The best books with ways to fit in in America

Before David Adjmi became an acclaimed playwright, he was contending with his complicated upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, the child of Syrian Jewish parents, being schooled in a Yeshiva, and trying to come to terms with being gay. Adjmi writes with incredible candor about feeling like a perpetual outsider, including—or especially—within his own family. The title borrows its name from a pejorative term for gays that his family would often use to their great amusement and Adjmi’s mortification. Bonus viewing: Marie Antoinette, The Evildoers, Stunning, Stereophonic, or any number of his plays, where you will be able see how and where nonfiction is transmuted into theatre.

As with all things Michael Jackson, everything is complicated. Mira Jacob, who is the American-born daughter of East Indian parents, and who is now married to a Jewish man, begins her graphic memoir with her dilemma over her six-year-old son’s obsession with the pop star. So launches a mother’s struggle to understand and explain, both to self and son and reader, the role that skin color has played in her American life—in fact the nuances between the varying degrees of pigmentation—as well as ethnicity, gender, race, religion. In a world where physical appearance has been paramount for our author, it’s fitting that this story is told through pictures. 

Nothing is more American than making war in other countries, and Phil Klay’s collection of essays investigates that line between those Americans who fight in our current wars and those who get to stay home and eventually forget that there’s even a war taking place somewhere. Klay knows about what he writes. He’s a former marine who was stationed in Iraq, and while not seeing combat himself, he did see firsthand the complex relationship between occupied and occupier. Upon his return home, he was plunged into an even more surreal place: a country that had long since stopped paying attention. Bonus reading: Klay’s National Book Award-winning short story collection, Redeployment, where you can see how fiction becomes transmuted into nonfiction and vice versa.

Early on in this collection is an essay that encapsulated for me the often unseen internal struggle of attempting to assimilate into the United States. A young Porochista makes an excursion to the Los Angeles Zoo with her parents, and to her great horror she is taken on a camel ride that she fears will publicly expose her for who she is: an Iranian who has been masquerading as an American. Constructing the mask is only one part of the challenge, but keeping it on might be even harder, and this collection can be read as a primer on the impact on the individual of two nations that have been at odds for the last forty years. 

If you’ve never thought it possible to write about imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay with humor. Alex Gilvarry upends this misconception. This is billed as a “memoir,” but it’s really a madcap novel about a high-fashioned Filipino-born young man who happens to be living in New York City at the wrong moment in history, and who finds out the hard way that the American dream can turn into a nightmare at any moment. “How did I end up in No Man’s Land?” our hero wonders, joining a long list who have asked that question.