It’s been almost forty years since my husband and I spent an entire month driving around Australia in a yellow station wagon with two British friends. But I can still hear them teasing us about how often we used the same three-letter word, over and over and over.

 “Wow!” they would say. “You Americans just can’t stop saying Wow, can you?”

They were right. Rustin and I overused Wow like crazy on that trip and on every other trip we’ve ever taken. It’s just so handy. It says so much, depending on how you say it. And it’s always right there, ready to launch, without all that rummaging around in your brain for a more creative alternative.

And now I know that we English speakers have been saying “Wow!” for more than five hundred years. Wow. Right? I mean, just, WOW.

It was an ESL teacher who casually mentioned this fact to me. I volunteer in her classroom, and I can’t remember who said “Wow!” during class that day. It might have been me. It might have been a reaction to how hard the spelling test words were. Fantasy, reality, and comedy were on the list. Maybe one of the students nailed one of those words on the first try, which would have definitely deserved a good loud Wow.

When I got home, I looked up Wow in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (free with your library card). Sure enough, the OED identifies the earliest written use of the word in 1513, in a translation by Gavin Douglas of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Out on their wanderand spirits, wow! thou cryis.”

The OED describes Wow’s origins as “chiefly Scottish” and defines the word as an “exclamation, variously expressing aversion, surprise or admiration, sorrow or commiseration, or mere asseveration.” Wow. No wonder it’s so useful. (I had to look up asseveration: “solemn affirmation, emphatic assertion, positive declaration.”)

Other OED examples of how the word has been used through the centuries include: “Wow! That’s braw news” (1721) and ‘The girls—wow!’ ‘Beauties, eh?’ ‘Lollypaloozers!’ (1896). “Braw” can be traced to 1565 and means “brave” but also “finely-dressed; splendid, showy.” It too originated in Scotland. “Lollypaloozer” has a similar meaning: “outstandingly good, stylish or pleasing,” according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

Wow, has this turned into quite a winding etymological road. Why am I on it? Where am I going?

I’m… avoiding writing about politics? Yes, definitely.

I’m… searching for what to write about instead? Ditto.

Why not indulge in sharing a few things that have made me say “Wow” lately? The good kind of Wow. How about words that made me say “Wow?” Better yet, how about whole books full of words? Specifically, memoirs?

 A few avid readers I know tell me they don’t read memoirs anymore. Too much narcissism, they say. Too much whining. I get that. But I teach memoir writing, and I believe in the value of memoir. Like journalism, a good memoir is a first draft of history. A personal story can give us details of not just one life but of a time, a place, a culture, a war, a world, from one writer’s unique point of view.

Here are a few memoirs that recently wowed me:

Soil, by Camille Dungy, is subtitled The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, but it is much more than that. It’s a story of life during COVID. Of relocating with her husband and daughter, each of them starting a new chapter in a new place at a time of unprecedented uncertainty and fear, and how creating a garden anchored and taught and physically exhausted them, too, in a way that was sometimes overwhelming but also cathartic.

Strangers: a Memoir of Marriage is a 2026 memoir by Belle Burden, whose twenty-year marriage ended as abruptly as a heart attack. This is not a revenge memoir. Burden, the daughter and granddaughter of pedigreed, old-money New Yorkers, writes with straightforward, dumbfounded honesty. She is self-deprecating and reflective. She just wants to know why it happened and why she didn’t see it coming.

Paper Girl: a Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America is Beth Macy’s latest book, and her most personal. Macy has written several deeply reported nonfiction books, including Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America (2018), which was adapted into a Hulu miniseries. In Paper Girl, she weaves the story of her own rocky childhood with the story of her once-thriving hometown, Urbana, Ohio, and how it was slowly crippled by the loss of one factory after another, triggering an unstoppable downward spiral into poverty, addiction and family breakups.

After Long Silence, The Escape Artist and Outside the Lines, are three riveting memoirs, written over a span of nearly thirty years, by Helen Fremont. The first two are about discovering Fremont’s parents’ long-held secrets. They were not Polish Catholics, as Fremont and her sister had been brought up to believe. They were Jewish Holocaust survivors. Fremont’s third book, published in 2025, is about a clandestine love affair that turned tragic even as her family’s stories were beginning to unravel. I read these three memoirs one after another because I was so taken by Fremont’s honesty and curiosity and her willingness to pose every possible question about how and why her parents had made the unbearably difficult decisions they made. I found myself saying “Wow” again and again.

Remember those ESL spelling words? Fantasy, reality, comedy? You can find them all in a good memoir. Fantasies about what could have been. The reality of what was, and is. And comedy, often dark, which is the best kind. As you read, say “Wow” as often as you must. Call out the wonders of our wandering lives. Our brave and splendid Lollypaloozers.