Kelly Blewett

Naoki Higashida is a nonverbal, autistic young man whose first widely translated memoir, The Reason I Jump, written when he was 13, was received with acclaim and incredulity. Acclaim because it detailed the vivid inner life of someone who had, before his mother’s intervention with what they call an “alphabet grid” (a modified QWERTY keyboard), seemed unresponsive, and incredulity because it seemed impossible that someone who was genuinely autistic and working independently could compose such coherent and artful prose. Since writing The Reason I Jump, Higashida has become a celebrity in Japan and the second most widely translated Japanese author behind Haruki Murakami.

Higashida’s new collection—comprised of blog entries, poems, a short story and an interview—brings readers up to speed with the author, now in his early 20s. His thoughts on neurological diversity are riveting: “My brain has this habit of getting lost inside things. Finding the way in is easy, but—like being in a maze—finding your way out is a lot harder. I want to exit the maze right now, but I’m forced to stay inside it. This applies also to time and schedules. They constrain me.” Higashida’s accounts of thinking in images, feeling compelled to make repetitive movements and the difficulties and pleasures of communicating make this book totally captivating. Translator and bestselling author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) introduces the volume with an account of the dismay he felt when Higashida’s work was dismissed by critics as fraudulent. Mitchell points out that he has witnessed Higashida’s composing firsthand, and that, moreover, Higashida’s prose has changed the way he perceives—and interacts with—his own autistic son. Mitchell writes that bringing Higashida’s writing to a larger public has been the most important writing task of his life.

Readers will find this older Higashida not only eloquent and thoughtful, but also wise, measured and, most of all, kind.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Some people are born to write, and one of those people is Patricia Lockwood, who knew at age 6 that she would be a poet. In the final chapter of Priestdaddy, her debut memoir, Lockwood—whose poem “Rape Joke” won her a Pushcart Prize in 2015—marvels at her own forcefulness: “On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength.” In this brilliant and heartbreakingly funny book, the poet returns to her childhood home and offers the story of her unconventional Catholic upbringing and her larger-than-life parents.

Lockwood’s father, believe it or not, is a Catholic priest who converted to the faith after he was married. In such circumstances, there is a celibacy loophole, and Lockwood and her four siblings grew up on rectory grounds in St. Louis and Cincinnati, which Lockwood loyally refers to as “the worst cities in the Midwest.” When she became a teenager, she fell in love on the internet and ran away to marry Jason, which, miraculously, turned out to be a great decision. In adulthood, however, the couple fell on hard times and found themselves moving back in with Lockwood’s parents—her guitar-strumming, boxer-shorts-wearing, holy and emotionally aloof father and her paranoid, accommodating and lyrical mother. Surrounded by the vestiges of her childhood, Lockwood begins thinking anew about identity, place, religion, girlhood and poetry—always poetry.

This is a book that will transport the reader deep into Lockwood’s zany and appealing point of view. The sheer authority of the prose will occasionally take the reader’s breath away. To say I could not put the book down does not do it justice, nor would quotations from the dozens of pages that struck me as beautiful and unforgettable and weird. Do yourself a favor and read this memoir.

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Decca Aitkenhead never meant to fall in love with Tony. A drug dealer who was already married, Tony seemed the least likely candidate for a serious love affair. But insuppressible attraction and deep emotional intimacy led the British couple to a partnership that lasted nearly 10 years—until Tony, a man in his prime, suddenly died inside the space of 10 minutes while on vacation with his wife and two children in Jamaica.

Aitkenhead’s new book chronicles the terrible details of Tony’s death by drowning and her mourning in the year that followed. “You always said I should write a book about you,” she writes in the dedication to Tony. “It wasn’t meant to be this one.” As this wrenching dedication suggests, Aitkenhead is an unsparing writer. Her understated prose makes the story surge forward with force.

It is not, though, an unusual story. Like many grief-stricken widows, Aitkenhead found herself, in the wake of tragedy, to be a person she did not know. This new Decca Aitkenhead had enormous and unpredictable needs. She felt split in half. Though it was her partner who drowned, it was Aitkenhead who was, as the title puts it, all at sea.

Aitkenhead is well known in England as a journalist, and she brings an intensity and objectivity to her story that is tremendously appealing. The consternation of how to remember Tony—and how to remember that heartbreaking day with her children—show up in ways both symbolic and mundane: how to plan the funeral, how to talk about Tony with her children, whether or not to bring new kittens into the household, whether or not to return to Jamaica. Though ostensibly a story of loss, this is also a story of survival by a woman who is strong, self-perceptive and a beautiful writer.