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The Cuba We Lost
Genie Milgrom’s The Cuba We Lost: Witnesses to the Last Days of Freedom, 1959 Through 1962 is an oral history of the first years of the Cuban Revolution, built from the memories of people who experienced political upheaval and exile as children, teenagers, and young adults. Milgrom organizes the testimonies chronologically according to when each person left Cuba, placing brief historical accounts before many of the individual stories so that private memories unfold alongside events such as nationalization, growing Soviet influence, the Bay of Pigs invasion, religious repression, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The approach gives readers two perspectives at once: the public record of a country undergoing rapid transformation and the intimate record of families trying to understand what those changes meant inside their homes. Milgrom describes her purpose as preserving the memories of a generation whose parents and grandparents are disappearing, allowing the witnesses to speak in their own voices and creating a record intended especially for descendants who have no firsthand memory of Cuba.
The book’s greatest strength is the accumulation of precise, often childlike details. Political change is remembered through objects and sensations: a favorite doll damaged by soldiers, armed milicianos walking a neighborhood street, jewelry hidden inside clothing or toys, a small Christmas tree decorated with costume jewelry, the sound of an air-raid siren in Miami, or the sight of relatives crying behind airport glass. These details give the book an emotional texture that broad historical summaries rarely capture. One of Milgrom’s own memories is especially representative. Soon after arriving in Miami, she asked her grandfather when they would return to Cuba, and he told her, “We will not return in my lifetime and possibly not in yours. This is our country now.” That exchange expresses one of the book’s central tensions: many families departed believing their exile would last only months, while the children grew into adults in a country that gradually became home. The recurring memories of beaches, schools, grandparents, food, music, churches, synagogues, neighborhoods, and family gatherings make the lost Cuba of the title a lived place.
The individual testimonies also reveal how varied exile could be. Some families had wealth and professional standing in Cuba and arrived in the United States to take factory jobs, work in grocery stores, pick tomatoes, or crowd several relatives into a small apartment. Some children traveled with their parents, while others endured painful separations that lasted months or years. Catholic families describe the closing or confiscation of religious schools and the expulsion of clergy, while Jewish contributors recall the effects of nationalization, emigration, and the assistance of organizations such as HIAS. Several accounts intersect directly with the Bay of Pigs, including stories of fathers who joined Brigade 2506, imprisonment, and families left waiting in Miami. Across these differing circumstances, the book repeatedly returns to education, work, family solidarity, religious life, gratitude, and the rebuilding of professional and personal identities. The repetition is meaningful because each testimony approaches similar events through a different household. Taken together, the accounts show exile as both a historical movement and a collection of thousands of private disruptions whose consequences continued for decades.
By the epilogue, Milgrom makes clear that the project became as much about memory as about chronology. She reflects on witnesses who had rarely or never spoken about their experiences and on the enduring presence of childhood fear, separation, grief, and longing in their adult lives. She summarizes what the collection became in a particularly fitting sentence: “The book became a chronicle of quiet voices preserving personal and family histories.” That description captures the achievement of The Cuba We Lost. Its historical value comes from preserving firsthand recollections before they disappear, while its emotional force comes from the ordinary details through which people remember extraordinary events. The book records the severing of families from a homeland, but it also follows those families into the lives they created afterward, making resilience, cultural inheritance, and intergenerational memory essential parts of the story. As a result, Milgrom has produced both a testimony to a particular generation of Cuban exiles and a family-centered archive intended to carry their voices beyond that generation.
Pages: 333 | ASIN : B0HDV895LW
Objective Truth
A New True to Me: The Foundation for How I Got Here is a memoir built around a deceptively simple question: How do we really know the story of our own lives? At what point did you realize the book was becoming something very different from the memoir you initially intended to write?
Actually, until I was months into writing, I didn’t intend to write a memoir. I was simply answering questions provided by a Storyworth subscription, to collect discrete stories in a volume they would print and bind. The individual stories, in separate word processing files, wove themselves together like fabric through the language I used. The individual files were combined into a manuscript ten months after I began writing. An introduction was added, and I began wondering if I would ever offer the manuscript to a few friends and relatives. That was when my writing defined itself as a memoir, which simply evolved into the published book as I kept doing the next thing writing demanded I do.
