This Boy We Made

August 1, 2021

In I Came All This Way To Meet You, New York Times best-selling author Attenberg explains that as the daughter of a traveling salesman she came by her wanderlust naturally and shows how reflecting on her early years during her travels led her to writing--and particularly her theme of troubled families (75,000-copy first printing). Award-winning actress and Food Network star Bertinelli follows up her No. 1 New York Times best-selling memoir Losing It with inspiration as she turns 60 in Enough Already (100,000-copy first printing). In High-Risk Homosexual, a memoir ranging from funny (a baby speaking an ancient Jesuit language) to heartbreaking (the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando), Gomez explains how he came to embrace his gay, Latinx identity within a culture of machismo. In This Boy We Made, Harris relates her efforts to determine what is suddenly wrong with her bouncy 22-month-old boy in a system frequently inhospitable to Black mothers and her discovery when meeting with a geneticist that she has medical issues of her own. In Admissions, James relates the complications of being a diversity recruiter for select, largely white prep schools after attending The Taft School as its first Black legacy student. Attorney, podcaster, and Extra correspondent Lindsay discusses growing up in Dallas, TX; her career in law; and why she chose to be the first Black Bachelorette on The Bachelor in Miss Me with That. Miller reveals how he made the Jump, taking Nike's Jordan Brand from a relatively modest $150 million sneaker producer to a $4.5 billion worldwide footwear and apparel phenomenon while also recalling his teenage jailtime and the nightmares from which he still suffers and arguing for criminal justice reform and greater educational opportunities for the currently or formerly imprisoned. After her mother, actress Roseanne Barr, moved the family to celebrity-soaked Hollywood from working-class Denver, using personal details from their lives there for her sitcom's storylines, the teenaged Pentland endured anxiety and eating issues and various 1980s-sanctioned self-help interventions while muttering to herself This Will Be Funny Later (evidently proved here). In Lost & Found, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker staffer Schulz explores the bittersweet reality of meeting the woman she would marry just 18 months before losing her father. Readers Rise with Vonn as she earns 82 World Cup wins, 20 World Cup titles, seven World Championship medals, and three Olympic medals to become one of the top women ski racers of all time. Raised in Albania, the last Communist country in Europe, where the final tumble of Stalin's and Hoxha's statues soon led to economic chaos, political violence, and the flight of the disillusioned, Ypi has earned the right more than most to ponder what it means to be Free.

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Starred review from October 25, 2021
Essayist Harris weaves a medical mystery, love story, parenting memoir, and tale of survival in her stunning debut. When Harris’s sweet-natured 22-month-old boy, Tophs, started showing a host of inexplicable symptoms—including hypoglycemia, developmental delays, and speech and language difficulties—she was forced to reckon with the ways in which his health issues stoked anxiety issues that she’d spent most of her life battling. In writing that is heartfelt and raw, she recounts her distress at the evasive explanations that she received from doctors as her son underwent test after test, while braiding in reflections on motherhood (“Being a Black mother in a... country, built for whites was hard”), faith, and the idea of existing within liminal spaces: “Caught somewhere between ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’.... It was getting harder to see what, if anything, was being formed in Tophs, in me, or in us as a family through this search for answers.” Though medical professionals believed Tophs had ketotic hypoglycemia, a condition in which blood glucose levels drop unexpectedly, Harris and her husband never received a conclusive diagnosis. But out of that uncertainty grew a love and calmness that Harris couldn’t have foreseen, and a story of acceptance that mesmerizes with its vulnerability: “He had always been my son.... It was my job to let him be.” This is astounding. Agent: Bridget Matzie, Aevitas Creative Management.

November 1, 2021
A Black woman with an anxiety disorder chronicles the process of caring for her son, whose undiagnosed illness thrust the family into uncertainty. Just before his second birthday, Harris' youngest child, Tophs, woke up listless, silent, and thirsty. When Harris felt his racing heart, her gut told her that something was wrong--but she wasn't sure if she could trust her gut. A lifetime of managing an anxiety disorder made her feel like she was constantly overreacting to something. Luckily, she overcame her doubts and took her son to the hospital, where the doctors found that his glucose was dangerously low and recommended the start of a process that eventually became years of shuttling her son among geneticists, endocrinologists, and neurologists. While waiting for a diagnosis that would never come, Harris and her husband battled reluctant school systems to get their son the special services he needed, a struggle complicated by their family's Blackness. "The city needed fewer Black boys in special education, and my Black boy almost got caught up in the quota," writes the author. "Maybe it wasn't an intentional scheme, surely it wasn't a written policy, but it could derail lives of the most vulnerable nonetheless." Throughout, Harris describes struggling with anxiety, leaning on her Christian faith, and coping with the discovery that she carries a gene that put her at risk for cancer. She leaned on her family and faith to help her live with the reality that her high-needs child would probably never receive a diagnosis and that she would have to parent him without fully understanding his body or his brain. The author deploys humor and delight to infuse the narrative with nuance and hope, and her frank, vulnerable voice makes the book feel like a conversation with a close friend. At times, though, the prose is overwritten, and the flashback-laden timeline can be confusing. A compelling, insightful memoir about parenting through the unknown.

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December 3, 2021

On an otherwise ordinary morning Harris and her husband find their 22-month-old son Tophs awake--but troublingly lethargic and unresponsive. A visit to the ER seems to indicate a case of low glucose, but as time passes it's clear that while Tophs is energetic and sweet, something is affecting his physical and mental development. A battery of tests finds no answers for Tophs's symptoms or what causes them, but have a shock for Harris: she carries the BRCA1 gene, putting her at high risk for breast cancer and leaving her with doubts about her and her family's future. Her recounting of a life upended by medical revelations touches on the sureties and doubts of motherhood, her lifelong anxiety and its intersection with love for her children, the challenges of seeking medical support as a Black woman, and the vital support of her husband in speaking out for her and Toph's needs. Throughout the book, she offers insight into inequities in health care and what it means to strive for social justice. VERDICT A sensitive look at motherhood and the parenting of an "undiagnosable" child, and what parents pass on, in their genes and their care, to their children.--Kathleen McCallister, William & Mary Libs., Williamsburg, VA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.