Secret History

Sadiya Ansari

In 2001, when Sadiya Ansari was 15 years old, her grandmother died. The two were close enough that they shared a bedroom for five years, but there was a gulf between them. Throughout her childhood, Ansari heard rumblings in her family about a secret era in her grandmother’s life. “It was a really simple story that my grandmother had left her children,” Ansari says. “And then she was kind of the bad guy, because what kind of mother leaves her children?”

For years, the story sat in the back of Ansari’s mind. A decade after her grandmother’s death, she was home on a break from journalism school and began to ask her father more questions about her grandmother’s life. Thanks to her background in journalism, Ansari started thinking about the story differently. “What would lead her do that?” she remembers asking. “What were the conditions in her life? And also, what were the conditions that led to her coming back to the family? Because she did eventually come back to our family. And that’s a huge act of reconciliation.”

In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life (House of Anansi, Aug.) is the fruit of that curiosity. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Ansari uncovers her grandmother’s secret history, investigating the years she spent following a man away from her life as a wife and a mother in Karachi. Chapters documenting Ansari’s attempts to reconstruct what those years must have been like alternate with those written from her grandmother’s perspective.

Ansari notes that her journalistic training colored the way she approached writing a memoir. “I think transparency is very key. I messed up a lot, and I wanted that to be part of the story.”

As she was putting the book together, writers and nonwriters alike asked her how to do what she was doing. “How do you talk to your family? I wanted that to be part of it,” she says. “To be like, well, you can. I think everyone should do it if they feel like they want to, and it’s just not going to be perfect. And that’s okay.”

House of Anansi editor Shivaun Hearne calls that journalistic mindset one of Ansari’s great strengths, referring specifically to the “educational” nature of the book’s afterword, which offers protocols for trauma-informed reporting. “It’s more than just a story, it’s a story about telling a story,” Hearne says.

Journey Back to Myself

Andrea Currie

Andrea Currie didn’t want to write a memoir. A survivor of Canada’s Sixties Scoop, a period in the 1960s and ’70s when child welfare agencies placed Indigenous children in white homes, Currie knew she wanted to write a book on the topic; she found her Métis birth family and culture at the age of 38, an experience she calls “profound and obviously life-changing.” But her first idea was to collect and anthologize interviews with other survivors.

A psychotherapist who works with Indigenous communities, Currie saw how the ability to tell one’s story and “put it in a larger context” helped people heal. As she began to talk to others about her book idea, “it began to be reflected back to me that maybe my story was the story I needed to tell.” That feedback eventually resulted in Finding Otipemisiwak: The People Who Own Themselves (Arsenal Pulp, Oct.), which weaves together poetry and prose for an intimate look at Canada’s history of harm to Indigenous communities.

Currie still doesn’t consider the book a memoir, in part because of the unique nature of her experience. While she includes her personal account in vignettes interspersed throughout the book, she notes that her “journey back to herself” was “atypically positive, and it would really be doing an injustice to the goal of helping people better understand the Sixties Scoop if a story like mine was read by people who thought that that’s what it was like.” Her adopted younger brother, for example, had a traumatic childhood involving abuse and rejection by his adoptive family; the book tells his story, as well.

Currie’s agent, Samantha Haywood of Transatlantic, praises Currie’s “exciting approach to narrative and structure” and notes that her instinct not to follow the conventions of a typical memoir made her book stand out. “We love genres in the publishing industry,” Haywood says, but Currie was able to ditch the “confines” of straightforward nonfiction storytelling in a way that more closely mirrors Indigenous oral traditions.

Currie says she’s always balked at strict categories, in her writing and elsewhere, and cites Billy-Ray Belcourt, Alicia Elliott, and Joshua Whitehead as “genre-busting” inspirations. “Indigenous people have a different worldview, a different way of thinking—definitely a different way of expressing ourselves,” Currie says. “Our sense of identity is not separate from our homeland. It’s part of how we know who we are.”

Fear Factor

Lyta Gold

Erik Hane of Headwater Literary was a regular Current Affairs reader when Lyta Gold was a frequent contributor and managing editor there. A 2019 essay she wrote for the magazine about Todd Phillips’s movie Joker stood out to Hane. “It made me think she probably had some bigger, broader things to say about fiction interacting with politics,” he recalls. So he reached out to her.

She did have bigger things to say, but initially, the two started talking about novels—Gold is a fiction writer first. Eventually, she began thinking about moral panics surrounding works of fiction and realized her thoughts probably amounted to more than a magazine article. That led to the proposal for Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality (Soft Skull, Oct.), which takes a look at such panics, all the way back to Plato’s time.

