Great Story Coaching* outlines the 3 ways we tend to narrate our lives to ourselves. The victim story (similar to Parul Sehgal’s “trauma...

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...

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...

Early in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, the elderly protagonist Lady Slane says, “Besides, I have considered the eyes of the...

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...

Accomplishment is one of the ways we measure our lives, but in terms of what gives meaning to our lives, accomplishments are often merely...

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...

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...

I’ve never been big on making New Year’s Resolutions. In fact, the idea used to annoy me deeply back when I worked out at a gym and...

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about Indigenous Americans’ Original Instructions. “These are not ‘instructions’ like...

I’m entranced by Eudora Welty right now. Reading her short story "Livvie," I’m awed by how much Welty does in just ten pages. In One...

Having read Angela’s Ashes and The Liar’s Club in quick succession, I was beginning to think that the only enjoyable memoirs overflow...

I used to pay a lot of attention to the first lines in books. I had a notebook where I wrote them down and classified them according to...

Ooph.I was relishing Mary Karr’s delicious language, but didn’t realize that this line I so admired - “Maybe it's wrong to blame the...

Penelope Fitzgerald always wanted her children to be well-educated, to study foreign languages, to be employable. In her biography of...

And the most disappointing thing about the book is the way Liz Gilbert seems to suggest that in finding Felipe she’s completed her...

Soul Vows is my favorite of Janet Conner’s books. I have gone through it twice and have twice crafted my own set of vows. I think that’s...

Brené Brown’s natal chart (available at Astro Databank) provides a deeper understanding of the 12th house - that hidden house where...

My nest is empty and I’m grasping like a drowning person at anything that will tether me to a sense of stability and meaningful purpose....

Artbitrary Stupid Goal is excellent. I bought it having seen that it's one of Austin Kleon's book club picks and I devoured it, both...