Biography | Bright Wings Wellnes

Lelia

Book Review: Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

I can’t say I enjoyed this book. Before reading it and after reading it, I had the impression of someone who’d co-opted her life...

Lelia

Book Review: Tom Nolan's Ross Macdonald: A Biography

“What the reader hopes most to see in a biography is the work of the intelligent scholar who also feels an affinity for his subject.” -...

Lelia

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

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

Imagining 'Vague Days' Clearer through Writing*

I’m experiencing a concatenation of ideas about writing, self-understanding and self-actualization. Joan Didion started it. After her...

Lelia

My Best-of Book List for 2021

I like year-end best-of lists. Reading others’ lists is a fun way to learn about things I’ve missed. And thinking about my own best-of...

Lelia

Alter Ego as Creative Muse

To my delight, I fell down a Maxine Hong Kingston rabbit hole and discovered this gem from an interview in The Guardian. Describing a...

Lelia

Edith Wharton + Principles of Creativity

Reading Edith Wharton, the biography by Hermione Lee, I’m becoming aware of why I never liked to read Edth Wharton’s novels, which are...

Lelia

Memoir and the Moon

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...

Lelia

Falling in Love with Penelope Fitzgerald

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

Lelia

Edith Wharton's Gardening Life

“I am intrigued by writers who garden and by gardeners who write. The pen and the trowel are not interchangeable, but seem often linked.”...