Part of what Gold investigates in the book comes directly from her background writing short stories and novels. While she had some “small successes” with fiction, it was articles, essays, and opinion pieces that got editors’ attention. “You actually get a response, instead of just sending things into a hole and you feel terrible forever,” she says. “Part of what I’m wondering about in the book is the problems of contemporary fiction and why the field is a mess and why it’s so difficult for writers and so disheartening.” There’s a notion, she adds, that a writer can write anything they want, “but in practice, it’s not really how it goes.”

Elsewhere in Dangerous Fictions, Gold covers romantic fantasy book bans, considers the effects of representation in literature, wonders whether art can meaningfully be considered “useful,” and calls Don Quixote “the first salvo in the war against the nerds.” It’s a charming mix of humor and rigorous criticism, and a fascinating look at where fiction’s power lies.

Hane notes that while it’s a cliché to use the word “sharp” about someone’s writing, “that feels like the right word” when it comes to Gold’s criticism. “Anyone who I’ve ever seen argue about a book or a movie on the internet needs to read this immediately. This is the thing they’ve been waiting for. This is the actual piece of substance that can steer some of these conversations.”

An Unusual Success

Hahrie Han

Hahrie Han, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, was researching what she calls an “unusual success story” in Ohio politics when the seed for her first trade book, Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church (Knopf, Sept.), was planted. In 2016, the same year that Donald Trump won Ohio, Cincinnati residents voted in favor of a tax to fund universal preschool. It was a win that primarily provided resources for the city’s low-income and mostly Black communities. During Han’s search to find out how it happened, people kept pointing her to Crossroads, a megachurch that had volunteers rallying behind the tax.

“I thought, okay, usually when people say that, it’s, you know, five people in a basement somewhere, making phone calls,” Han says. “But it turned out that this was hundreds of volunteers from this evangelical megachurch. And I thought, this is crazy because it’s so different than any other thing that we’re hearing about evangelicalism.” She set out to investigate why the primarily white church was so animated by the cause, and discovered that Crossroads had developed a six-week program about racial justice called Undivided.

In 2018, Han turned her research into an article for the New Republic that came to the attention of Knopf executive editor Jonathan Segal. “I have long felt that religious institutions could play a useful role—should I say, a more useful role—in helping close the racial divide, so I acted on that instinct,” Segal says. He contacted Han to see whether she might be interested in writing a book.

Han was on board. “I had been researching them for a year or two,” she recalls, “and then somewhere around, I think 2018, I thought, there’s a bigger story here to be told.”

Undivided takes a look at Crossroads’s role in fighting racial inequality and follows four of the program’s participants. “Most of my career has been focused on trying to understand how you pull people off the sidelines of public life and get them involved in different efforts around social change,” Han says. She found that the Cincinnati church’s efforts shed light on “how you organize people around a vision for a more just world.”

“She wanted so passionately to write the book for a general audience,” Segal says. “It is never easy to write your first trade book, but the book delivered in every way I hoped it would.”

Outside Issues

Jessica Hoppe

The American dream is “the ultimate gateway drug,” writes Jessica Hoppe in her memoir First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream (Flatiron, Sept.). Hoppe, who has been in recovery for nearly eight years, loved the honesty and earnestness she found in Alcoholics Anonymous, but was struck by the program’s silencing and erasure of things it considered “outside issues,” including racial trauma, sexual abuse, and her family’s history of immigration.

“It was the first time really accepting that white supremacy played such a huge role in my life,” Hoppe says. Written in fragments (“The way we drunks tell our stories matters. It may make you feel disoriented. This is intentional,” Hoppe writes), First in the Family follows the author’s path to sobriety, considers the role addiction has played in her family, and takes a broader look at America’s approach to substance misuse, particularly in communities of color.

The book grew out of Hoppe’s discovery of what she calls the “rich Indigenous history” behind contemporary Western addiction treatment. For example, she notes in the book that “the tradition of storytelling as the cornerstone of recovery” began with Indigenous communities in the mid-18th century. Hoppe couldn’t believe it wasn’t a more widely known part of the history of sobriety programs.

“I was 33 when I got sober,” she says, “and I was into my 30s when I decided to really give myself a shot, becoming a writer.” Hoppe developed a blog, NuevaYorka, so she could bypass the pitching process and write what she wanted. The platform offered her anonymity, but an article she wrote in 2020 for Gen Mag about sobriety pushed her to use her name.

The article “went a little viral,” Hoppe says, leading her to realize the power of her story. “It just became clear that this was a book.”

The proposal sold within 24 hours. “The enthusiasm for the book was magnificent,” recalls Hoppe’s agent, Johanna Castillo of Writers House. “I believe no one has written a book like this before.”

