Can love exist alongside abuse?

Some writers say yes. Mary Oliver, in contemplating the inevitable cruelties of the world, asked, “When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks? / And should we not thank the knife also? / We do not live in a simple world.”¹

Other writers say no. For bell hooks, love and abuse are mutually exclusive: “When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.”²

Perhaps the truth lies in the vast gray middle, which is why Jeannie Vanasco, in her third memoir A Silent Treatment (Tin House), hesitates to call her mother’s behavior “emotional abuse.”³

“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote. In Melissa Fraterrigo’s simmering collection of essays, The Perils of Girlhood, she slowly unwraps a singular truth that life teaches women, beginning in childhood: growing up female is perilous, even when nothing is presently threatening. Tautly crafted and immensely accessible, Fraterrigo’s personal narratives unfold with an ambient tension as she moves through the pivotal milestones of being female and the lessons that stick.

It’s 12:15 a.m. and about an hour ago, I told my iPhone’s bedtime reminder to take a hike because I had to finish the last thirty pages of Tom McAllister’s remarkable memoir, It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays. The book is a collection of crisp life memories – each essay no more than 1500 words, all with acres more land to cover if McAllister were flowery or long-winded, or, if he were paid by the word. A master sentence-maker, McAllister packs such punch into each of the book’s essays, that you need a minute (or fifteen) to pause at the end of each, just to be sure you caught every detail, and to think about the woven connections from essay to essay and year to year. And perhaps most critically, to consider what the details of his life story tell you about yours.

Samina Najmi’s memoir-in-essays Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time captures her family’s migrations across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. The circle mentioned in the title holds true both for the form itself—the author uses a meditative, repeating structure—and for the uniting of disparate people, places, and histories central to her identity. A professor of multiethnic literatures at the California State University, Fresno, Najmi writes an ambitious, fascinating multigenerational story, a collective narrative, that resists the erasure of her family and the violence of colonization.

In “My Dad Still Watches the NFL,” the opening essay of Jason McCall’s collection Razed by TV Sets, the prose is shot in bursts, every sentence beginning with the phrase “This is about,” aside from a handful of occasions where the reader is told the opposite: “But it’s not about that.” What initially seems terse and truncated moves ever closer to completion with each addition: “This is about a job. This is about how hard it is for some of us to get a job. . .This is about how it feels like we all got a good job when one of us gets a good job.” The writing continually billows and morphs, expands and contracts. McCall returns to this technique repeatedly throughout the collection; what begin as shallow breaths become deeper and more meditative with each iteration. Stylistically, it is no surprise that the author would employ anaphora, given his background as a poet with several collections to his name. Still, the foundation of McCall’s first book of prose is built on repetition, and yet nothing about it feels repetitive. Instead, the tactic acts as a compass, a way to navigate through seemingly antipodal content, a needle always pointing toward some broadly specific version of the truth.

Jeremy Jones seeks solid ground in his new hybrid work of nonfiction, part biography, part memoir, part detective story, part ghost story. Readers of Cipher will recognize Jones’ pull toward his Blue Ridge Mountain family land that pulses through his first memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014), along with the thoughtful approach to Appalachian—and American—history through a personal lens. But this new book also yearns for a narrative solid ground and the way it can make a meaningful whole of disparate parts, and for the answers to be found in genetic coding about who we are and who we might become.