That’s the premise of Lionel Shriver’s new novel, Big Brother. A touchy topic for our ever-widening times? Oh yeah — and meant to be.

“We’ve lost our innocence about food,” the fit-looking Shriver told me over tea and biscotti at Washington’s Dupont Circle Hotel on June 11. “What we use food for today has little to do with our actual needs.”

In Big Brother, Pandora Halfdanarson (the name could use some slimming itself) invites her jazz-musician brother, Edison Appaloosa (ditto), to stay with her family. The end result is an unexpected disaster.

The novel’s genesis came from her own brother’s death in 2009, at age 55, from complications of morbid obesity. (At 5-foot-7, Greg Shriver weighed almost 400 pounds.) “It’s much easier to stay trim than it is to lose weight,” says Shriver. “And shedding pounds gets harder as you age.”

The author does not hate food, as the press in her adoptive England has reported. “That’s an obtuse interpretation of a book that celebrates food,” she says. “Food is like sex: It doesn’t last very long, and there’s only so good it can get. Food often stands for love in our lore, but it isn’t the love itself.”

Shriver believes that we “too frequently turn to food to feed appetites that food can’t satisfy, which is why in our country people gain weight back — they still aren’t satisfied, and they often don’t know why.”

That may be why, she muses, fat is now seen as a character flaw.

Having loved her brother through all his stages and sizes, Shriver sees obesity as a health problem that demands understanding: “Someone of Edison Appaloosa’s size can be an assault on your personal and psychic space. But compassion is a deliberate decision. We should regard homeless people as human beings, not obstacles — and we should see fat people the same way.”

Shriver’s books are known for pushing hot buttons. Her disturbing 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, features a mother who must confront the aftermath of a school shooting perpetrated by her difficult son. The book was made into an equally disturbing film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly in 2011.

Indeed, the intense author seems most at home with things that put us on edge. “For me,” she says, nibbling a biscotti, “the danger is getting too comfortable. You’re meant to be hungry.”
–

The Original 1982 imagines what might have been if its protagonist, a singer-songwriter-waitress named Lisa, had decided not to terminate an inconvenient pregnancy 31 years ago.

Lori Carson, the former lead singer of ’90s experimental band The Golden Palominos, hooks you with nostalgic references to bygone music venues like Folk City, the West Village club that launched the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins and so many others in the early ’60s. But she keeps you reading to find out how Lisa will resolve her on-again, off-again love affair with a famous musician named Gabriel Luna.

If Lisa resembles Lori — a gifted composer who wrote the folk-rock soundtracks for the movies Strange Days (1995) and Stealing Beauty (1996) — the resemblance is purely intentional. And if Gabriel seems like a dead ringer for actor/musician Rubén Blades, well, that too is drawn from Carson’s real life.

Lisa misses Gabriel, but she yearns even more achingly for the child they almost had together. In Carson’s imaginary scenario, that child, Minnow, grows up to experience teen dilemmas so anguished (an absentee father, a sexual-orientation crisis) you may feel like you’re reading your daughter’s diary. By the time Carson’s characters reach 2010, both Lisa and Gabriel have moved on, but they’ll never forget their bond.

The second novel in which a midlife woman travels back in time is The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer. Unlike Lisa’s, Greta’s time-trippin’ ain’t voluntary: It’s triggered by the electro-convulsive therapy she endures for depression. Greta is transported back to 1918, 1941, and 1995. In each of those alternative lives, she discovers that she has the ability to choose actions that will affect her other selves.

I don’t want to give away too much of Greta’s story, so you’ll have to take it on faith that The Impossible Lives superbly explores some fairly heady issues: history repeating itself, the human capacity for sorrow, our evolving notions of selfhood. Look at it this way: How many novelists can compare the flu epidemic of 1918 and the AIDS epidemic of the late 20th century without indulging in hyperbole?

Which era would you time-travel to visit?

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The pair wrote a trio of thrillers together, starting with Miracle on the 17th Green (1995). De Jonge got a coauthor credit on all three covers but “wanted to do something of my own.” His first mystery novel featuring Detective Darlene O’Hara, Shadows Still Remain, came out in 2009; his latest, Buried on Avenue B, appeared in hardback last year and will be out in paperback in July.

