The seafaring-adventure-story has been a foundational American text as early as Herman Melville, and Alice, or The Wild Girl, a debut novel by Michael Robert Liska, presents a cynical and contemporary new take on the genre.

The one-word title of Chloé Caldwell’s new memoir has several different resonances. Caldwell and her husband, B, are trying to conceive via assisted fertility, as the cringe expression goes. But then, surprisingly, the couple splits up mid-book, a trying experience. A third, comedic, spin on the word appears in a series of anecdotes about Caldwell’s retail job in a clothing store whose sign advertises “life-changing pants.” Women come in and try them on. Sometimes it’s a fit and sometimes it isn’t, as with fertility and husbands.