“I didn’t really want it prior,” Hoppe says about writing a book. “But I really wanted to make this statement. I wanted the community I had been a part of to have that, and I promised myself I would never allow myself to be silenced again.”

Labor of Love

Tia Levings

Tia Levings’s first book, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (St. Martin’s, Aug.), wasn’t always a nonfiction project. “My therapist was like, ‘You should try writing a book,’ ” Levings recalls. “And I did, as a novel. I needed to externalize it. And then, as I healed through trauma therapy, I wanted to tell it in my own voice, in my own name.”

The book is a powerful account of the domestic abuse Levings experienced as a member of the Christian fundamentalist Quiverfull movement, which she joined early in her marriage. It’s also a searing indictment of patriarchy and a moving look at her escape from the community in 2007 and the life she built with her four children afterward.

The memoir came together as a labor of love over 10 years, while she worked as a copywriter for a marketing company and began to go more public about her experience, including with an appearance in the 2023 documentary Shiny Happy People.

Levings hopes the book will reach readers however they can get their hands on it, noting that the women who may be most in need of her message don’t often have the freedom to stop by a bookstore on a whim. “I have this image of a woman who’s as isolated as I was, who can toss my book into the cart when she’s getting the bread or the laundry, and that it’ll reach her in her kitchen,” Levings says.

St. Martin’s executive editor Eileen Rothschild remembers feeling awe when the “hefty” proposal first crossed her desk. “It’s one of those stories that came to me, and I opened it up, and I did not close it until I was finished. Immediately, I was like, ‘I need to work on this. This is such an important story,’ ” she says, adding that Levings is “incredibly talented and has so much more to say.”

A Chorus

Rebecca Nagle

In summer 2017, Rebecca Nagle stumbled upon a Facebook post about a court case impacting the Muscogee reservation in Oklahoma, where she lives. “I basically just got completely obsessed and spent the past six years reporting on it,” she says.

That case started as a murder trial in 2000, when a Muscogee man named Patrick Dwayne Murphy was sentenced to death for killing another Muscogee citizen. His defense attorneys claimed on appeal that, because the crime occurred on reservation land, the state had no jurisdiction to pursue the death penalty. Over the next 20 years, Murphy’s appeal morphed into a landmark case about land and treaty rights, setting the stage for the Supreme Court’s historic 2020 ruling that nearly half of Oklahoma falls within a tribal reservation.

Nagle’s obsession led her to write an article about the case in Indian Country Today, after which came pieces for the Washington Post and the Atlantic. By 2019, she had started a podcast called This Land, out of which grew By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight For Justice on Native Land (Harper, Sept.). “The book’s a lot more in-depth,” Nagle says, “in both the history that it presents and the story of the case.”

Nagle’s research involved poring over “basically every piece of paper that had ever been filed” in both state and federal courts and conducting interviews with witnesses, community members, and law officers. In addition to the Murphy case, Nagle also recounts the removal of Indigenous tribes from their homelands as the state of Oklahoma was created, and considers her own family’s history as members of Cherokee Nation.

Kris Dahl, Nagle’s agent at CAA, recalls being “immediately hooked” by This Land, which she would listen to on long walks in Central Park. Dahl knew Nagle’s storytelling chops would translate well to a book. “I also admire how she supports her colleagues and Native community through her work,” Dahl says. “From the people hired on the podcasts, researchers, the jacket artist, and every step of the way, Rebecca spotlights Native talent and amplifies their voices.” For Dahl, Nagle’s work amounts to “a chorus for Native rights.”

Something Ambitious

Aaron Robertson

In 2019, New York–based translator and editor Aaron Robertson was making progress on his first novel, about African American Catholics and the Black Power movement. In his research, he came across a Black priest’s memoir that mentioned a church called the Shrine of the Black Madonna. The church, which Robertson learned was central to Black countercultural movements in the 1960s and ’70s, was founded in Robertson’s hometown of Detroit. Fascinated, he put the novel to the side and began what would become The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (FSG, Oct.).

A meticulous study of Black utopian projects in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries, the book also sees Robertson visit his grandfather’s hometown, Promise Land, Tenn., a historic all-Black community and “safe harbor for black families” after Emancipation. He travels back to Detroit, as well, to learn more about the Shrine of the Black Madonna.

In the early stages of the project, Covid lockdowns made research difficult. With his access to in-person archives on hold, Robertson found a way to make do from Brooklyn. “What that meant in practice was me socially isolating on the roof of my apartment in a camping chair, speaking to people about what the ’60s and ’70s were like, and what their views on Black liberation movements in that period were like.” He also read up on the history of utopias and was struck by the omission of Black stories.

