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From the outside, Prachi Gupta’s life looks self-directed and accomplished. After winning awards for her writing as a political reporter for Cosmopolitan and Jezebel, she now makes a living as a freelance writer in New York City. Gupta is successful, like her father and her late brother, Yush, but behind these public victories is Gupta’s mother, whose role was to support her husband. The family believed in a powerful myth of Indian American exceptionalism: They were destined for greatness. It came at a high personal cost.

In They Called Us Exceptional, a complicated and emotional memoir written as a letter to her mother, Gupta unearths the impact of this foundational myth on the lives of her family. She explores the ways she was taught to accomplish things—learning complicated words, winning prizes—at a very young age, an orientation toward success that had also driven her father and her aunt (both medical doctors) and her grandfather before them (who immigrated from India to Canada looking for economic opportunity). A brutal racial hierarchy underlies this emphasis on accomplishment: It is through force of will and education that members of Prachi’s family have broken through economic barriers in America. Gupta grew up mostly in Pennsylvania and shows how being a minority in a culture of whiteness is deeply disorienting. Simultaneously, the gender hierarchy within their home—an intensely manifested patriarchy in which her father held the economic, social and intellectual power—caused Gupta to initially identify with and worship her father. As she began to question the roles laid out for women and to experience her father’s unpredictable wrath, her attitudes toward home, culture and identity began to shift and her brother, Yush, Gupta’s closest confidante in childhood, began to feel like a stranger.

Now estranged from her parents and grieving the sudden death of her brother, Gupta has written a memoir that is part olive branch and part reckoning. It recounts her journey toward herself, which entailed shedding familial half-truths and cultural baggage, and recognizing her story as both an Indian American and a woman within a larger historical and cultural context. As she details her growth, Gupta also explores the complicated development of each member of her immediate family, who all struggle to fulfill their roles at the expense of their own wellbeing and wholeness. For readers interested in complicated, thoughtful and beautifully written family stories that explore the cost of the model-minority myth, this book is as good as it gets.

The most persistent plot in literature—from Homer to Tolkien—portrays individuals journeying away from home in search of some object, only to eventually return, sometimes tattered and torn, but always wiser. In the South, musicians and artists record the meaning of home as a place that people carry with them in their hearts, that shapes them and to which they long to return. In her poignant memoir, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey, Ruth J. Simmons carries readers with her as she recounts the contours of her own journey from sharecroppers’ daughter in Grapeland, Texas, to president of Smith College and Brown University, memorializing the many individuals who guided her.

Simmons chronicles her upbringing in Grapeland with her brothers and sisters, where they explored dirt roads and nearby fields, observed wild animals and the animals on the farm and played various games when they weren’t toiling in the fields and keeping up with the drudgery of household chores. Her parents fell into the rigid marital patterns typical of the 1940s and 1950s. Her father was a severe disciplinarian who did not think women should be educated or work outside the home, and he “did not act like a caring husband who appreciated my mother’s love and sacrifices.” Her mother was a “homemaker who managed the household and reared her children,” but Simmons and her sisters did not want to be like her.

When the family moves to Houston, Simmons begins to excel in the classroom and in various extracurricular activities, discovering new facets of the world and launching herself on the journey that carries her from the limiting factors of home in Texas—race, poverty, segregation—to the expansiveness of Europe and eventual leadership in higher education. Along the way, she introduces readers to teachers who helped her, such as her first grade teacher Ida Mae Henderson, who shows Simmons “for the first time . . . the kind of independence of spirit that made life free, happy, and meaningful. If learning could lead to such a result, I wanted it to be a part of my life forever.” Her high-school drama teacher, Miss Lillie, encourages her, working to schedule a one-woman show for Simmons. At the same time, Simmons reads “as many books as possible of every genre . . . wanting to learn specific ways language could open doors to unfamiliar worlds.”

Up Home recalls a life richly shaped by experiences with languages, literature and mentors that helped Simmons become a person she never expected to be. Her sparkling prose and vibrant storytelling invite readers to accompany her on her journey.

With five novels to her credit, Martha McPhee has well-established credentials as a storyteller. In her memoir, Omega Farm, she drops the veil of invention to share an intensely personal tale of her attempt to reclaim a troubled past amid a ceaselessly demanding present.

In mid-March 2020, McPhee, her husband and fellow writer, Mark, and their children Livia and Jasper, decamped from their New York City apartment to the eponymous farm—a 45-acre property about 10 miles outside her birthplace of Princeton, New Jersey—to escape the COVID-19 pandemic and help provide care for her mother, well-known photographer Pryde Brown, whose decade-long dementia was deepening. McPhee, the youngest of four children of Brown and famed New Yorker writer John McPhee, had spent most of her childhood at the farm after her parents divorced when she was four and her mother began a romantic relationship with Dan Sullivan, the farm’s owner, that lasted until his death in 1994.

