I’d enjoyed Caroline Moorehead’s biography of Martha Gellhorn, but this book fell short, primarily because of the excessively detailed...

In Lauren Groff’s Matrix, there’s a wonderful character called Nest. From her name to her every action, she embodies the healing,...

“ A Worn Path ” is one of Eudora Welty’s most powerful short stories, and if you've read it, you know the epic journey Phoenix Jackson...

Having just had a thunderbolt knock me out of my routine and off my comfortable perch, I’ve been thinking about Uranus, the Lord of...

In one of Steven Forrest’s books, he mentions that every astrological sign could be reduced to a few clichés. That cliché might be a...

Great Story Coaching * outlines the 3 ways we tend to narrate our lives to ourselves. The victim story (similar to Parul Sehgal’s...

About halfway through My Lives by Edmund White, I expected to give it a two-star rating. White spends so much time narrating his abject...

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...

Early in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent , the elderly protagonist Lady Slane says, “Besides, I have considered the eyes of the...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...