Archive – The Writing of A NEW TRUE TO ME traces the evolution from the origin story to a post about discovering Literary Titans’ review on Goodreads on the day it was published (August 31).
You allow readers to see your earlier belief, the evidence that challenged it, and your revised understanding. Why was it important to preserve that process on the page?
The second question from Storyworth was, “How did you get your first job?” My answer was a walk through the jobs and my ancestral history that guided me to them. With seven days of steady writing, the response became nearly four thousand words, which was an extension of the first Storyworth question—What were your grandparents like?—response.
Then, months later, I was exploring records to describe my high school years. There, I discovered that stories I have told about my first jobs throughout my adult life were absolutely not true. This created a dilemma. What should I do about the factually flawed stories I believed and memorialized when I wrote about those first jobs?
On my first day of drafting the answer to the first question, I whimsically put a footer in the word processing document. “I made up a few things. There are some I forgot. It’s all true to me.” It appeared on every page of every draft until the manuscript became a book layout. To settle the dilemma, I lifted “true to me” from the footer and added “new.” A NEW TRUE TO ME became the title I intended for the collection of discrete stories printed by Storyworth.
Still later, as I edited the manuscript, I wanted to encourage potential memoir authors by displaying the path from beliefs to an understanding that is closer to objective truth, even if objective truth is not available. One of the reasons I felt encouraged to offer my manuscript to the world was the idea that it may help others write their own.
How did your definition of professional success change between your years in banking and your later career in financial planning?
Wow, at age seventy-eight and nearly five decades since I worked in a commercial bank, it is hard to remember my definition of success then. When A NEW TRUE TO ME discusses my high school and undergraduate years in the 1960s, it questions what the word “success” means, while acknowledging I’m still not sure about what I believed then. We were a generation troubled by what we saw as society’s definitions of success.
My definition of “success” as a financial planner, on the other hand, is clear and far more than “professional success.” When I heard financial planning described as a service to help people understand the intersections among complex financial services and optimize their use, I recognized that many people needed the service and I had skills well suited to helping clients. Then I recognized that commission-based compensation for financial planning resulted in abuse of clients. I was distraught. I launched my own firm to provide fiduciary financial planning, divorced from selling financial products other than my labor-intensive services focused totally on clients’ best interests.
At that point, the definition of success became clients who felt secure, with a clear understanding of their financial circumstances. Seeing new clients worried about their ability to retire comfortably, then retire ten to twenty years later with well-founded confidence that they were financially secure, was the definition of success for me.
What questions would you recommend someone ask when beginning to examine the stories they have always believed about themselves?
I’m not sure I have any better questions than the various services like Storyworth. My first was “What were your grandparents like?” Within ten minutes I had my first paragraph that included:
I start this by saying that I never really knew any of my grandparents well, except through the stories I was told. Whatever I say is, therefore, colored by interpretations by the people who told the stories and my memories of their telling, which, of course, is subject to me enhancing the readers’ impressions of me … So, here we go.
From there, I just kept responding to questions until I began creating my own titles for stories. That first paragraph was not edited in any way, I remember, through 3 ½ years of work on the manuscript.
For me, it is not the questions that count. It is the act of writing about one’s life that raises the questions that matter. Then you question what you wrote in the first draft, then question the edits repeatedly until you reach a true-to-you as of the date you feel satisfied. I had to extend that date multiple times when providence revealed new truths after I thought I was finished. Less than three months after I declared my satisfaction with the truth of the entire book, I have experienced discoveries that would have required minor editing if discovered before that date.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Substack | Amazon
Reawaken: Finding Hope, Purpose, and Joy Through Life’s Unexpected Journey
Reawaken is Richard E. Poulin III’s account of how his family’s adventurous, carefully planned life changed after his daughter, Rylae-Ann, developed unexplained medical episodes. Poulin begins with his and his wife Judy’s multicultural childhoods, teaching careers, and years of travel before moving into the book’s central story: their search for the cause of Rylae-Ann’s symptoms. That search leads to a diagnosis of aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase deficiency, an extraordinarily rare genetic disorder, and eventually to an experimental gene therapy trial in Taiwan. The result is part family memoir, part medical odyssey, and part caregiver field guide.