Driving the plot of Buried on Avenue B is the (regrettably nonfictional) plague of elder scams. “My father was a victim of one,” De Jonge reveals. “He was starting to suffer from dementia and wound up giving tens of thousands of dollars to a scammer. They lure you in with false promises of prizes you’ve ‘won.’ Then, once you respond, they keep coming back at you. There’s an element of intimidation in it, too.”

The author’s older characters range from a detective in his 50s to a scam victim’s love interest in her 90s. All of them are quirky individuals who defy stereotypes of age. “My grandfather was a tough guy,” De Jonge recalls. “There’s some of him in one of my characters, Bunny ‘Schoolboy’ Levin. And my parents had a condo in Longboat Key, so I’ve crafted these characters based on 20 years of annual trips. I’m definitely trying to counter those who have a condescending view of people who are aging.”

That enlightened outlook also translates into compelling story lines. We want to know all we can about the borderline-alcoholic O’Hara, Levin’s suave friend Sol Klinger, and Levin himself specifically because de Jonge hints their time on Earth may be limited. Upon learning that Klinger gets a colonoscopy and a new Lexus every three years, for example, O’Hara fires back, “I hope you’re good for half a dozen more … of each.”

Do you have a favorite older character? (Uh, fictional character, that is…)

I know, I know: Where’s the AARP angle?

Well, afterward I was approached by a friendly blonde who introduced herself as “Cindy, Class of 1982.” That made her 52, by my reckoning. We started talking books, naturally enough, and it turns out that Cynthia Copeland, as she is known professionally, has written 40 of the things, including Really Important Stuff My Kids Have Taught Me and The Diaper Diaries: The Real Poop on a New Mom’s First Year.

Both sound like fun, parent-friendly titles with a whimsical twist. But there’s nothing childish about Copeland’s latest, Good Riddance: An Illustrated Memoir of Divorce. In it Copeland details her anguish of a decade ago, when T.J., her husband of 18 years, told Cynthia he loved another woman and wanted a divorce. The breakup would leave their three children — a boy, 8, and two girls, 12 and 14 — caught in the middle of two households.

Join the discussion: What’s Everyone Reading?

As a woman who had viewed herself as a “supermom,” this was devastating. Yet the trauma helped Copeland develop as an artist. She had begun experimenting with illustration as far back as the 1980s, yet Copeland found Good Riddance particularly challenging “because women readers are just discovering graphic novels.” So she resolved to shun the “comic book” look. Instead she created pages that feel “open and inviting, with loose illustrations and very few severe borders.”

I was struck by a page on which Copeland sends her youngest off for his first overnight in the home of T.J. and his new wife. The author-artist uses just a few words and images to convey an entire world of maternal despair. Copeland and other “graphic memoirists” have me convinced that illustrated books — unlike Trix^® — aren’t just for kids anymore.

(click image to enlarge)

Now … what are the odds Smith invites me back next year to moderate “Empowering Older People through Stories”?

Do you have a favorite graphic novel?

Midrash, or the rabbinical interpretation of Old Testament writings, repeats certain phrases and scenes as a way to help the devout learn sacred texts. The technique may help explain why Maya Angelou seems to be repeating herself throughout her new memoir, Mom & Me & Mom.

Before you unleash your outraged cries, I mean to say only that we’ve met these Moms before: One is Angelou’s fascinating and complicated mother, Vivian “Lady” Baxter, a figure well known to readers of her searing 1969 memoir, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. The other is Angelou’s devout and iron-willed grandmother, Annie Johnson Henderson, who was forced to raise 5-year-old Maya and her 4-year-old brother, Bailey, when Lady dumped them on her doorstep in 1931.

As Caged Bird made so unsentimentally clear, Lady abandoned her children only to reappear in their lives years later. Now, eight decades on, Angelou is clearly still processing the trauma of those early events.