In addition to filling in those gaps, Robertson hopes the book might change the way people think about his hometown. “This is at its heart a story about people, most of them from Detroit or Michigan, who saw this city as a real locus of social change and transformation,” he says. “I would love for people to have a sense that the people in Detroit have been envisioning and creating better worlds for a very long time.”

FSG executive editor Alex Star first came across Robertson’s writing in The Point, where early versions of the book’s ideas appeared. Star was enthralled not only with the topic but also with Robertson’s chops as a writer. “Most of all,” Star says, he hopes “that people can really recognize Aaron not just as a translator or editor, but someone who’s a very distinguished writer doing something ambitious for his first book.”

A Knife and A Pen

Theodore H. Schwartz

Neurosurgeon Theodore Schwartz surprisingly had no trouble finding time to write Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery (Dutton, Aug.). “I write a lot of research papers, so I’m constantly writing,” he says. “It’s just part of my schedule. I wake up on the weekends in the morning, and I write. I come home at night, and I write, and between operations, I’m writing.”

When it comes to what he wants to communicate about neurology, Schwartz takes issue with the age-old saying “it’s not brain surgery” to describe how easy something is. Yes, he says, brain surgery is difficult, “but it’s not that you have to be brilliant to be a great neurosurgeon.” The job requires dedication, sacrifice, focus, hard work, and compassion—“it’s not just IQ.”

Showing readers “how meaningful and wonderful a life dedicated to brain surgery can be” was one of his goals. The book combines his personal experience with a history of the field and an investigation of high-profile case studies, including those of Beau Biden, Natasha Richardson, and Malala Yousafzai.

Explaining his approach, Schwartz says he’d observed that most books written by neurosurgeons skewed more toward memoir, and he wanted to broaden the scope in the hopes of bringing more people in. “I said, ‘Well, what if I describe cases of people that everybody knows—celebrities, politicians, sports figures—who have had brain surgery?’ ”

Kris Dahl, Schwartz’s agent, recalls her excitement when she read the proposal for Gray Matters. “I mean, how many neurosurgeons are such gifted writers? I was astonished by his ability to explain brain surgery in such a lively way. He is a world-class surgeon holding a knife and a pen.”

For Schwartz, encountering neurology at Harvard Medical School felt like a flashback to his childhood dreams of going to space. He hopes to bring lay readers that same sense of wonder.

“I saw these neurosurgeons working under the microscope, and they looked like astronauts,” he recalls. “I mean, they’re in a special chair, they’re looking at a microscope, they’re working in this little microcosm. It was like journeying into a new world that I’d never seen before.”

What Is Life?

Sara Imari Walker

“I’ve been thinking about the nature of life and how we saw the origin of life for quite a while,” says astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker. “It’s been the focus of my career. But the sort of conversations we have about the nature of life are not really caught up with the cutting-edge science.”

The desire to bring that science to general readers led Walker to write Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (Riverhead, Aug.). The book considers what life is and why it exists, and describes the “assembly theory” she codeveloped, which suggests that measuring the number of “steps” it takes to make up an entity can determine whether it’s alive.

A big part of Walker’s writing process was keeping up with the pace of scientific discovery. “As I was writing the book and really trying to bring the reader to the forefront of the science, we were also making this tremendous headway in the set of ideas that I was working on.”

Riverhead executive editor Courtney Young recalls being struck by Walker’s “whole new way of thinking” about where life comes from, adding that Walker wrote Life as No One Knows It as “really a quest to find a better way to ask these big questions.”

To help readers get excited, Walker was conscious from early on about writing in a conversational tone. “I was very deliberate about using first names for scientists because that’s how we talk to each other,” she says. “A lot of the discussions we have about the deep ideas are very informal. I really wanted that experience to be part of the book.”

Part of Walker’s desire to make science accessible comes from her own education. She became enamored with physics while studying at Cape Cod Community College in 2001, thanks to a “really wonderful” professor. It was there that she began to think more about writing. She says she was an “18-year-old student, at community college, putting aside my teen magazines and wanting to read physics books. I had to set a goal for myself.” Bringing science down to earth and getting people interested in it became central to her career.

Walker went on to the Florida Institute of Technology for a BS in physics, followed that up with a PhD in physics and astronomy from Dartmouth College, and now teaches at Arizona State University. There, a mentor’s good-natured ribbing gave her another push toward finally writing a book.

“He was always, in a very positive way, taunting me that by the time he was my age, he had already written 15 books or something,” she recalls. “That was fun.”

Carliann Rittman has an MFA in creative writing and lives in upstate N.Y.