Poulin writes with an open, personable voice that suits the story well. He’s candid about fear, denial, exhaustion, financial pressure, and even the envy he felt while watching other families celebrate milestones that seemed unreachable for his daughter. His humor keeps those admissions from becoming overwhelming, whether he’s describing airport mishaps, hospital bureaucracy, or therapy sessions conducted over Rylae-Ann’s enthusiastic protests. Judy emerges as the family’s steady engine, while relatives, caregivers, educators, clinicians, and researchers gradually form the wider “Team Rylae.” That attention to collective effort gives the memoir much of its warmth.
The book is especially affecting when it concentrates on small, observable changes. Rylae-Ann sitting independently, selecting a picture in a familiar book, throwing a fork, speaking her first words, and taking a few unsteady steps carry more emotional force than broad statements about perseverance. Poulin’s background as an educator also gives the later chapters practical substance. His discussions of scaffolding, play, sleep, communication supports, and the family’s caregiver lifestyle framework show how therapy became part of ordinary routines. Brief sidebars on medicine, science, history, travel, and culture add context, though their frequency and the repetition of a few motivational ideas occasionally slow the story’s momentum.
I recommend Reawaken to parents and caregivers of children with rare diseases, disabilities, or developmental delays. They’ll recognize the difficult decisions, relentless research, improvised routines, and strange mix of grief and celebration that can shape caregiving. Educators, therapists, healthcare professionals, and rare-disease advocates will also find a useful reminder that families bring vital knowledge to clinical and educational partnerships. Above all, this is a hopeful account of a child gaining access to movement, language, learning, and a fuller life, and of a family turning that experience into advocacy for others.
Pages: 291 | ASIN : B0HB2NQP28
Sharing My Story
In Turning Fertile, you share your difficult journey through infertility and medical complications as you learned to listen to your body and ultimately became a mother. What made you decide to tell your infertility journey as a memoir?
I chose to write Turning Fertile as a memoir because infertility often happens in silence. During my own journey, I searched for stories that felt honest, vulnerable, and unfiltered — stories that didn’t just describe medical procedures, but the emotional weight behind them. I couldn’t find many.
I realized that if I wanted a book that spoke to the loneliness, the fear, the hope, and the small victories that shape this experience, I would have to write it myself.
Sharing my story became a way to reclaim my voice after years of feeling like my body was being spoken for by test results, scans, and protocols. I wanted women to see themselves in a narrative that doesn’t shy away from the difficult parts, but still finds strength and meaning in them.
How did you decide how much of the medical experience to share?
I included the medical details that shaped my emotional reality — not every number or chart, but the moments that changed how I understood my body.
Repeated IUIs, the unexpected IVF cycle, ovarian hyperstimulation, surgery, and the tubal pregnancy were not just medical events; they were turning points in my life. Each one carried fear, confusion, and hope, and leaving them out would have made the story incomplete.
My goal was to strike a balance: enough detail for readers to understand the physical intensity of infertility treatments, but not so much that the memoir felt like a medical textbook. I wanted readers to feel what I felt — the waiting rooms, the injections, the ultrasounds — without overwhelming them.
Who did you imagine speaking to in the “Dear Reader” passages?
Whenever I wrote “Dear Reader,” I imagined someone sitting across from me who was going through the same emotional storm — someone exhausted, scared, hopeful, and unsure of what tomorrow might bring.
I pictured a woman who had just received a difficult test result, or who was silently grieving a failed cycle, or who was trying to stay strong for her partner while feeling fragile inside.
Those passages were my way of reaching out and saying: You are not alone. I see you. I’ve been where you are.
They became the emotional heartbeat of the book — a conversation between two people who may never meet, but share a deeply human experience.
What do you hope partners, family members, and friends will learn from your experiences?
I hope they learn that infertility is not just a medical condition — it is an emotional landscape that affects every part of a person’s life.
Partners may see the procedures and medications, but they don’t always see the quiet moments of grief, the self‑doubt, or the fear of disappointing the people they love. Family members and friends may offer advice or encouragement, but sometimes what people need most is simply understanding and patience.
I hope my story helps loved ones recognize that support is not about fixing anything — it’s about showing up, listening without judgment, and respecting the emotional complexity of the journey.
