Best Memoirs of the Year

Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a talent evident in every line of this crystalline memoir. Hers is not the dysfunctional family story we've grown accustomed to reading; in fact, Smith recalls her family of seven as "steady, steadfast, happy, and whole." Her dad was an Air Force engineer, while her mom was a sometime teacher. In loving detail, Smith recalls both the happiness and the complex questions of her childhood. Religion is a force to be reckoned with again and again (at 8, her first reading of Revelations leaves her terrified). Questions about race are also ever-present. Growing up in suburban California in the 1980s, “It felt like...there were limits to what I would let myself understand, limits to the whole to which I’d give myself access. I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright.” Smith is stung when a blonde classmate asks, "Don't you wish you were white?" And when her parents urge her to be "twice as good as they are at everything you do," she wonders about that willingness to bear an unfair burden. Smith’s honest, unflinching book offers an inspiring model for seeking the light in an "ordinary" life—ask the tough questions, look in the hidden corners, allow yourself to understand and never stop searching for faith.