The end of 2021 is upon us, signaling "good riddance" to another difficult year and hope that 2022 is an improvement. This month's nonfiction provides for reflection as well as inspiration for better days to come.

Kicking things off are a pair of celebrities. In Garbo, film critic Robert Gottlieb revisits the life and career of the most enigmatic star from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Fast forward a few decades and we arrive at the memoir Apparently There Were Complaints by Cagney & Lacey star Sharon Gless, who candidly looks back on her career and battle with alcoholism. In Mothers, Fathers, and Others, Siri Hustvedt merges essay with memoir with a focus on influential women in her family and in literature; meanwhile, in her debut Sea State, Tabitha Lasley joins the men working on an oil rig off the coast of Scotland to understand how men behave when women are (largely) not around.

If it's inspiration you seek, look no further than Call Us What We Carry, presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman's first full-length poetry collection. Catherine Price wants us to get over the "always on" culture we live in and embrace The Power of Fun, at work and at home; along similar lines, Eve Rodsky (Fair Play) insists that carving out space to Find Your Unicorn Space is not a luxury but integral to our well-being. And in Unfollow Your Passion, Terri Trespicio gives readers the tools to consider that there's more than one way to find meaning in your life.

The pandemic has, and will continue to change life as we know it. In The Myth of Closure, Pauline Boss identifies the lingering despair many of us experience as "ambiguous loss" and provides guidance on how to cope with it. Perhaps nothing has been upended by the pandemic as much as our work lives, and Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen discuss radical new definitions of work in Out of Office.

For current events, there's Profit and Punishment, in which Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Messenger exposes how the poor are criminalized in America through modern day debtors' prisons; and Sarah Ransome shares her trauma about sexual abuse and Jeffrey Epstein in the hopes of empowering women to change minds and lives in Silenced No More. Historically minded readers will want to dig into: A Killer By Design, where Ann Wolbert Burgess's work with sexual assault victims in the 1970s influenced the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit to better identify serial criminals; The Bright Ages, a new history of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry; and The Churchill Sisters, Rachel Trethewey's biography of the daughters of Winston and Clementine Churchill.

Finally, if you (literally) want to get your house in order, try Life in Jeneral with Jen Robin for tips of physical (and mental) decluttering. If perfect and tidy is just not your thing, then Rachelle Crawford and Messy Minimalism is a realistic, judgment-free zone to organize on your own terms. But if you've got cabin fever and want to get away from it all, then J.J. Eggers and Cabin Tripping – with more than 80 rentable cabins from the Cascades to farthest reaches of the planet – is just the ticket.

~posted by Frank