If this memoir teaches anything, I hope it teaches compassion.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Amazon
Sonali carried hers like a locked diary. Then, one ordinary morning, her seven-year-old son lifted a violin to his chin, drew a single trembling note into the air — and something she had kept closed for years finally cracked open.
Turning Fertile is the story of the woman behind that note.
A girl whose ambition burned so brightly she stopped hearing her own body. A diagnosis that named years of quiet signs she’d ignored. And then the long, unmapped country of waiting — where time is no longer measured in days, but in heartbeats, held breaths, and prayers whispered in bathroom silence.
This is a book about hope that refuses to die. About the question every woman has asked in the quiet of a waiting room — why not me? — and the slow, hard-won discovery that the question itself is a form of love.
Written as an intimate conversation — Dear Reader, yes, you — it reaches straight to the woman sitting somewhere right now with her own version of that silence, and tells her the one thing she most needs to hear.
This book will not be gentle with the truth. But it will be gentle with you.
Peeling the Layers of an Onion
Crushed Azaleas gathers fragments of an international childhood into an intimate memoir about belonging, family wounds, cultural identity, music, and learning to understand the people who shaped us. The memoir unfolds through self-contained memories rather than a strictly chronological narrative. Why did that structure feel right for your story?
I chose the form of self-contained memories, or vignette-like scenes (as I refer to them in my introduction) because it was the only way to convey the beauty and power of each memory, and also the absence of a unifying theme linking these memories into a coherent whole. Longer chapters like “Roman New Year’s” and “A Monsoon Tale” present somewhat of a contrast because they portray entire worlds where festive and colorful surroundings take center stage.
Music appears throughout the memoir as an important emotional language. What has music allowed you to express or understand that words sometimes cannot?
Any answer to this question will be incomplete because you are asking me to describe a place beyond words. Toward the end of my chapter titled “Seeking a Spiritual Path,” I describe what listening to music does for me. It creates a sanctuary, a space beyond time where love received is perceived as light, a place of mystery, a home for my soul.
What was most difficult about writing honestly about people you loved while also acknowledging the pain within those relationships?
Writing this memoir has been like peeling the layers of an onion. Each layer has brought pain with it, and also a deeper insight. It has been an inward journey. Early on I decided to bare my soul to the reader and to show the beauty and pain inherent in loving relationships. In family, we are at our most loving and most vulnerable. I found resonance and affirmation in reading Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul” where he states “Family is a sometimes comforting, sometimes devastating, house of memory.”
After spending so much of the memoir searching for belonging, where do you believe our deepest sense of home ultimately comes from?
In answer to this question, I would like to quote a concept from Zen practice called “turning one’s light around.” It teaches that one’s true light (wisdom) isn’t waiting at the end of a long journey, it has been always at one’s own doorstep (within) if one simply stops looking outward. I lean towards this inward journey at the end of my first chapter titled Origins: “Maybe the way back home is to find the most intimate part of me, a part stretched thin by memory. A part that is beautiful, mysterious, and fragile, sustained by a love of dreams and origins.”
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
Born in Washington, D.C., and raised across Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy, and India, Moulik grew up amid constant motion—an outsider everywhere, yet belonging nowhere. Told through vivid vignettes, his memories capture the wonder of postwar cities, the rituals of diplomatic life, and the friendships that shaped a wandering childhood.
But beneath the cosmopolitan surface lies a more fragile world: a demanding father whose approval must be earned, a mother struggling with deep depression, and a boy searching for refuge in music, memory, and the cultures around him.
Evocative, intimate, and deeply reflective, Crushed Azaleas explores the quiet complexities of identity, family, and belonging—resonating with anyone who has ever lived between cultures or questioned where “home” truly lies.
Turning Fertile: The hardest roads lead to the most extraordinary arrivals
Sonali Sheetal Appikonda’s Turning Fertile is an intimate memoir about infertility, marriage, and learning to listen to a body she once treated as an obstacle to ambition. The story begins with her seven-year-old son performing at a violin recital, then circles back to her teenage years, when irregular cycles, facial hair, PCOS, and thyroid problems first entered her life. From there, Appikonda traces a demanding path through repeated IUIs, an unplanned IVF cycle, ovarian hyperstimulation, surgery, an excruciating tubal pregnancy, and finally the birth of her son. Framing the memoir with the recital gives the journey a satisfying shape: the child onstage is both the ending readers already know and the reason the story can finally be told.
