bestmemoirs2022sofar

When Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019, many readers, and some critics, assumed it was Evaristo’s first book and that she had achieved overnight success. In fact, she had been writing fiction, poetry and plays for 40 years at that point, and her Booker-winning novel was her eighth book. In Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, Evaristo offers her own story.

Evaristo structures her memoir thematically rather than chronologically, in seven long sections covering topics such as family, romance, writing and activism. Born in 1959 to a Nigerian father and a white English mother, Evaristo grew up as one of eight children in a working-class suburb of London. Money was tight, and the family endured a spectrum of racist hostility, from rudeness and name-calling to bricks thrown through their home’s windows. The narrative balances Evaristo’s early hardships and obstacles (being poor and biracial in class-bound 1960s England) with the gifts and support (her parents’ political activism, her convent school education) that laid the groundwork for her midlife success.

In her 20s, Evaristo formed a theater company with other Black women and began to write plays while living hand to mouth in cheap rentals. She also spent those years in lesbian relationships, before beginning to date men again in her 30s. With candor and even some humor, she looks back on an early abusive relationship, nicknaming her ex The Mental Dominatrix, or TMD. It’s a good example of the way Evaristo can write about a heavy subject thoughtfully yet conversationally.

Throughout, Evaristo describes her development as a writer, from her first attempts at fiction to the aftermath of becoming a bestselling author at 60. “Writing became a room of my own; writing became my home,” she notes. Manifesto is not a self-help book, but Evaristo’s long, persistent journey to becoming a lauded novelist is inspiring, especially for any writer who’s struggled to get a story published. The book concludes with “Evaristo’s Manifesto,” nine tenets that guide her life. Here’s one: “Be wild, disobedient & daring with your creativity, take risks instead of following predictable routes; those who play it safe do not advance our culture or civilization.”

In Manifesto, Evaristo takes her own advice, producing a thoughtful, vivid, often funny work of nonfiction that refuses to play it safe.

Read our review of the audiobook for ‘Manifesto,’ narrated by author Bernardine Evaristo.

Growing up in Florida, with roots in Puerto Rico and Nicaragua, Edgar Gomez was confronted very early in his life by a culture of machismo—a glorified, aggressive masculine pride. Within such a culture, “men must marry, spawn children, and head their households.” If it weren’t for his queerness, Gomez writes, “which made many of the benefits awarded to men who uphold machismo unappealing, I would have likely accepted them without question.” With alternating notes of gut-wrenching emotion and humor, High-Risk Homosexual chronicles not only Gomez’s coming-of-age and coming out, but also his choppy navigation of a culture and family that refused to accept him.

Much of Gomez’s memoir recounts his struggles to find guides to help him growing up, gay and Latinx in a world that often violently rejected gay men. His mother and stepfather couldn’t live with the thought that Gomez was gay. His uncles tried to “reform” him by setting him up with a woman one night after a cockfight. Along the way, Gomez found solace in conversations with trans women in Nicaragua, with people in the Castro District in San Francisco and with drag queens at gay clubs in Miami and Orlando—including at Pulse, before the shootings that killed 49 people and wounded 53.

It was when he visited his college health clinic that he was dubbed a “high-risk homosexual” for sleeping with more than two sexual partners a week—a label he knew would not be applied to people who had a similar number of opposite-sex partners per week—and given pills to mitigate HIV. When he learned that taking the pills might be more dangerous than the disease, he dumped them down the toilet and vowed to “live a life that acknowledges [AIDS] as a possible outcome.” Gomez concludes that “what you do when you’re not afraid anymore is the same thing you do when you are: keep going.”

In High-Risk Homosexual, Gomez’s incandescent prose flickers with an intensity that illuminates his insecurities, his disappointments and his courage.

Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz’s first memoir, Lost & Found, is an eloquent meditation inspired by the end of her father’s life and the beginning of the romance that led to her marriage. This probing, multifaceted exploration of two universal phenomena—grief and love—is both a revealing account of defining moments in Schulz’s life and an eloquent map of the pathways connecting them to our shared human experience.

In the first section of the book, Schulz’s reflections on the profound grief provoked by the peaceful passing of the man she describes as “part Socrates, part Tevye,” at the end of a decade of slowly failing health, illuminate the “essential, avaricious nature of loss.” She examines the complexity and uniqueness of each person’s bereavement, giving the lie to clichés like “moving on” and “closure” that are offered to comfort those in mourning. “Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable,” she observes; “the idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.”

The poignancy of these reminiscences is more than balanced by the exuberant account of Schulz’s love affair with C. in the second section of the book. Though C. is a fellow writer, she is also a woman whose cultural roots—as a devout Lutheran from Maryland’s Eastern Shore—are so different from Schulz’s—a nonpracticing Jew from Cleveland—that Mars and Venus can barely encompass them. The affectionately candid story of their instantaneous attachment and deepening relationship allows Schulz to probe some of the ineffable mysteries of human attraction and ponder the wild improbability that two people ever find each other and fall in love.

Concluding her memoir with a section entitled “And,” Schulz skillfully melds the two profound subjects that animate her story, attempting to reconcile herself to an undeniable reality at the heart of life’s beauty and pain: our limitless capacity to love, undiminished by the inescapable knowledge that one day every one of us will inevitably lose all we cherish. “Of every kind of ‘and’ that we experience,” she writes, “I find this one the most acute—the awareness that our love, in all its many forms, is bound inseparably to our grief.”

Discoursing knowledgeably and often with good humor on subjects that include etymology, poetry, natural history, psychology and more, Schulz displays a capacious intelligence matched only by her boundless curiosity and insight. Lost & Found is a beautiful, life-affirming book that passionately embraces some of the deepest questions of human existence in the fullness of their sorrow and joy.

Read more: Author Kathryn Schulz voices the audiobook for ‘Lost & Found.’