T.S. Eliot wrote, “There’s no vocabulary / For love within a family . . . the love within which / All other love finds speech. / This love is silent.” Not so for Nicole Treska, as she introduces her rogues’ gallery of a family in her debut memoir, Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard and Breaking Even. Treska knows her family’s vocabulary by heart and speaks it with equal parts love, loyalty, chagrin and ambivalence. She paints her hometown of Boston with the same vibrant detail, offering both cityscape and cultural backdrop. Legendary attractions like the Hilltop, Kowloon and the Golden Banana strip club come alive, along with cherished and not-so-cherished memories of her family, some of them long gone but living on in their own notoriety.

Treska begins by envisioning the eponymous Wonderland, a short-lived, early-1900s amusement park on Boston’s Revere Beach. “Of course,” Treska writes, “we revered some kind of permanence—something to point to and say, ‘I came from right here.’ . . . There was yearning in what remained.” In this spirit, Treska dives into her family history. Her grandfather was a bookie for the infamous Whitey Bulger. His diner was host to the Winter Hill Gang, an Irish mob syndicate that dominated the city in the ’60s and ’70s: “They ran books and armed the IRA and engaged in your typical mob-type behavior: racketeering, robbery, drugs, murder.” When her father, Phil, worked at the diner, he took bets from “all the gamblers and wiseguys around town” and later did a stint in prison for federal drug trafficking. “My family met the devil regularly,” Treska notes dryly.

Meanwhile, Treska was the first to graduate from college, and she became an adjunct professor at City College of New York. But she notes, too, her skill at swapping price tags on artwork and stealing accessories for her Harlem apartment. She also became smart at tricking her landlord and profiting from the Airbnb rental of one of her bedrooms. “Begging, borrowing, and stealing were the only way I knew how to build a life, but I did build.”

Treska’s reckoning of her two lives—rising success in New York and her family’s heavy legacy of poverty and crime in Boston—continues. Phil gambles. “He breathed, he lied, he gambled, and then all the rest that makes up a life,” Treska writes. “I loved my father. And how do you love a thief?” For those who, like Treska, may have some skeletons in their family closet, Wonderland holds both good and bad news: We can honor them with our fonder memories, but the damage they caused may yet linger. But still, family is something to point to, to say, “I came from right here.”

Raised by vivacious and uncompromising Irish American parents in Massachusetts, Tracy O’Neill did not spend much time thinking about her Korean birth mother or the circumstances of her adoption until the COVID-19 pandemic made her suddenly wonder whether the mother she never knew might, in fact, be about to die alone. Her mother became her “woman of interest,” and O’Neill’s hardboiled detective-style memoir details her journey through her own personal history—and eventually to South Korea—to find her.

Many memoirs offer a carefully rendered picture of past events, with a tight thematic focus. O’Neill is after something different with Woman of Interest. By choosing the tone of a noir, she inhabits a narrative space full of macabre humor, plot twists and offbeat characters. Her sentences run to the jangling and unpredictable rhythms of the classic detective story, with spare descriptions and snappy, deadpan dialogue: “So you graduated?” a social worker who handles adoptions asks O’Neill. “Good for you. A lot of the children don’t graduate.” The author uses the genre’s tropes—chapter titles include “Leave No Witness,” “Red Herring” and “A Stranger Comes to Town”—to recast the story of her life as a kind of meta-nonfiction: “I could confuse my life for experimental literature with possibilities of diffuse narrative perspectives,” she writes, “but it still adhered to realism.”

O’Neill’s journey is confusing, overwhelming and deeply human. It is the story not only of an adopted child facing the essential questions of all adopted children, but also, and more universally, the story of a search for home. As such, the phrase “woman of interest” applies to O’Neill as well as her mother. Through describing interactions with her family, her friends, her beloved dog, Cowboy, and an earthy, semi-wild boyfriend whom she refers to as N., O’Neill reports on a quest that, while uniquely her own in terms of form and content, is also relatable to anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and wondered, “Who am I, really? And who are my people?”

As a child in Kashmir, India, Priyanka Mattoo cherished time spent at her maternal grandparents’ family compound, its several buildings full of her “outspoken and uproarious” relatives. “Imagine an empty cup under a gushing faucet,” she writes. “It fills up, it tips over, the faucet keeps gushing, and the cup thinks, I really don’t need any more water, but, okay, this feels nice. That’s the adoration I felt from my family.”

That luxurious, gushing feeling is exactly what readers of Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones will experience while reading this memoir in essays. Stylistically, it’s The Secret Garden meets Nora Ephron: Mattoo serves up memories with both fairy tale-like charm and thoroughly modern, riotously funny observations.

The book’s title comes from a Kashmiri phrase used to describe “things so rare and precious that the listener should question their very existence.” That sentiment has defined Mattoo’s life since political upheaval prevented her family from returning to their beloved homeland. Luckily, Mattoo’s father was an internationally renowned pediatric nephrologist, and his career took them around the world to London, Saudi Arabia and, finally, America. This expat life blessed Mattoo with intriguing experiences, but also left her longing for Kashmir with “a deep well of sadness that follows me around.”

But Mattoo keeps her sense of humor, as when describing the day she taught her 9-year-old son how to microwave a hot dog (“I briefly drifted into a vision of reading magazines while my child makes dinner.”). The essays can be read separately, but are roughly chronological, explaining how she veered away from her “life plan” and married an American Jew instead of “a nice Kashmiri boy,” didn’t become a doctor and instead followed her creative spirit, forging a life as a writer, filmmaker and talent agent.

In “How to Be Alone,” she writes of her middle school years, enduring painful prejudices that turned her into a loner, until she eventually realized, “I could make anyone my friend, and I would make anyone my friend.” She does just that with Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones—a book of enormous heart, humor and insight that will leave readers wanting more of Priyanka Mattoo’s company.