What makes the book memorable is its attention to the ordinary details surrounding medical ordeals. A pharmacist understands a failed attempt when the husband returns for sanitary pads. A nurse protects Appikonda’s privacy after an uncomfortable scan. A handmade picture bought on a cold evening becomes a symbol of the life she and her husband nearly forgot to enjoy. Her husband is especially important to the book, not as a faultless rescuer but as the person who cooks after surgery, sits through appointments, carries hope when she can’t, and grieves privately when he thinks no one is watching. Their marriage gives the memoir its emotional center, while the costs, invasive procedures, workplace pressures, and family questions show how thoroughly infertility can occupy a couple’s life.
Appikonda writes as though she’s speaking across a table to someone living through a similar experience. The recurring “Dear Reader” passages make that intention explicit, blending memoir with reassurance and plain-language explanations of fertility treatments. Concrete numbers, including twenty-one retrieved eggs, twelve IUI cycles, and four brief days of pregnancy, keep the physical and emotional stakes from becoming abstract. Her repeated images of doors, waiting rooms, seasons, stitches, and bodily “messages” give the book a meditative quality. Some phrases and reflections recur often enough to slow the narrative, and the medical explanations occasionally interrupt a tense scene, but that repetition also mimics the exhausting cycle of hoping, waiting, and beginning again. The glossary at the end reinforces the book’s role as a companion as much as a personal history.
The readers most likely to appreciate Turning Fertile are people navigating infertility, PCOS, assisted reproduction, pregnancy loss, or the strain these experiences can place on a relationship. Their partners and close family members may find it equally valuable because the book shows forms of grief and support that patients don’t always voice. It will also speak to readers drawn to candid accounts of Indian family life, career ambition, migration, medicine, and marriage. Appikonda’s successful pregnancy gives her story its conclusion, but the book’s deeper subject is the life that continues during the waiting: work, love, travel, disappointment, and the gradual recovery of a self larger than any diagnosis.
Pages: 142 | ASIN : B0HFCD2YSW
Six Weeks: A Literary Memoir
William Ledbetter’s Six Weeks is an emotionally stirring memoir about caring for his older sister, Nancy, during the final six weeks of her life. The story begins with a promise he made to become her caretaker, then reaches backward through their family history to show how the two siblings developed their different but complementary ways of handling trouble. Ledbetter is the planner and problem-solver, while Nancy brings patience, faith, and an instinctive concern for other people. Their shared humor keeps the book grounded, even as hospice care, cancer, financial strain, and inherited family wounds move to the foreground.
The memoir’s four sections, “The Promise,” “The Dawn,” “The Afternoon,” and “The Night,” give Nancy’s last days the shape of a single life moving toward evening. Within that framework, Ledbetter shifts between the hospice room and earlier generations, tracing how poverty, institutional cruelty, difficult marriages, illness, and family expectations shaped Nancy and him. An old clock, a cup of rice pudding, a crooked coal-town house, a set of keys, and a carefully assembled funeral binder become more than remembered objects. They carry the history of people who learned to survive through work, thrift, routine, and dry humor.
The author is especially effective when he stays close to ordinary physical details. Hospital corridors, unfinished meals, medication syringes, financial paperwork, fast-food breakfasts, and quiet conversations reveal what caregiving actually feels like from hour to hour. The book treats love as something practical: making calls, keeping records, moving furniture, finding money, telling an old joke, or simply staying awake nearby. Its recurring reflections on inheritance and responsibility give the narrative a steady refrain. The directness feels consistent with Ledbetter’s character and with the promise at the heart of the memoir.
I’d recommend Six Weeks most strongly to readers who appreciate family memoirs centered on caregiving, sibling devotion, and the complicated work of making peace with the past. It’ll also speak to anyone who has managed hospice care or watched a family member’s final illness turn love into a long list of necessary tasks. Readers looking for an honest account of grief shaped by humor, faith, duty, and reconciliation will find plenty to sit with here. The closing letter from Nancy gives the book an intimate final note, confirming that all the organizing, remembering, and showing up was understood as the love it had always been.
