5 Powerful New Memoirs

What are we really looking for in love? What does it mean to abandon oneself to another? Melissa Febos weaves together personal history, mythology, psychology and literary references to create a nest for these questions. Growing up with an adoptive father who was often away at sea (she refers to him as "the captain"), Febos often felt bereft and frightened, painfully left behind. Her mother took lovers, eventually divorcing the captain and becoming a psychotherapist. Well-intentioned as she was, she couldn't help her children. Febos sought solace in heroin ("I sometimes cradled the telephone on my shoulder so that if I overdosed I might have time to dial 911") and suffered through relationships with people who couldn't give her what she needed. Later, sober, she turned to an obsessive romance with a married woman. Perhaps her most faithful companion was literature. "Our favorite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts." Her memoir is both intensely intimate and wide-ranging, as she pulls together insights from sources as disparate as psychoanalyst Carl Jung, jazz singer Billie Holiday and an ancient alchemical text. Febos is voracious in her emotional cravings, but none is stronger than her desire to know and own herself. The hard-won ending (truly, a beginning) is exhilarating.