This dynamic gives Mom & Me & Mom a wrenching if familiar feel. In the course of a long life (she turned 85 last month) Angelou has assembled many fragments of her past, and we watch in awe as she fits them into a coherent whole. While some scenes are newly rendered — notably a harrowing passage in which a thirtysomething Maya is beaten, thrown into the trunk of her “boyfriend’s” car, and driven around St. Louis until being rescued by Lady — others will be recognizable to Caged Bird fans.

Don’t get me wrong: The sentiments are fresh and raw. The prose is spare and lean. Indeed, readers accustomed to the lush voice of Maya Angelou the poet will find its stark inverse here: a streamlined narrative that builds feeling through fact.

The reason it works is because this time Angelou’s telling her story from its end. Her final words to Lady will send you running for your phone — or fleeing it in terror — this Mother’s Day:

“I’ve been told some people need to be given permission to leave. I don’t know if you are waiting, but I can say you may have done all you came here to do… You were a terrible mother of young children, but there has never been anyone greater than you as the mother of a young adult.”

As Mother’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking about the most powerful gift my mother ever gave me: my love of reading.

Not just any reading, mind you. When it became clear that 8-year-old finicky reader Bethanne Kelly was bored to death by age-appropriate bedtime tales, 35-year-old Julia Kelly quickly “thought outside the book”: She dug out her old college literature texts and started reading me the poetry, short stories and essays they contained.

That sounds sweet, doesn’t it? Sure — until you hear some of the titles Mrs. Kelly gleefully read her 3rd-grade daughter at bedtime:

“The Masque of the Red Death,” where costumed partygoers are felled by a mysterious plague.

“The Tell-Tale Heart,” where the murderer of an old man buries the dismembered body beneath the floor of his bedroom.

“The Cask of Amontillado,” where a dude gets buried alive.

I wasn’t a macabre kid — I swear! — but I loved the musicality of Poe’s prose. And the gift was less in what my mother read than in her willingness to stop feeding me those predictable Newberry- and Caldecott-stamped paperbacks (though I had plenty of those, too).

That sort of open mind and heart are precisely what I love about the book I’m recommending this week.

What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gift That Mattered Most, edited by novelist Elizabeth Benedict, features fond-but-wise recollections by some high-candlepower daughters: Joyce Carol Oates, Roxana Robinson, Marge Piercy, Rita Dove — you get the picture. These essays are not fluff pieces. (Not a chocolate box or silk scarf in sight, I’m happy to report.) Instead they’re deeply considered, deeply felt writings on identity and relationships.

Some of the gifts received were objects: a gold dress; a bouquet of bat mitzvah flowers; a cake pan. Others were experiences: a boat trip around Manhattan; a year of sobriety. And still others were life-transforming: a passport.

Every gift described in What My Mother Gave Me will make you think — mostly, if you’re like me, of your own mother and the most cherished thing she passed along to you.

What did your mother give you that you will never forget?

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Why’s that?

Because if every sequin and bugle bead from the Mackie gowns they own were laid end to end, they’d stretch from Burnett’s hometown of San Antonio to Reynold’s of El Paso.

Turns out there’s more grit than glitter in Burnett’s Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story.

Part of the tale takes the form of emails exchanged by the beloved comedienne and her daughter, actor and musician Carrie Hamilton, during Carrie’s 2001 pilgrimage to Carol’s childhood home. Burnett’s parents were alcoholics, and she and her half-sister were raised in poverty by her maternal grandmother. She has shared those details before, but they take on new import as Hamilton searches for her family roots after kicking a multi-year drug habit.

Related: Happy Birthday, Carol Burnett — a look back at how she made us laugh (slideshow)

Hamilton died of lung cancer at age 38 in 2004. It’s hard not to feel frustrated grief for a life cut short as you read her unpublished story, “Sunrise in Memphis,” which Burnett has included here. It’s a fitting tribute to a relationship as resilient as the women involved.

The family of Debbie Reynolds had financial issues too, but there the resemblance to Burnett’s childhood ends. In Unsinkable: A Memoir, “America’s Sweetheart” recounts how close to her parents she managed to stay throughout her famously public romantic upheavals. (For those of you just waking from a 60-year nap, Reynolds’s first husband, Eddie Fisher, left her for Elizabeth Taylor.)

