In 2009, a week after Gayle Brandeis gave birth to her third child, a son, her mother Arlene hanged herself. The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide is a compelling and suspenseful read, a medical mystery, a family drama. Brandeis recounts her mother’s final week, reexamines their complicated relationship throughout her life, and questions: What drove her mother to take her own life?

Memoir requires such brutal honesty, the willingness of an author to bare herself before the unknown reader, to pick the scab from a wound that has failed to heal properly no matter how long ago it occurred. “Starting With Goodbye” succeeds in this respect. Romeo spares no one, including herself, acknowledging how spoiled she was as a child, how petulant she could be during her father’s last months.

In a book full of technical drawings and multiform observation on fatherhood, there is silence in the way of advice. The reader will find clever instruction on folding a ten-foot piece of paper into a two-and-a-half-foot tall owl, but nothing close to even a here’s-what-worked-for-me speech and accompanying handshake.

Renee Macalino Rutledge is a long-time journalist from the San Francisco area whose articles and essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including ColorLines, Filipinas Magazine, and Ford City Anthology. Her debut novel, , employs a Filipino folktale of …

In Unbound Jamie Sumner details her journey through infertility to motherhood through her strong Christian faith, where the barren and fertile women of the Bible are her mentors.

The Madwoman of the title is a complicated persona that the poet herself seems to shift into and out of. The poems convey the personal, the familial, the cultural/traditional, and the mythical.