Widow— Widower— Widowest— by Aaron M. Simmons begins after his wife, Polly G. Simmons, dies unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism following surgery, leaving him a single parent to three children, Peggy, Hazel, and Cary. As Aaron tries to understand what it means to remain Polly’s...

In Jennifer Gay Summers’s memoir, Chasing Lee, Summers recounts becoming a mother through adoption after years of trying to have a child. Lee arrives from Texas as an infant, and Summers discovers that motherhood begins to take a form she never expected. As Lee moves...

Howard L. Dalton’s Four-Footed Sergeant is a beautiful account of a Marine armored unit officer and his fiercely loyal dog, Injector, who served beside him in the intense Pacific theater of World War II. Coming from a Texas farm background and holding a dairy science...

Searching for Full: How GLP-1s Changed My Eating-Disordered Life by Paige Gordon is a memoir that traces many years of bulimia nervosa, beginning in childhood and tangled up with trauma, family strain, and years of treatments that never quite worked. The book opens with an...

Waiting for the Kick: A Midwife's Grief and Rebirth in Africa by Sheila Kimble-Haas is a memoir that opens in the rawest place possible: the months after the sudden death of the author's husband, Ric, when grief becomes a constant, buzzing presence she can't outrun....

In Rosemary’s Way, Spring Courtright recounts the years in which changes in her mother Rosemary’s memory begin reshaping their close relationship. Repeated questions about an upcoming honeymoon first raise concern, leading to medical appointments as Rosemary thought about the future as she watched her own...

In The Phoenix Within, Tabitha Polenz recounts a Cleveland, Ohio, childhood marked by instability at home, where she learns early on to watch the adults around her for signs that something is about to change. At fifteen, motherhood gives her a reason to imagine a...

Some time ago, Joanna Potepa promised herself she would travel abroad before turning forty. But when the time came, she didn’t have the money or anything planned to make that trip. So she went with her husband and daughter to a border crossing, where she...

Christie Del Vesco’s A Road Trip with God is a bold memoir with a subtitle that summarizes it perfectly: 11,800 Miles from Hoping to Die to Daring to Live. She is fifty-five and shut-in, with a life that revolves around food, nature-watching, Netflix, an extra...

In Drifting Sublime Hope, Zach Girard looks back on childhood through memories that seem to exist at a distance, many preserved in videos filmed by the author's father before journals become a record of the years that follow. The author remembers experiencing school differently from...