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...
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Lelia
- Apr 30
- 7 min
Edmund White, Memoir & Astro Reading
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...
Lelia
- Mar 12
- 4 min
Desire in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
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...
Lelia
- Feb 28
- 4 min
Bernardine Evaristo, Elaine Dundy, Patti Smith & Resilience
There’s a great passage in Manifesto: On Never Giving Up where Bernardine Evaristo declares “In spite of what my father endured, he never...
Lelia
- Feb 18
- 6 min
An Imaginary Astrology Reading for Joyce Carol Oates: Part I
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...
Lelia
- Feb 9
- 2 min
Barbara Pym's Full and Quiet Life
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...
Lelia
- Jan 2
- 4 min
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
- Dec 24, 2021
- 2 min
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
- Dec 20, 2021
- 3 min
Eudora Welty + Aries + Guilt
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...
Lelia
- Dec 16, 2021
- 5 min
Memoir, Elderhood & Saturn
Having read Angela’s Ashes and The Liar’s Club in quick succession, I was beginning to think that the only enjoyable memoirs overflow...
Lelia
- Dec 8, 2021
- 3 min
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
- Dec 5, 2021
- 3 min
Dickens, Frank McCourt and Compassion
In Sally Ledger’s Introduction to Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Books, she writes, “Redemption through suffering is a significant...
Lelia
- Dec 4, 2021
- 2 min
Mary Karr, Memoir and the South Node
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...
Lelia
- Dec 1, 2021
- 2 min
Savoring Language
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...
Lelia
- Sep 29, 2021
- 5 min
I Finally Read Eat, Pray, Love
And the most disappointing thing about the book is the way Liz Gilbert seems to suggest that in finding Felipe she’s completed her...