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

There’s a great passage in Manifesto: On Never Giving Up where Bernardine Evaristo declares “In spite of what my father endured, he never...

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...

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...

I finished Good Behavior which I read without great relish. I mostly cringed and held my breath. Molly Keane is merciless in presenting...

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...

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...

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’m trying to reread John O'Donohu's Anam Cara, and can’t stomach the pollyanna sunshine spiritual message. O’Donohue writes, “Light is...

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

In an interview in The Guardian, Maxine Hong Kingston describes a male alter ego from her memoir I Love a Broad Margin to My Life....

In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty says her short story"Livvie" is “about youth and old age: the death of an old, proud, possessive...

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...

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...

My reading is taking on an unintentional theme. Several of the books I’ve recently picked up are by women or about women who’ve had to...

As I read through Crones Don’t Whine by Jean Shinoda Bolen, I found myself dismissing it as fluff. It seemed to be just a collection of...

Last House by MFK Fisher is good and sad. In many of the later essays, she’s angry at the aging process which for her was exacerbated by...

“They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of...

I’ve been thinking about Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal as a way to pay attention and engage with my imaginarium but it occurred to me...

I just finished Then Again by Diane Keaton and loved it. One of my favorite parts is Keaton’s assessment of some of the documentary films...