Best books... chosen by Piper Kerman
Piper Kerman is the author of Orange Is the New Black, the 2010 memoir about a
stint in federal prison that inspired the Emmy Award–winning Netflix series. The
show’s final season debuts on July 26.The Book List^ ARTS 23
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
by Jeanette Winterson (2011). I devoured
Winterson’s first book, the roman à clef Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit, when it was published
in 1985. Why Be Happy When You Could Be
Normal? is a fascinating memoir that consid-
ers the same period of Winterson’s life that she
shared in the novel. I’ve found it an invaluable
book when I teach memoir writing to prisoners.The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds
(1984). I have owned a copy of this book for my
entire adult life. I return to these narrative poems
again and again because Olds’ exploration of
private and public conflicts leaves me gasping
every time.
Until We Reckon by Danielle Sered (2019). For
the U.S. to end our failed policy of mass incarcera-
tion, we must reconsider our response to violence
in communities. Sered leads a pioneering restor-
ative justice program called Common Justice.
Here she shows clearly and thoughtfully how our
criminal legal system fails survivors of violence,
and how accountability that does not rely on ban-
ishment helps break cycles that harm us all.Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (2013). This
elegiac book stands as a memorial to five young
men lost to Ward and to her close-knit small-
town community in Mississippi. It is a personal
reckoning with death, with family history, with
racial inequality, and with the undeniable pull
homeward.
Survival Math by Mitchell S. Jackson (2019).
I love Jackson’s singularly insistent and inquisi-
tive prose style. Here he applies it to a searing
examination of family history, masculinity, and
race in America. He’s a challenging and reward-
ing polymath who, with unforgettable style, can
zoom you into the survival moments he and
his intimates must navigate in an impoverished
neighborhood in Portland, Ore.
Harley Loco by Rayya Elias (2013). Elias,
who died of cancer a year ago, was a Syrian
immigrant raised in 1970s Detroit—as well as
a lesbian, a punk rocker, and a survivor who
earned the nickname Harley Loco inside New
York City’s Riker’s Island jail. Much more than a
recovery memoir, this big-hearted, funny book is
a truthful American story.Also of interest...in memory and its shortcomings
Paul Tremblay
Beware that initial feeling of
down-to-earth domesticity in a
Paul Tremblay story, said Tom
Philip in GQ. The 48-year-old,
who in the past half-decade
has “rightfully rocketed to
fame as one of the best hor-
ror authors alive,” typically
introduces
lovable, lived-
in characters
before turning
the screws
on them.
In 2015’s A
Head Full
of Ghosts,
a big sister starts acting in
ways that are strange even
for a teenager. In 2018’s The
Cabin at the End of the World,
a home invasion disrupts a
gay couple’s vacation idyll.
But such incidents are less
unsettling than how they warp
the characters’ relationships
with one another. “It’s just
sort of the way I think,” says
Tremblay, a father of two who
still teaches high school math
in Needham, Mass. “A lot of
these stories are definitely
reflecting some of my anxiet-
ies as a parent or just even as
a person living through these
last couple decades.”
In Growing Things, his new
story collection, Tremblay
pulls the rug out from under
us many times, said Neil
McRobert in SlantMagazine
.com. In one tale, a woman
either rescues her daughter
from a monster or abducts
her. In another, a family trag-
edy is hinted at within a photo
album. And supernatural
events loom at the margins—
or do they? Tremblay, an
avowed skeptic, prefers to
keep his readers in doubt. “If
I were to experience some-
thing that was supernatural,”
he says, “I’d have a really
difficult time identifying if
it was supernatural or not.”
Even clear signs that, say, his
house was haunted wouldn’t
scare him off—because he’d
still have a mortgage to pay.
“I’d probably think I had to
gut it out, even with a ghost
standing in the living room.”Author of the week
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“Lewis Hyde’s new book is so coun-
terintuitive, so bracingly clear and
fresh, that reading it is like leaping
into a cold lake,” said Christian
Wiman in The Wall Street Journal.
The author best known for The Gift,
a book on creativity, proposes here that forget-
ting can be as vital to well-being as memory,
and he does so by weaving together anecdotes,
quotations, and insights. He teases out good and
bad forgetting at both the personal and national
levels. “It’s less argument than art.”A Primer for Forgetting
by Lewis Hyde (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)
Blake Crouch could be any college
dorm’s “certifiable midnight weirdo,”
said Jason Sheehan in NPR.org. But
he’s also the rare sci-fi writer able
to invent complex characters. In his
latest best-seller, a detective witnesses
the suicide of a woman who has just claimed to
be suffering false memories. A flashback then
introduces a neuroscientist who accepts funding
to research memory recovery. Though Couch’s
time-travel tale carries “a whiff of contrivance,”
it’s also awake to the consequences of big ideas.Recursion
by Blake Crouch (Crown, $27)This singular chronicle of war, finally
translated into English, “hews closer
to the Brothers Grimm than to
Homer,” said Sana Krasikov in The
New York Times. Its Nobel-winning
author created it by interviewing
citizens of the USSR who were children during
World War II, and many of the details feel sur-
real: Food markets selling dirt to the starving;
boys using frozen German corpses as sleds. Many
witnesses lost parents suddenly; “for a child, the
loss of a parent is the loss of memory itself.”Last Witnesses
by Svetlana Alexievich (Random House, $30)
The 11th novel from Turkish dissi-
dent Elif Shafak “appears to start at
the end,” said Francesca Segal in the
Financial Times. In 1990 Istanbul,
a prostitute lies clinically dead in a
dumpster. But Tequila Leila’s syn-
apses will fire for nearly another 11 minutes,
involuntarily conjuring memories of a life fuller
than a reader might expect. Through Leila,
Shafak “gives voice to the invisible, the untouch-
able, the abused and the damaged, weaving their
painful songs into a thing of beauty.”10 Minutes 38 Seconds...
by Elif Shafak (Viking, $18)