Hunger: a Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

In Hunger, Purdue English Professor Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist, Difficult Women) applies her usual wit and wisdom to the story of her body and her relationship to it. It is filled with experiences that are astoundingly personal and surprisingly universal. With Hunger, Gay expands things touched on in Bad Feminist, specifically a childhood trauma and the ensuing binge eating that led her to become what she refers to as "a woman of size." She adopts this habit as both a way to comfort herself and to make herself invisible to people who might hurt her.

It should be noted that Hunger is not a self-help book or an inspirational story of a woman losing hundreds of pounds or even an inspirational story of a woman truly accepting her body and herself as it is. It is a memoir of a human being who has struggled and continues to struggle. Throughout the book, she opens herself up to the reader’s scrutiny, honestly approaching her weight, her struggle with self-esteem, and the difficulty she faces in daily life living in a society that judges her for her size. There are devastating parts and inspiring parts and parts that make one want to hide the book from other readers because it feels like Gay has given away too much of herself and parts that are absolutely hilarious. 

This is not a book that one picks up lightly, nor is it a book that once begun is easy to put down. Gay has described this as the most difficult thing she has written, and that will be obvious to anyone willing to give it a read. Hunger is definitely not an easy book, but it is one that will stick with readers long after the last page is finished.

Fun Home: a family tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Fun Home is a graphic novel memoir centered around Bechdel’s father and their sometimes close, sometimes strained relationship. Bechdel’s father, Bruce, was a passionate restorer of their Victorian home, a high school English teacher, a part-time funeral home director, and a man who tried to hide his true self from friends and family. His relationship with his wife and children was often strained, and when he commits suicide he and Alison are barely on speaking terms. While the subject is often bleak, Bechdel has a knack for finding both humor and beauty in difficult times.

Before picking up Fun Home, I had not read a graphic novel since middle school. While I enjoy a number of comic strips, I never understood the idea of an entire book told in comic form. Now I cannot imagine this story being told any other way. The imagery and languages work together to immerse the reader so deeply into Bechdel’s life that it’s impossible not to feel the complicated mix of emotions she herself felt for her father: adoration, disgust, trust, betrayal, love, and heartbreak. Woven throughout are comparisons of her family members to characters from literature especially Daedalus, the ancient Greek inventor, and his son Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun. In Fun Home, Alison and Bruce take turns as parent and child to one another, at times pushing each other to great heights, and at others falling into the depths. And much like the tales of Greek mythology, Fun Home is a tale that sticks with you long after the story has been told.

Fun Home has won a number of awards including the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work, Lambda Literary Awards for Biography / Autobiography, and the Stonewall Book Awards: Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award. In 2013, it was adapted for the stage winning the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Original Score, and others.  

- Portia Kapraun

Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth

Now a popular BBC television series (also available for checkout), Call the Midwife, is Jennifer Worth’s 2002 memoir detailing the time she spent as a midwife in London’s post-war East End district.  Written with empathy and humor, Worth’s account of her time serving the poorest of the poor is both moving and informative.  Following a devastating break-up, young Jennifer commits herself to training and residency, for nursing and midwifery, at the Nonnatus House (a pseudonym) convent in East London. The Nonnatus nuns have a long history of providing medical and social services to the cockney families living in tenements and slums near the Poplar dockyards, and house a number of nurse trainees and midwifery students.  Worth recounts for her readers various experiences she had during that time with her patients and other community members. These recollections range from heart-warming; including the Spanish-born mother who astonished everyone by saving and caring for her 25^th child, born prematurely at 28 weeks, to the despairing; the descriptions of squalor, neglect, and abuse (one neglectful mother left her two toddlers and infant, unsupervised in her filthy tenement apartment with a burning paraffin heater, while she took up trade at the behest of her abusive husband).  Despite the vagaries of life in the slums, nearly all characters are remembered with fondness.  This book would be a good fit for anyone who enjoys historical works or books on British life and customs. I ought to also mention that the audio-book, available for download from the Delphi Public Library via Overdrive, is a delight to hear with the snippets of both posh and cockney dialogue!

-Jennifer Wilson

Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime by Scott Simon

In July 2013, Scott Simon was vacationing with his family when he received a call from his mother, Patricia Lyons Simon Newman Gelbin. Instead of joining them in California as planned, she had been admitted to the ICU in Chicago and wasn’t getting answers from the staff about her condition. After days of getting nowhere on the phone with hospital staff, Simon flies to Chicago to be at his mother’s side and talk to the doctors in person. He arrives to find her hooked up to oxygen and with a grim prognosis.

Unwilling to leave his mother, Simon spends the next week at his mother’s bedside, even sleeping on the floor of her hospital room. During this time, he tweeted messages to his 1.2 million Twitter followers, celebrating his mother during the last days of her extraordinary life. This book is an expansion on those tweets, telling the story of a remarkable woman who was funny, gracious, and kind to those around her even as she was lying in a hospital bed hooked up to countless machines.

While this story would have been touching in the hands of a lesser author, Scott Simon, an award winning journalist and host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, is able to tell a story rich with emotion and life. Unforgettable is equally thoughtful, funny, and heart wrenching, a story of a son and a mother who have been through the ups and downs of life together and come out strong. This is evident even in the short tweets that begin each chapter, such as “I tell my mother, ‘You’ll never stop teaching me.’ She said, ‘Well don’t blame me for everything.’” and “I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way.”

Unforgettable is a book that touches the heart and will stay on the mind for days after it's finished. For fans of Simon’s radio show, the audiobook version is a special treat.

How to Catch a Frog

The subtitle of Heather Ross's delightful book is "and other stories of family, love, dysfunction, survival, and DIY." Illustrated with her own beautiful drawings, this book is part memoir, part how-to manual, and a total joy to read. Heather tells stories of her childhood growing up in primitive circumstances on a Vermont mountain, her forays into trying to build a creative business, and her relationships with her family, friends, and lovers. In other words, she takes us on a path through the messiness of everyday life. Her previous books, Weekend Sewing and Heather Ross Prints, focus solely on her creative endeavors as a fabric designer and artist. Here, in How to Catch a Frog, we come to know Heather as a creative, thoughtful, and adaptable person who has carved a beautiful life for herself.