Like many people, I dislike Valentine’s Day, from the sticky-sweet Hallmark sappiness to the social pressure to lavish your significant other with expensive jewelry or overpriced flowers—and no, it’s not just because I’m single! But at least the holiday is an excuse to talk about love, something we all need, and this February brings a few unique books about various forms of love.
Alice Wong, acclaimed author of Year of the Tiger, is back with Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire (Vintage, April 30), an appropriate follow-up to Disability Visibility. In this edited volume, the author opens up the possibilities of love and intimacy “beyond ableist interpretations,” in the words of our reviewer. For nondisabled readers, this book should prove revelatory, as Wong and the contributors—including John Lee Clark, Khadijah Queen, Naomi Ortiz, and Aimi Hamraie—create an inclusive narrative tapestry that is “not only a joy to read but also a welcome introduction to innovative, intensely liberating approaches that are sure to change the way [we] feel about traditional notions of intimacy.”
In Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (Little, Brown, Feb. 20), Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering, explores love through the lens of both motherhood and marital turmoil. When their daughter was born, the author and her husband had spent a few years in therapy, and the demands of caring for a newborn exacerbated their conflict. Jamison recounts how the problems grew deeper after her mother came to help with the baby. In a nuanced, tender, open-hearted narrative, Jamison presents a thoughtful meditation on early parenthood, what our reviewer calls “intimate recollections on motherhood and commitment.”
The mother-daughter relationship emerges from a different angle in Patti Davis’ Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew (Liveright/Norton, Feb. 6), a follow-up to the author’s book on Alzheimer’s, Floating in the Deep End. Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s daughter immerses readers in a world few know: the complicated dynamics of a president’s family. “Humane, elegiac, and wise,” writes our reviewer, “this book moves smoothly through its portrait of a complicated family and of the daughter who learned the lessons of patient acceptance that family had to offer.” Well written and consistently intimate, this is “a fully candid and profoundly moving memoir.”
Last but not least is Sloane Crosley. Her latest book, Grief Is for People (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feb. 27), is a significant step forward for an author who has already written multiple acclaimed books of fiction and nonfiction. In her latest, she digs into fraught philosophical and emotional territory, chronicling her love for a former colleague in the publishing world who died by suicide. According to our starred review, “Crosley’s memoir is not only a joy to read, but also a respectful and philosophical work about a colleague’s recent suicide.…The book is no hagiography—she notes harassment complaints against [her friend] for thoughtlessly tossed-off comments, plus critiques of the ‘deeply antiquated and often backward’ publishing industry—but the result is a warm remembrance sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced loss.” (Read our interview with the author.)
Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction editor.
