The three memoirs I listened to this month all include a violent crime or the threat of one, and two of the three ruminate on Gavin de Becker’s message in The Gift of Fear: The best way to stay safe is to lean hard into your first intuition of danger. It comes up in Griffin Dunne’s The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir (Penguin Random House Audio, 12 hours and 18 minutes) because the moment that he met his sister Dominique’s  boyfriend, who would become her killer, he was sure the guy was a creep but hid it because he wanted to please his sister, a fledgling actor who appeared in Poltergeist. The book opens with her death and finishes with an account of the trial, often quoting his father Dominick Dunne’s famous articles about it in Vanity Fair. In between, Dunne regales us with one terrific story after another, beginning with his extraordinary childhood growing up among the literati and glitterati of the 1970s, including his aunt and uncle, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and everybody from Frank Sinatra and Truman Capote to the author’s longtime best friend, Carrie Fisher. Accounts of the endless bad luck that plagued his prep school years and his career as an actor and film producer are filled with snappy writing and black humor, and his delivery brings it home. You’ll love him.

You’d have to be made of stone not to feel for Christine Blasey Ford, author and narrator of One Way Back (Macmillan Audio, 8 hours and 44 minutes), who unwittingly invited a reign of terror into her life when she decided it was her civic duty to share, during his Supreme Court confirmation process, the long-ago experience she’d had with Brett Kavanaugh. The misogynistic fury unleashed by her testimony fueled an avalanche of threats and hate mail, along with an almost equally disturbing number of letters from abuse survivors who reached out to tell their own stories and thank her. By the time someone gave her de Becker’s book, she was loath to read it: “I already have the gift of fear a thousand times over,” she writes. The audiobook of her memoir includes clips from her testimony, which even Donald Trump initially termed “credible.” But after Kavanaugh was confirmed in spite of it, the retaliation went into overdrive. Blasey Ford is a surfer; a scientist; a Metallica fan; a make-up-free, hoodie-wearing California mom; and it’s almost your civic duty to let her tell you her story, which at this point has been spun and respun past recognition.

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer doesn’t touch on Gavin de Becker, but she too is a victim of sexual assault (she was raped in college, a fact she first revealed on the floor of the state legislature as part of her fight for reproductive rights). Living in a world of death threats and kidnapping plots, she left her naïvetébehind long ago. But whether it’s to a gun fight or a knife fight, “Big Gretch” always brings a sense of humor (and 24-hour security.) Her upbeat techniques for dealing with adversity are laid out in chapters titled “Don’t Let the Bullies Get You Down,” “Run Toward the Fire,” and “Never Give Up.” True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between(Simon & Schuster Audio, 3 hours and 21 minutes) is upbeat, lively, and full of good advice. Whitmer’s Michigan accent isn’t too different from the parody version Cecily Strong delivered on SNL—and that clip is included here, along with other live audio from her inspiring career.

Marion Winik hosts NPR’s The Weekly Reader podcast.