They’re Going to Love You, by Meg Howrey
Carlisle Martin is a 43-year-old choreographer living in Los Angeles. Her parents, both of whom danced in the New York City Ballet during the Balanchine era, split up years ago when her father came out as gay. Now her mother is remarried with another child and her father, Robert, lives with his longtime partner James in New York City. Carlisle, who desperately wanted to be a professional ballet dancer herself but was too tall, has been estranged from her father for 19 years. Just as she’s on the verge of an exciting new project, she gets a call from James, telling her that Robert is dying. The novel switches back and forth between the present, as Carlisle prepares to travel to her father’s bedside, and the past, when she regularly visited him and James in their Greenwich Village apartment as a child and teenager, leading up to the series of events that caused him to cut her out of his life. This is a book about what children and parents owe each other and more broadly, about forgiveness. As Howrey, who danced professionally before becoming an author, writes, “In the history of the world, has anyone ever been forgiven because they said, But I didn’t mean to hurt you?”
Congratulations, the Best Is Over! by R. Eric Thomas
These essays by playwright, television writer and essayist Thomas (his first collection was the bestselling “Here For It”) tend to start with a funny story and slowly move into something deeper and more meaningful. The context for the collection is Thomas’s move back to Baltimore — the city he grew up in and with which he has a complicated relationship — along with his husband David, a Presbyterian pastor. Thomas digs into relatable questions of what it means to come home (and go to a high school reunion, to boot) when you’re no longer the person you once were, how we so often crave feeling “something incredible and extreme” rather than our everyday neutrality, and how we relate to our own family members as they, too, move through new life stages. Thomas is smart and hilarious and observant. One of my favorite passages, from an essay about a fishing trip he took with David and his future father-in-law: “Everyone else’s father is inscrutable to me. And this isn’t a knock against other people’s fathers. I just don’t think we’re set up, as a society, to see a lot of men in their complexity. And a lot of men aren’t willing to or able to show their complexity. And so we’re left with a pile of tropes from the Father’s Day card aisle at the supermarket: a reference to football, an old chair, a vague sentiment about working and sacrifice. Oh, and a mounted fish. Cuz men be fishin’.”
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
I had more than one friend tell me about reading this book over the summer and conclude with, “All I want to do now is visit a cherry farm in Michigan.” I don’t even like cherries, but: same! The frame for the story is the gathering, on the aforementioned farm, of Lara, her husband Joe, and their three daughters during the first months of the pandemic. While performing the endless tasks that make up farm life, the three young women prod Lara into telling the details of her years-earlier summer at a Michigan theater company, during which she played Emily in “Our Town” and dated an actor who would go on to be a big star, Peter Duke. (One of Lara’s daughters, not coincidentally also named Emily, spent a chunk of her childhood convinced Duke was her real father.) The jacket copy says this is in part a meditation on “the lives our parents led before they were our parents,” and I’d add that it’s also a meditation on what you do and don’t share with your children about those lives. Much like my previous pick, “Still Life,” this is beautiful and uplifting, even though it’s set during very uncertain times. And it sticks the landing. There are parallels to “Our Town,” which makes me want to read the play (for the first time!) and then read “Tom Lake” all over again.