inhabit it.

She portrays tech as a field for people who want to be taken seriously, even though most of them have not yet proven themselves as good leaders or even good human beings. Wiener wonders how she came to earn a salary over $100,000 to essentially answer emails. Her questioning who earns that kind of money, and why, feels pertinent to the current political climate.

Wiener sipped the Kool-Aid but never quite drank it. She became skeptical about whether tech contributes positively to society, let alone fixes anything in it (which is often the stated goal). In each of her workplaces, she was one of only a few women, an experience she likens to “immersion therapy for internalized misogyny.” Surveillance of tech users was—and still is—rampant, and unchecked greed turns out to be a big elephant in the room. “What were we doing, anyway, helping people become billionaires?” she writes toward the book’s end. The reader will have long been wondering the same thing. 

Wiener’s eventual exit from startups is publishing’s gain: She is an extremely gifted writer and cultural critic. Uncanny Valley may be a defining memoir of the 2020s, and it’s one that will send a massive chill down your spine. 

Growing up means learning that our parents are not always content with their lives.

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur is a story of one daughter’s moral contortions to make her mother, Malabar, happy. Brodeur learned the full contours of her mother’s discontent by becoming embroiled in her extramarital affair.

Brodeur was only 14 when Malabar—a charming cookbook author wed to a wealthy man who soon fell ill after their marriage—divulged that she had taken a family friend, also married, as her lover. Brodeur kept their affair a secret from her stepfather, both families, her friends and, later, even her own spouse. Wild Game explores this secret’s impact on all of their lives, but primarily Brodeur’s own.

Brodeur knew her mother had suffered a tragic life due to parental abuse and the later death of a child. As Brodeur became personally invested in protecting the affair, she reveals herself to be an extraordinary case of the parentified child. Anyone with similar childhood circumstances will relate to the weightiness of filial duty depicted in Wild Game.

But Brodeur is also extraordinary for how, on the other side of this story, she has ended up basically OK. She’s married again, a parent herself and a lovely writer. (She is the former editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary magazine she launched with Francis Ford Coppola.) Her talent with words lies in her ability to make the reader feel deeply empathetic for Malabar, while at the same time abhorring her behavior as a parent. Mother and daughter are, certainly, a perpetrator and a victim. But the reader is liable to be convinced, as Broedur is, that her mother was very much a victim, too.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game.