What happens when the fantasy of getting everything you want collides with cold, hard reality? Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility attempts to answer that question by plotting the love lives of two young women: the cool-headed, pragmatic Elinor Dashwood, and her feverishly emotional younger sister, Marianne. Together, the pair embody the novel’s titular struggle: of practicality versus passion, decorum versus desire, the head versus the heart (or the hormones). More recently, a pair of memoirs released in the US has made it clear that Austen’s age-old conflict is still with us.

On the sense side, there is Rob Henderson’s Troubled: the story of the author’s turbulent childhood in America’s foster care system. Removed from a drug-addicted, criminally neglectful mother, Henderson ultimately escapes the delinquency to which many of his peers succumb, to become a highly educated member of the media class. On the sensibility side, there is Molly Roden Winter’s More — in which the author, a middle-aged writer and musician who lives in upscale Brooklyn, ruminates about the ups and downs (and ins and outs) of her open marriage.