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Claire Messud turns her family’s history into a masterpiece

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Israel’s shameful ban on Al Jazeera

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Are smartphones destroying childhood? It’s complicated.

In the campaign against Donald Trump, do the ends justify the means?

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The greatness — yes, greatness — of the Planet of the Apes

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US-POLITICS-BIDEN

Crown; University of North Carolina Press; Celadon

‘This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life,’ by Lyz Lenz

What’s clear from the very first page of Lenz’s new book is that her ex-husband is a real jerk: leaving garbage to fester on the floor, taking Lenz’s feminist mugs and hiding them in the basement, telling her she should get pregnant with baby No. 3 and write fiction to be “less stressed out.” Oh, and he voted for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a>. Lenz acknowledges that getting married young and being raised in an evangelical community didn’t help her self-actualization skills. “Do you want to know how I finally got my husband to do his fair share?” Lenz asks. “Court-ordered fifty-fifty custody, that’s how.”

Pilsen Photo Co-op

But “This American Ex-Wife” is bigger than Lenz’s horrific marriage. Lenz is a journalist; her previous books, “God Land” and “Belabored,” explored the religious right in middle America and the rights of pregnant people. In her latest, she sets out to prove, using anecdotal evidence and hard statistics, that marriage (as a structure, in this country) is an oppressive tool determined to squeeze the life out of any woman it entraps. While it might be tempting to shrug off Lenz’s argument because of her unlucky (and that’s a nice word for it) coupling, the data here is persuasive. In heterosexual marriages, women bear more of the domestic and emotional labor, even when they are the primary breadwinners. This isn’t inherently because of the institution of marriage, but it stems from the ways we’re socialized to believe that women should function in a family. Lenz quotes a sociologist: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”

“This American Ex-Wife” can be exhilarating or worrying, depending on the status of the person reading it. What ultimately makes it compelling, whatever one’s feelings about straight marriage, is the sheer joy that Lenz so obviously experiences as a single woman. Even when she meets a man she likes, “the best man I’ve known,” she says, “I was still scheduling and reminding and doing the emotional and cognitive labor. And I was no longer interested in doing all of that. I wanted to be the one who was free.” Lenz is done with marriage, but her book carries a more powerful message than “marriage sucks.” Women’s lives, their happiness and their desires, matter. If a husband stands in the way of a woman being “equally and fully human,” as Lenz puts it, well — it’s time to take out the trash. (Crown, $28)

‘Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination,’ by Stephanie Clare Smith

“Cats don’t get sad,” Smith’s mother once told her when the family cat went to hide under the house, presumably to die. “Still,” Smith writes, “I could see it.” There’s not much Smith doesn’t see as a survivor of rape and neglect. When she was 14, her mother left her alone at home in New Orleans to fend for herself over a summer. Looking in her mom’s closet, still filled with all her clothes, “I knew somewhere in between all the shoulders hung my worry — Will she come back?”

Bhanu Mati

The memoir “Everywhere the Undrowned” is, somewhat unbelievably, Smith’s first book. A poet and essayist, she works as a clinical social worker and mediator in Raleigh, N.C. Her book conveys a story that many survivors of neglect and sexual violence will recognize. Her own experience led her to help other victims. One, named Tiffany, was 14 when her mother decided to relinquish her custodial rights. They discussed tattoos: Tiffany wanted “my mother’s name on my right arm and my sister’s name on my other arm,” she told Smith, despite the fact that her sister wouldn’t claim her, “because I am full black and she’s half.” “This is what it is,” Smith reflects. “We tattoo ourselves with the people who won’t claim us.”

After she was raped by a man in a green truck the summer of her mother’s absence, she put the clothes she had been wearing during the attack in a paper bag and placed them near a trash can. “But when I got back upstairs, I could still hear them crying. After an hour, I brought the clothes inside,” she writes. “They quieted down or else they just died.” This book, told in short vignettes like one of the books Smith recalls reading — “Bluets,” by Maggie Nelson — is a kind of prose poetry that recalls the work of writers like Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. When Smith finally told her mother about her assault, the response was deeply upsetting. “Why are you telling me this? She was hot; she was mad. She walked like a gun as she walked out of the room.”

That Smith survived that summer in New Orleans is remarkable. That she found the drive, space and courage to turn that experience into this book is what makes “Everywhere the Undrowned” not only a compelling memoir but a work of literature, the kind she was reading that horrible summer. She recalls staying up late to read Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”: “One morning, I found a dent on my cheek from where her bound corner slept into me all night.” Describing how Jane survived, because of “her resilient heart cave,” Smith is also describing herself. (University of North Carolina Press, $20)

‘The Manicurist’s Daughter: A Memoir,’ by Susan Lieu

“In Vietnamese, there are six tones that can change the definition of a word,” Lieu writes. Depending on tone, the word “ma” can mean mother, but, tomb, horse, ghost or rice seedling. The loaded connotations of a lost mother are what haunt and propel this memoir, which is based on Lieu’s one-woman theater show, “140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother.” Lieu was 11 when her mother died after a botched tummy tuck procedure performed by a doctor who was on probation at a plastic surgery clinic in San Francisco. The youngest of four, Lieu later made revenge her mission — but when she discovered that the doctor who had performed the surgery was dead, her mission morphed into another: to know her mother. It was a mission made impossible by her family’s unwillingness to speak about her mother or the circumstances of her death.

Tamara Staples

“It wasn’t until I went to college that I learned words like ‘capitalism,’ ‘exploitation,’ and ‘intergenerational trauma,’” Lieu recalls. Her parents were from Chinese families that had fled persecution into Vietnam, and from there to America. Lieu was the first child born in the United States, so her mother decided to give her an American name. It was also the name of the first nail salon her parents opened, Susan’s Nails, over which her mother presided like a general. When Lieu went to Harvard, students shared their parents’ careers: surgeon, professor, lawyer. “My dad does nails,” Lieu told them. “He’s a man-i-curist.”

Unsurprisingly, Lieu had a hard time finding her way in life. Her father remarried, her aunts moved out, she fell prey to a yoga cult run by a White woman who demanded money in exchange for spiritual detoxing. Her family’s running commentary on her weight was relentless: “You look fat,” one aunt flatly said. Lieu was driven by some force to keep pushing to learn about her mother in the face of her family’s stonewalling.

“What was she like?” Lieu said in the second iteration of her one-woman show. “No,” her director instructed, “say it like you’re in Viet Nam and you’re shouting across the ocean to America.” Lieu’s foray into theater proved to be a healing balm, not only for her but for her siblings and father as well. “As I inhabited their words, their gestures, their voices, my perception of them began to change,” Lieu writes. “My energy toward them shifted, and so did their communication with me.” Two of her siblings joined her for a Q&amp;A after a performance. “We were children who had tragically lost our mother. Two decades later, I could finally stop because we had found her, through one another.” Maybe. In reality, “The Manicurist’s Daughter” shows that Lieu did the heavy lifting herself. (Celadon, $30)

Jessica Ferri is a writer based in Berkeley, Calif., and the author, most recently, of <a href="https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B098WDYGN3&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_QWJ9GSTQKHFQ2F96FMWW&tag=thewaspos09-20" target=_blank>“Silent Cities San Francisco.”</a>

Jessica Ferri

New memoirs, including ‘This American Ex-Wife,’ tell stories of resilience

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