Lelia
Crabwise: The Wisdom of Cancer
In Lauren Groff’s Matrix, there’s a wonderful character called Nest. From her name to her every action, she embodies the healing,...
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Lelia
Nov 7, 20223 min read
Jenn Shapland, Non-linearity and Lunar Consciousness
Having just finished My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland and, on the same day, discovered the journals of Janice Lowry,...
Lelia
Oct 15, 20222 min read
Learning from Clichés: The Trite but True in Astrology
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...
Lelia
Sep 10, 20222 min read
Pisces/12th House/Neptune
It' seems to me that if Neptune is prominent in your chart, or Pisces or the 12th house, you might find these quotes resonant. Or if...
Lelia
Jul 29, 20223 min read
Pym, Woolf and the Small Things in Life
“The position of unmarried women—unless, of course, she is somebody’s mistress, is of no interest whatsoever to the reader of modern...
Lelia
Jun 4, 20223 min read
Writing About Writing: Muriel Spark, Elena Ferrante and Sylvia Plath
It occurs to me that writers write about writing a lot more than I realized. Take The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. According to an article...
Lelia
May 21, 20227 min read
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
Apr 30, 20227 min read
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
Apr 19, 20221 min read
Penelope Fitzgerald & the Exponentially Possible
Barbara Pym wasn’t a Penelope Fitzgerald fan. In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Pym writes, “I read Penelope Fitzgerld’s The Book Shop,...
Lelia
Apr 2, 20224 min read
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
Mar 19, 20222 min read
Trying and Losing in Fitzgerald's The Bookshop
Penelope Fitzgerald writes such quietly brutal books. Florence Green with her naivete and kindness says toward the end of The Bookshop,...
Lelia
Mar 14, 20224 min read
Uranian Freedom & Vita Sackville-West
Early in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, the elderly protagonist Lady Slane says, “Besides, I have considered the eyes of the...
Lelia
Mar 12, 20224 min read
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
Mar 9, 20222 min read
Saturn and Your Great Work
Accomplishment is one of the ways we measure our lives, but in terms of what gives meaning to our lives, accomplishments are often merely...
Lelia
Feb 28, 20224 min read
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, 20226 min read
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, 20222 min read
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
Feb 2, 20224 min read
Good Behavior + Beauty Norms
I finished Good Behavior which I read without great relish. I mostly cringed and held my breath. Molly Keane is merciless in presenting...
Lelia
Jan 24, 20227 min read
"Nightbitch" & Wildness: A Descent to Soul
Nightbitch has created a tangled skein of ideas in my head and I’m not sure I’ll unravel it. You know how Austin Kleon does mind maps? I...
Lelia
Jan 16, 20223 min read
Eudora Welty, Peter Schjeldahl + Bill Plotkin
In The Optimist’s Daughter, the dark forces in the novel are Fay and her family, people “who never know the meaning of what has happened...
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