Risk! True Stories People Never Thought They’d Dare to Share

Allison, host of the Risk! podcast, collects stories from the podcast in which people talk about defining moments in their lives. Dan Savage writes regretfully in his essay “The Stranger” about letting “things go too far and too fast”while having sex with a younger and less experienced young man. In, “Dylan,” Kyle Gest describes how being bullied led him to drop out of high school, and how thoughts of his bully, who was later convicted of murder, still haunt him to this day. Some stories evoke both laughter and sadness, such as comedian Marc Maron’s “Hookers ’n’ Blow,” about a sexual encounter with a sex worker that made him panic about getting AIDS, and his realization that he probably hired her because “I see now that if I’m not in some sense of panic... I don’t know what to do with myself”; at one point during his anxiety attack he realizes that the lump he felt in the woman’s breast could have been cancer. Each storyteller is brutally honest, and each essay is guided by the belief—as stated by Morgan in “Always a Woman,” her essay about transitioning—that “this is my truth, and I’m not going to hide.” These fascinating, affecting confessionals are sure to reach readers beyond the podcast’s scope. (July)