Also of interest ... in new memoirs

The Slippery Year

by Melanie Gideon

(Knopf, $25)

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“I was all set to dislike” Melanie Gideon when I first started reading about her married life, said Jane Juska in the San Francisco Chronicle. Gideon is a “champion worrier,” fretting about everything from the dangers of Pee Wee lacrosse to midlife’s seemingly ineluctable fading of passion. But The Slippery Year turns out to be “a funny book, often a wise book”—and a surprisingly happy one. Hers is a good life, and she “has the saving grace” to realize it.

The Big Rewind

by Nathan Rabin

(Scribner, $25)

Pop culture was Nathan Rabin’s life raft during a difficult adolescence, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. In his “mordant” and oddly affecting first book, the film critic uses Nirvana, Reservoir Dogs,

and ­various other youthful obsessions to “pry open” some of the tougher chapters of his teenage years. The Big Rewind “goes badly off the rails” by dwelling too long on career ­minutiae, but there is “something real and scuffed and quite winning at its core.”

Everything Sucks

by Hannah Friedman

(HCI Teens, $13)

Prep school isn’t what Gossip Girl makes it out to be, said Judy Berman in Salon.com. In this “impeccably honest” memoir for teenage readers, recent Yale grad Hannah Friedman recalls pressures that transformed her and her friends into “high-achieving anorexics, bulimics, and pharmaceutical addicts.” As Friedman details how senior year devolved into “a blur of binges, purges, and drug benders,” she also sustains “a self-aware wit that is all too rare” in young-adult fare.

The Impostor’s Daughter

by Laurie Sandell

(Little, Brown, $25)

Magazine writer Laurie Sandell had suspected since childhood that her professor father could not always be trusted, said Doree Shafrir in Jezebel.com. In her “amazing” new graphic memoir, she tells how he went so far as to steal her identity to run up credit card debt. Watching as she unravels his untruths and struggles to decide whether to expose them, “I couldn’t put her book down.” His deceptions nurtured her investigative instincts, and we’re allowed to watch the two forces collide.