Pages: 248 | ASIN : B0H2QHTJN4
Crushed Azaleas
Amal Moulik’s Crushed Azaleas is a memoir built from vivid, self-contained memories of a childhood spent moving among India, Japan, England, and Italy. The son of an Indian diplomat who later worked for the United Nations, Moulik grows up surrounded by travel, education, culture, and material comfort, yet his most persistent concern is the meaning of home. Early in the memoir, he describes himself simply: “I remained an outsider.” That sense of displacement gives the book its emotional continuity. Moulik presents childhood through episodes shaped by the way memory actually works: certain rooms, conversations, humiliations, landscapes, meals, and pieces of music remain sharply illuminated while the years around them recede. He moves easily from a sunrise accompanied by an Indian morning raga to childhood mishaps in Tokyo, school life in London, family holidays in India, and adolescence in Rome. The result is a memoir in which geography matters deeply, but place is always connected to an internal search for belonging.
The book’s strongest quality is Moulik’s ability to preserve a child’s perspective while allowing the older writer to understand what the child couldn’t. That dual vision gives seemingly small incidents surprising emotional weight. A young Amal can marvel at an earthquake, quarrel over a handkerchief, misunderstand religious customs, or lose his breakfast to monkeys, while the adult narrator recognizes the larger questions those memories contain. Humor appears frequently and keeps the memoir intimate, particularly when childhood logic collides with adult expectations. At the same time, darker memories accumulate around his family. His father, Baba, is intellectually formidable, culturally sophisticated, and capable of introducing his son to beauty, but he’s also controlling and intensely concerned with achievement and obedience. His mother, Ma, is loving and spiritually influential, yet increasingly withdrawn as depression overtakes her daily life. Moulik’s treatment of both parents gains force from its specificity. He remembers food, clothing, music, gestures, arguments, and silences, allowing family relationships to emerge through scenes. The title itself comes to represent this mixture of beauty and injury, a pattern that extends through much of the memoir.
As Moulik grows older, Crushed Azaleas broadens into a thoughtful account of identity formation. His experiences with racism at school force him to understand how others interpret the color of his skin, while friendships across cultures and religions encourage him to resist inherited prejudices. His spiritual curiosity develops in much the same way. Hindu prayers associated with his mother, Christian scripture and hymns at school, Catholic Rome, and his own questioning temperament become parts of an evolving personal spirituality. Music provides an equally important language of connection. Indian classical music, opera, church music, and eventually Mahler accompany some of the memoir’s most significant moments, giving Moulik access to emotional territory that his family often struggles to express directly. These themes come together particularly well in the later Rome chapters, where adolescence brings greater independence. He begins challenging his father’s assumptions, defending friendships his father disapproves of, pursuing his own interests, and discovering the city beyond the controlled boundaries of family life. The international setting therefore becomes more than background. It shapes the author’s moral imagination, teaching him to examine nationality, race, faith, loyalty, and prejudice through lived encounters.
The closing sections give the memoir its deepest emotional resonance. The death of Moulik’s friend Marc, who introduced him more fully to Mahler, transforms a youthful friendship into a lifelong meditation on grief, just as the earlier death of Ram, the devoted family servant who cared for him as a child, becomes inseparable from childhood guilt. Moulik writes of Ram, “Writing this now is an act of self-forgiveness.” That sentence also describes much of the memoir’s larger purpose. In “Heart to Heart,” he looks back at the emotional structure of his family with unusual clarity, recognizing his father’s need for control, his mother’s suffering, and his own lifelong search for unconditional love. The epilogue then carries the idea of home beyond childhood, tracing Moulik’s later movement through London, the United States, and Germany before his eventual return to the country of his birth. Crushed Azaleas is therefore both a record of an unusually international upbringing and an examination of how a person turns scattered memories into a coherent understanding of self. Its lasting achievement is the way it holds beauty and pain in the same frame: the music, cities, friendships, humor, and moments of kindness remain as consequential as the loneliness and family wounds. Moulik’s memoir suggests that home can be carried through memory, relationship, art, and the difficult work of understanding the people who shaped us.
Pages: 231 | ASIN : B0GZV79RFH
