Ochsner's second collection of eleven short stories, The People I Wanted to Be (2005), is set in Eastern Europe and Russia as well as Ochsner's native Oregon. Like many of the stories in The Necessary Grace to Fall, these stories feature sympathetic, long-suffering characters who suddenly find a kind of spiritual redemption in unlikely circumstances.

Will's Choice: A Suicidal Teen, a Desperate Mother, and a Chronicle of Recovery (2005), by Gail Griffith, is the story of one mother whose seventeen-year-old son tried to commit suicide by overdosing on an antidepressant. The author also discusses her own struggle with depression. The book shows that depression is a treatable illness, since both mother and son recovered from it.

Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), is based on Plath's final college year in New York as a guest editor for a women's magazine. Like...