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...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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