Embracing the joys and challenges of family

Four new memoirs explore complicated relationships with parents

‘Through the Groves,’ by Anne Hull

Former Washington Post reporter Anne Hull’s memoir is about more than oranges. As a young girl, Hull was assigned to keep watch on her father, an alcoholic and a fruit buyer in central Florida for a juice processing company, who used a grapefruit as a paperweight. Father and daughter listened to the “Florida Citrus Report” on the radio every morning. “Misery was their specialty,” Hull writes. “They made even good news sound bad. ‘Tangerine futures are up,’ the man said, as if someone had died.”

Able to spin memories into literary gold, Hull’s warmth and sadness call to mind the grotesqueries of Flannery O’Connor. Describing her aunt, she writes: “Everything she owned snapped shut — her cigarette pouch, her lipstick case, her white suitcase. When she came to visit, the entire weekend was a series of clicks.”

Hull’s father’s illness catches up to him in a terrifying scene witnessed by both of his children. Her mother, a glamorous would-be writer (but instead an elementary school teacher), flees. Hull learns she’s getting too old to run around shirtless. She goes back to work at the orange grove during tourist season. “The child Yankees were the ones I felt sorry for,” she remembers. “I had never seen children in sunglasses. They looked like small blind adults.” An unfortunate stepfather appears. By the time Hull’s father calls, drying out in New Orleans, they’ve both become different people. “‘Dad?’ I said for the third time. It was like using a foreign word.”

“Through the Groves” hits that perfect place between pain and love, and Hull makes it look easy. At the end of the book, and the end of her parents’ lives, I cherished them both as characters so much that I actually wrote “No” in the margins, as if I could stop the book from ending. (Henry Holt, $26.99)

‘Orphan Bachelors,’ by Fae Myenne Ng

Fae Myenne Ng’s first memoir, “Orphan Bachelors,” is the story of

Ng’s parents, which cannot be told without the Chinese Exclusion Act, legislation that kept an entire generation of Chinese men who had immigrated from America, and vice versa, from reuniting with their families. Ng learned from an early age that a “story’s function was to protect,” she writes. “Our parents didn’t believe in bedtime stories. A story that lulls you into dreaming? Why waste time telling a story that didn’t terrify and teach?”

Ng’s story is a kind of mourning, and the path to reclaiming her ancestors is lighted by her mother and father, and the family’s love of food. “Food is God. We are people of famine, drought, and hunger. Our daily greeting to kin: ‘Eat yet?’” Once, when Ng was living in Rome, she found her mother, who was visiting, “playing with her fingers” and asked her what she was doing. She answered: “Counting the days since I’ve not had a bowl of rice.”

One of the most moving chapters in the book tells the story of Ng moving to New York, where she was “instantly home,” and her friendship with the painter Moira Dryer. As Ng suffers the deaths of her parents, her younger brother and Dryer, she tells her students that she expects them “to put themselves first, to break the rules.” She finds joy in the irony of caring for her brother’s turtles. “Here I am, a woman who never wanted children, with charges that will live longer than any grandchild.”

“Orphan Bachelors” is beautifully written, powerfully informative and never boring. In her prologue, Ng warns: “When writing, consider the vessel of time that holds a story. Maybe that’s also a guide on how to read this book. When reading, honor what you can’t fully inhabit.” Thanks to Ng’s fierce talent and unapologetic honesty, “Orphan Bachelors” is a revelation. (Grove, $28)

‘Why Fathers Cry at Night,’ by Kwame Alexander

Kwame Alexander is the author of 38 books, many of them for young readers. “Why Fathers Cry at Night” is an unconventional memoir told in, as its subtitle says, “love poems, letters, recipes, and remembrances.” It could just as easily be subtitled “The story of the women in my life.” He begins with his mother, “my first teacher,” whom he “fell in love with” because of “the tender power of her voice. … She called us for dinner like we’d won something.” From there we move on to the mothers of his two daughters, and to the daughters themselves, girls “I’ve cherished, and let down,” with a brief interlude about poet Nikki Giovanni, a teacher and mentor to Alexander.

As with Ng’s family in “Orphan Bachelors,” food is a form of love and loving for Alexander. “From the second we are born, the experience of food is connected with being held, the warmth of our mother’s skin, her soothing voice,” he writes. Alexander comes from a line of strong women who have known that a home-cooked meal is a form of care. “My father’s mother, Granny, made dinner, for thirtyplus folks — children, grandchildren, neighbors, siblings — every Sunday. How she cooked so much food and still made it to church early to take her seat as head of the usher board, I will never comprehend.”

Alexander is obviously working to take responsibility for his mistakes, especially when it comes to his older daughter, whom he tells us he has not spoken with in three years. Perhaps he includes his friendship with Giovanni as an example of healing and redemption. Alexander took classes taught by Giovanni and never received higher than a C grade. Angry and hurt, he wrote a hateful play with a character not-so-loosely based on Giovanni. When they ran into each other later in life, they reconciled, and Giovanni has even called him her “literary son.”

“Why Fathers Cry at Night” offers a refreshing masculine vulnerability that is rarely seen, and one hopes after reading it that Alexander and his daughter will be able to reconcile. “That’s what I want this book to spark,” he writes frankly in its epilogue, “those difficult but necessary conversations that ultimately make us better.” (Little, Brown, $28)

‘Oh My Mother!’ by Connie Wang

Connie Wang’s “Oh My Mother!” is pure joy. A memoir about her mother, Qing, told “in nine adventures,” the book exhibits dark humor to good effect. Wang grew up in Lincoln, Neb., and remembers fretting in Mandarin school on Saturdays about the “Larry King hairline” she inherited from her Chinese father. “I was definitely not as weird as them, these child geniuses far more brilliant and demented than myself, including a twelve-year-old boy who constructed an entire laptop computer from salvaged parts that he then brought with him to class in order to watch porn during vocabulary lessons.”

Wang’s weirdness, she says, comes from her mother, who loves “Magic Mike XXL” and eating ice cream cones for breakfast. In “Oh My Mother!” (an exclamation that is the closest Chinese translation we have to “Oh my God!”), Wang takes us along on family trips to time-shares, China, Las Vegas, Disney World and finally Versailles, where they run into busloads of Chinese tourists. “The effect was totally bizarre, like seeing a birthday cake in the middle of the forest,” Wang writes. “It wasn’t until 2005 that the Chinese Communist Party deregulated their travel restrictions.” At first, Qing is caught off guard. Then, she says, “I am so proud.”

At 58, after years of not being able to get a good night’s sleep, Qing smokes weed in Amsterdam and gets the best rest of her life. “Thanks Connie I love this!” Alongside the funny stories about Qing are Wang’s sharp cultural observations. On the terrifying experience of luxury retail: “There is nothing similar,” nothing that “engenders the same intense feelings of inadequacy, elation, shame, and desire — except perhaps for gambling.”

This memoir ends when many recent ones begin, with the start of the pandemic, and then the birth of Wang’s son, Marc. Wang never intended this to be anything but the story of Qing and her influence on her life. “This is our memoir,” Wang writes. “And it was forged through shared fact-checking. … She is this book’s first editor. Every word you read here has first passed under her red pen,” making the book as unique and charming as its mother-daughter pair. (Viking, $28)