10 New Books You Should Read in March

That month of betwixt and between, we march into March yearning for spring, fortified with books across genres to steady our impatience. Among the most exciting new releases this month are candid celebrity memoirs from a sitcom star and a 1980s East Village impresario; novels that explore outsider perspectives; and a father-son true story that speaks to a powerful if often cryptic bond.

Here comes the sun, plus 10 March titles you don’t want to miss. 

Actor Christina Applegate’s candor and intelligence thread throughout her memoir, from a hippie-style Laurel Canyon childhood and a starry-eyed adolescence among Hollywood legends to roles in Married . . . with Children and Anchorman and her diagnosis and experience living with multiple sclerosis. Applegate evokes the hijinks of fame—there are more celebrity cameos here than in a Josh Safdie film—as well as her journey through chronic illness. “It has afforded me time and space to look back on my life,” she writes. “I have started to make a little sense of it, to understand what happened, see patterns, discover meaning.” 

A pioneer of the hip-hop revolution, Fred Braithwaite, a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy, recounts his odyssey from churchgoing Brooklyn kid to teenaged music aficionado (his first concert was Sly and the Family Stone) to the forefront of New York’s ’80s avant-garde scene, when musicians, artists, and fashionistas ruled the East Village, mingling with the likes of Blondie, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Grace Jones, Public Enemy, and Keith Haring. In this textured testament to a time and place, Freddy conjures club crazes and drug deals, business ventures and wannabe stars: “Sh-t was popping. You could feel it in the air.”

The author of A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind reimagines the Greek myth of Medea as a passion play, rife with domestic…