One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.”

Virginia Grohl managed to raise the Foo Fighters founder and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl—a guy who also happens to be kind and stable and who doesn’t hate her. In a new book, she’s asking other music-industry moms how they did the same thing.

In an oft-told story from Japanese folklore, an enchanted bird marries a man. There are many variations of the tale, but the one CJ Hauser relates in the title essay of her new collection, “The Crane Wife,” involves a creature who plucks her feathers out each night to preserve her marriage, to trick her husband into believing she is human.