truth or dare; This spring, the memoir continues its reign.

hether giving voice to intimate moments or dramatic cultural shifts, the best memoirs this season combine raw storytelling power with wry humor-and an undaunted sense of authenticity. Roger Angell harks back to a less cynical time in Let Me Finish (Harcourt), a portrait of the artist as a young baseball fan that weaves fond tales of a Prohibition childhood with anecdotes about friends and family-including Angell's stepfather, Charlotte's Web author E. B. White. The daughter of one of American literature's seminal novelists, Janna Malamud Smith breaks her silence in My Father Is a Book (Houghton Mifflin). Culling from Bernard Malamud's letters, journals, and Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction-some of which is startlingly autobiographical-she tenderly fills in the missing pieces of a man who exists as much on the page as he does in her memory. From the trenches of celebrity profiling comes young culture reporter Jancee Dunn's pitch-perfect But Enough About Me . . . A Suburban Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous (HarperCollins). For the madcap Rolling Stone scribe, sharing Velveeta with Dolly Parton and being mistaken for Ben Affleck's girlfriend were just a few fun stops on the way to the realization that everyone-herself included-has a story to tell. No doubt Gay Talese would agree. In his fittingly discursive A Writer's Life (Knopf), the best-selling author intersperses a host of unpublished gems with musings on his mother's Ocean City dress shop, his penchant for hand-stitched suits, and the serendipitous journeys that can both promote and impede creativity.

For some writers, looking back is a painful if necessary enterprise. Or so finds novelist Donald Antrim in his heartrending collection of essays, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), in which he describes the struggles of loving a parent from whom he must protect himself. In the hard-hitting and affectionate Falling Through the Earth (Henry Holt), Danielle Trussoni, whose father was never able to shed his memories of Vietnam, traces how trauma is passed from generation to generation-and earns herself a place on the bookshelf next to Tim O'Brien. For Connecticut housewife Wendy Kann, news of her beloved sister's death in a car crash in Africa prompts a return to the homeland she thought she'd left behind. In Casting with a Fragile Thread (Henry Holt), Kann challenges, with bracing candor, her youthful acceptance of the order of things, from colonial racism to her mother's mercurial nature. As a teenager, actress Catherine Lloyd Burns blamed her mother for her bulimia and a host of other problems, but her hilariously biting It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks (North Point Press) explains how becoming a parent herself unlocked the mysteries of their contentious relationship: "The umbilical cord is cut. Eventually-inevitably-a velvet rope replaces ...