Lelia
Jenn Shapland, Non-linearity and Lunar Consciousness
Having just finished My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland and, on the same day, discovered the journals of Janice Lowry,...
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Lelia
- Oct 15
- 2 min
Learning from Clichés: The Trite but True in Astrology
In one of Steven Forrest’s books, he mentions that every astrological sign could be reduced to a few clichés. That cliché might be a...
Lelia
- Sep 10
- 2 min
Pisces/12th House/Neptune
It' seems to me that if Neptune is prominent in your chart, or Pisces or the 12th house, you might find these quotes resonant. Or if...
Lelia
- Jul 29
- 3 min
Pym, Woolf and the Small Things in Life
“The position of unmarried women—unless, of course, she is somebody’s mistress, is of no interest whatsoever to the reader of modern...
Lelia
- Jun 4
- 3 min
Writing About Writing: Muriel Spark, Elena Ferrante and Sylvia Plath
It occurs to me that writers write about writing a lot more than I realized. Take The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. According to an article...
Lelia
- May 21
- 7 min
Gibbons, Gornick, Hardy, Bauby and Living Your Great Story
Great Story Coaching* outlines the 3 ways we tend to narrate our lives to ourselves. The victim story (similar to Parul Sehgal’s “trauma...
Lelia
- Apr 30
- 7 min
Edmund White, Memoir & Astro Reading
About halfway through reading My Lives by Edmund White, I expected to give it a two-star rating. White spends so much time narrating his...
Lelia
- Apr 19
- 1 min
Penelope Fitzgerald & the Exponentially Possible
Barbara Pym wasn’t a Penelope Fitzgerald fan. In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Pym writes, “I read Penelope Fitzgerld’s The Book Shop,...
Lelia
- Apr 2
- 4 min
Megan Marshall and the Art of Biography
As a biographer Megan Marshall plays very close to the vest. She doles out her subject in single words or phrases, holds stories out of...
Lelia
- Mar 19
- 2 min
Trying and Losing in Fitzgerald's The Bookshop
Penelope Fitzgerald writes such quietly brutal books. Florence Green with her naivete and kindness says toward the end of The Bookshop,...
Lelia
- Mar 14
- 4 min
Uranian Freedom & Vita Sackville-West
Early in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, the elderly protagonist Lady Slane says, “Besides, I have considered the eyes of the...
Lelia
- Mar 12
- 4 min
Desire in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde uses the erotic, or what Mary Karr might call the carnal, to deeply embed herself in her...
Lelia
- Mar 9
- 2 min
Saturn and Your Great Work
Accomplishment is one of the ways we measure our lives, but in terms of what gives meaning to our lives, accomplishments are often merely...
Lelia
- Feb 28
- 4 min
Bernardine Evaristo, Elaine Dundy, Patti Smith & Resilience
There’s a great passage in Manifesto: On Never Giving Up where Bernardine Evaristo declares “In spite of what my father endured, he never...
Lelia
- Feb 18
- 6 min
An Imaginary Astrology Reading for Joyce Carol Oates: Part I
Imagine that Joyce Carol Oates*—who does not seem the type to sit with an astrologer, but let’s pretend—came to see me for a New Year’s...
Lelia
- Feb 9
- 2 min
Barbara Pym's Full and Quiet Life
A Very Private Eye, Barbara Pym’s autobiography in diaries and letters, is lovely in just the way Barbara Pym’s novels are lovely: quiet...
Lelia
- Feb 2
- 4 min
Good Behavior + Beauty Norms
I finished Good Behavior which I read without great relish. I mostly cringed and held my breath. Molly Keane is merciless in presenting...
Lelia
- Jan 24
- 7 min
"Nightbitch" & Wildness: A Descent to Soul
Nightbitch has created a tangled skein of ideas in my head and I’m not sure I’ll unravel it. You know how Austin Kleon does mind maps? I...
Lelia
- Jan 16
- 3 min
Eudora Welty, Peter Schjeldahl + Bill Plotkin
In The Optimist’s Daughter, the dark forces in the novel are Fay and her family, people “who never know the meaning of what has happened...
Lelia
- Jan 11
- 10 min
Jane Austen, Joan Didion & Self-respect
Don’t you think Persuasion the best Jane Austen novel ever? It’s by far my favorite. That’s kind of a joke because most characters in...