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...

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...

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 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...

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...

In Sally Ledger’s Introduction to Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Books, she writes, “Redemption through suffering is a significant...

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...

I’m learning to slow down and savor Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. It’s a good story that gallops along and then arrests my attention with...

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