McPhee’s memoir takes stories of growing up amid the “big sprawling chaotic mess” of Omega Farm with her three sisters, Sullivan’s five children and a 10th child produced from the Sullivan-Brown union, and seamlessly connects them to reflections on how the echoes of those experiences complicate her struggles with the demands of caregiving and her own present-day familial relationships. Sullivan, an unlicensed Gestalt therapist, is “something of a con man, [a] serial philanderer,” and a charismatic, if sometimes disordered figure. It soon becomes clear that Sullivan’s repeated sexual abuse of his stepdaughters lies at the core of her difficulty coming to terms with her memories.

If all this weren’t enough, urbanite McPhee is called upon to shoulder the burden of superintending a haphazardly cared-for property that includes a 35-acre forest. While confronting an unruly strand of bamboo and a failed septic system, she learns that Omega Farm’s population of ash trees has been infested with a devastating pest: the emerald ash borer. Soon, she devotes herself to the task of forest preservation, dealing with a land steward, unscrupulous loggers and the management hunter she hires to help suppress the ravenous deer population. Throughout, McPhee candidly discloses the frustrations and satisfactions of this worthy but all-consuming project.

McPhee is an efficient, graceful writer, who makes no effort to spare her own flaws even as she searches for the roots of her mature turmoil in the shortcomings of adults who failed in the fundamental task of protecting her younger self. In barely three years since its onset, the COVID-19 pandemic already has produced a small shelf of impressive memoirs. Martha McPhee’s Omega Farm easily earns itself a place in that collection.

If you’re a Maria Bamford fan, you’ve probably already ordered your copy of her hilarious, devastating, fascinating new memoir Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere. If you aren’t yet clued into her comedic stylings, you might look at the wide-eyed, beautiful woman on the cover and think, “What do I know her from?”

The answer is: loads of things, from stand-up specials to “Arrested Development” to “Lady Dynamite” to iconic Target commercials (or perhaps you’ve heard her in “Adventure Time” and “Big Mouth”). She’s an accomplished comedian who’s brought joy to countless people—and she also has from mental illness, having battled debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and bipolar disorder since childhood.

The author is a winsome and unapologetic tour guide through her life thus far, musing on her “splintered, discomfiting need to reveal all my thoughts and flaws—which is either radical honesty or narcissistic showboating” and sharing her hope that “if I can be grandstandingly open about something taboo, maybe someone else might feel a little less isolated by knowing my own sad story (and have a few laughs)?” Bamford reflects on the groups she’s joined in search of achievement, belonging and healing, including Suzuki Violin, Overeaters Anonymous and Debtors Anonymous. She’s also a self-taught expert in the work of Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) and Richard Simmons (Richard Simmons’ Never-Say-Diet Book).

Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult is the definition of kaleidoscopic: In addition to loopy riffs, career insights and beautifully sad recollections of her mother’s illness and death, there are painfully honest chapters about the time period in which Bamford’s “mind/body had become a vibrating razor blade of electric psychic pain.” The resulting psychiatric hospitalizations were often grueling, but ultimately offered a hopeful path forward.

The importance of getting such help is central to Bamford’s story and at the heart of her hopes for readers. She writes that, rather than a book about triumphing over obstacles, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult is more of a “series of emotional sudoku puzzles . . . I haven’t figured it out.” And no matter where readers are on their own puzzle-solving journeys, she wants them to internalize something the late Jonathan Winters said to her after her first hospitalization: “You just keep going, kid.”

Three months after her father died, Canadian author and artist Kyo Maclear took a DNA test from a genealogy website. Her resulting memoir, Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets, could have taken its subtitle from the test’s disclaimer: “You may discover unanticipated facts about yourself or your family.” Nothing was more unanticipated than the discovery that her beloved father, journalist and documentary filmmaker Michael Maclear, was not her biological father.

Maclear is able to piece together the facts of her biological father’s identity, even the names and locations of her half siblings. But she knows she is unable to uncover the truth of her origins—the hows and whys of her birth—without the help of her mother, her father’s unruly, Japanese ex-wife. And that is where her quandary lies, because her mother is firmly rooted in the present with no interest in reconstructing the past. Furthermore, even if her mother wanted to tell Kyo the entire story of her origins, her ability to piece it together fades as she gradually succumbs to dementia.

As Maclear probes more deeply into her the intertwined story of her three parents—her mother, her father, and her biological father—more questions are raised than can possibly be answered. What is identity? What obligations do we have to people who happen to share our DNA? As her mother’s memory fades, these questions become deeper, more personal. Reconciliation seems impossible to Maclear, though, when the other person will not or cannot break the lifelong silence. Challenging the idea that our life story follows an arc, Maclear instead posits life as a free-form construction of patches of memory, actions and silences.

Maclear’s writing is poetic in the best sense. Using the image of her mother’s wild, rambling garden as a foundation, Maclear examines these questions in detail, without proposing a pat answer to any of them because, ultimately, they are unanswerable. Instead, Maclear allows the reader to struggle with them as she did, granting her audience the space and silence to reconcile the gaps and secrets in their own lives.