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Cheung, Karen. The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir. Random. Feb. 2022. 336p. ISBN 9780593241431. $28. Download. MEMOIR

Denk, Jeremy. Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons. Random. Feb. 2022. 384p. ISBN 9780812995985. $20. Downloadable. $28. MEMOIR

Drayton, Tiffanie. Black American Refugee. Viking. Feb. 2022. 304p. ISBN 9780593298541. $26. MEMOIR

Foo, Stephanie. What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Reckoning and Healing from Generational Trauma. Ballantine. Feb. 2022. 320p. ISBN 9780593238103. $27. MEMOIR

Hongo, Garrett. The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo. Pantheon. Feb. 2022. 544p. ISBN 9780375425066. $30. MEMOIR

Jefferson, Margo. Constructing a Nervous System. Pantheon. Feb. 2022. 224p. ISBN 9781524748173. $26. MEMOIR

Mead, Rebecca. Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return. Knopf. Feb. 2022. 240p. ISBN 9780525658719. $27. MEMOIR

Vasquez-Lavado , Silvia.In the Shadow of the Mountain : A Memoir of Courage. Holt. Feb. 2022. 320p. ISBN 9781250776747. $27.99. MEMOIR

Journalist Cheung relates growing up in Hong Kong— The Impossible City—after its 1917 reunification with China, traversing its rich identities while exploring her education at various English-speaking international schools, the city’s literary and indie music scenes, and the protests against restricted freedoms. One of America’s top pianists, MacArthur fellow Denk recounts his upbringing and training, clarifying the complexities of the artistic life and the student-teacher relationship in Every Good Boy Does Fine. As Drayton relates in Black American Refugee, she left Trinidad and Tobago as a youngster to join her mother in the United States but was angered by the contrast in how white and Black people were treated and by age 20 returned to Tobago, where she could enjoy being Black without fear. What My Bones Know reveals Emmy Award–winning radio producer Foo’s relentless panic attacks until she was finally diagnosed with Complex PTSD, a condition resulting from ongoing trauma—in her case the years she spent abused by her parents before they abandoned her. Growing up fourth-generation Japanese American in Los Angeles directly after World War II, Pulitzer finalist poet Hongo recounts spending his life hunting for The Perfect Sound, from his father’s inspired record-player setup and the music his Black friends enjoyed to Bach, Coltrane, ukulele, and the best possible vacuum tubes. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Negroland, Jefferson offers what she calls a temperamental autobiography with Constructing a Nervous System, woven of fragments like the sound of a 1950s jazz LP and a ballerina’s movements spliced with those of an Olympic runner to explore the possibilities of the female body. In Home/Land, New Yorker staffer Mead captures the excitement, dread, and questions of identity that surfaced after she relocated from New York to her birth city, London, with her family in 2018. Vasquez-Lavado now lives In the Shadow of the Mountain, but once she was a Silicon Valley star wrestling with deep-seated personal problems (e.g., childhood abuse, having to deny her sexuality to her family) when she decided to turn around her life through mountain climbing; eventually, she took a team of young women survivors up Mount Everest (150,000-copy first printing).

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