Like Burnett, Reynolds has covered her early years before — specifically, in Debbie: My Life, published in 1988. And like the doughty dreadnought her book title suggests, Unsinkable blasts away at targets she deems deserving of her aim, notably her sleazy third — “and last” — husband, Richard Hamlett. Financial chicanery by the latter forced Reynolds to sell her priceless collection of Hollywood memorabilia in 2011.

After bringing us up to speed on her life since Debbie — including the brief rise and fall of her eponymous Las Vegas hotel — Reynolds delivers the juicy stuff in the second half of Unsinkable, an anecdotal filmography that touches on personal trauma, too: During her curious second marriage to gambling-mad shoe magnate Harry Karl, we learn, Reynolds suffered two stillbirths.

In the end, both women underplay their most hurtful heartaches. There’s a reason I didn’t say “downplay” there: These Texans are too honest to shun the truth, but too tough to let tragedy steal the show.

What would you title your memoir?

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I thought of Beckerman and her book this week as I read several new memoirs that explore — each in its own vivid way — the significance of life, death, and what I’ll call The Aftermath.

Mom’s List: A Mother’s Life Lessons to the Husband and Sons She Left Behind by St. John Greene is an extended eulogy to Englishwoman Kate Greene, the author’s wife, who died of breast cancer in 2010.

The couple already knew trauma well: Their first child, Reef, was diagnosed with cancer at age 2, and their second son, Finn, was born two months prematurely. When the vivacious Kate realized her illness was terminal, she began to jot down simple aspirations for her children: “Look for four-leaf clovers.” “Take them for walks at Priddy Pools [Kate’s favorite beach].” “Always kiss hello and good-bye.” Kate’s list guides and comforts St. John as he stumbles through widowerhood and grief. This sentimental but sincere account was a bestseller in England (titled, of course, Mum’s List).

Journalist Susan Spencer-Wendel spent her final year living with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), a disease that slowly robs its victims of muscle function. Trapped in her body but with her mind still alert, Spencer-Wendel used her right thumb — the last digit she could control — to tap out Until I Say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy.

In it the mother of three children ages 7 to 15 describes her poignant last efforts to travel the world and stay close to her family and community. Ceding control and reconciling oneself to fate were lessons learned all too early in Spencer-Wendel’s life; thanks to her determination, it’s not too late for them to shed light on our own.

A third offering in this strangely flourishing genre — my editor insists on calling it “left-behind lit” — is David Rakoff’s, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. On top of churning out quirky books such as Fraud, Half Empty and Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff worked in radio, TV and film; he died of cancer last year. Like its polymath author, Love, Dishonor defies easy categorization. But it’s safe to say it’s a novel in verse — and a satisfying reminder that words left behind can be reassuringly instructive to those contemplating the years ahead.

What single piece of advice would you share with your loved ones?

To “get things right” in his recently released All You Could Ask For, Greenberg told me, he formed the world’s most homegrown focus group: his wife, his agent’s wife, and their female yoga instructor. But there’s one vignette Greenberg kept hidden from two of the three: “For the bikini-wax scene, I said to my wife, ‘Just give me some adjectives I should be using here.’ ”

How did Greenberg pull it off? (Sorry!) “We like to act like men and women are so different,” he says, “but in macro ways we aren’t. And for those telling details, I knew I could count on my focus group.”

Greenberg is a veteran journalist — he graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School in 1989 — who has always wanted to write fiction. “I’ve written three novels, but this is the only one I can prove is mine; no one else has seen the others!”

He was inspired to craft the story at the heart of All You Could Ask For after watching his wife’s closest friend, Heidi, live with and die from breast cancer. “The way Heidi’s friends rallied around her,” Greenberg told me, “was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

“At Heidi’s funeral,” he continues, “her husband read what sounded like these sincere and tender letters. They turned out to be posts that Heidi’s ‘breast friends forever’ had made to an online forum, and they inspired my novel.”

Greenberg wanted to present “three fully developed characters and make you care about them, even if you didn’t like them. The book is not about cancer. It is not Heidi’s story. It’s about friendship and the ability of friends to see each other through adversity.”

Sounds like something both male and female readers can understand.