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Yesterday, on my way to teaching at Penn, I took a small detour to see a Paul Strand exhibit in the Fine Arts building. Then climbed the steps. Took out my phone. And snapped this shot through the window.

Damn, I thought. How lucky am I to be a spring semester adjunct here. This campus. This place. This Creative Writing arm of an English Department USA Today just ranked second in the nation.

Last year, Avery Rome and I joined forces and hosted Michael Sokolove (Drama High) as a special guest. Michael thrilled our students, taught us many things. This year, I'm enormously blessed to be hosting Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction for The New Yorker for 25 years and served as the Executive Editor in Chief of Random House, acquiring books by some of my favorite writers. In his various editorial capacities, Daniel has worked with Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, George Saunders, Charles McGrath, William Trevor, Norman Rush, Katha Pollitt, Colum McCann, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, Salman Rushdie—and many others. He has also written a memoir I loved, My Mistake. I wrote about that here—a blog post that initiated an unexpected conversation.

Daniel will be at the Kelly Writers House on February 24, beginning at noon, when he and I will be talking about the vagaries of the publishing industry. The larger community is welcome. At 1:30, my class will join with Lorene Carey's class to talk in private about My Mistake.

After Daniel was in touch regarding my words about his book, Jeff Hobbs, the wholly compassionate and deep-seeing author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, got in touch about this blog post, in which I spoke of how I was incorporating his book into my teaching plan. Jeff, who lives in California, offered to come visit my class as part of a larger east coast tour. When the dates weren't quite working out as we had hoped, a Skype visit was planned instead.

And so my students will have the opportunity to meet two authors whose books and lives inspire. My students—who are teaching me words like "jawn" and authors like Maira Kalman, teaching me narrative photography and the nuance of talk, the pronunciation of complex cloud forms and the Black Scholes equation. We are learning memoir new, and we are learning it together, and I am beyond delighted that the neon lyric of our conversation will be further radicalized by Daniel and Jeff.

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During the last third of this upcoming semester at Penn my students will be reading The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, by Jeff Hobbs. It will be, for us, the fourth book in a "failure" series designed to provoke conversation and insight into the accidental, the premeditated, the inescapable, the unnecessary, the broken and the fixed—the things that shape all our lives. (The first three books are Little Failure, My Mistake, and Fire Shut Up in My Bones.)

I am keen to talk failure at a time when the world exasperates and disappoints, when the incomprehensible exists beside simple acts of compassion. I am keen to talk about socioeconomics and race, about the immigrant experience, about the irreversibly tragic, about the elusive promises of narrative and books. I am keen to teach the forms of memoir and narrative nonfiction, yes. But the quality of conversation will be of equal significance. Those of us who teach memoir have, I think, a responsibility to broaden the scope and enlarge the talk.

Peace is not a memoir. It is the deeply reported story, as the subtitle tells us, of a brilliant young man who leaves Newark for the Ivy League only to return to one of the nation's most dangerous cities—and stay, teaching some times, dealing drugs, too; a role model and a criminal. Robert Peace became Jeff Hobbs' roommate during freshman year at Yale. He was at his best and seemingly most true when helping others—his single mother living in poverty, his incarcerated father, his family and his friends. He was at his most self-protected and (also) vulnerable when he trafficked in drugs, when he revealed the depths of his anger, when he could find no answer, increasingly, to the question: What are you, Yalie, doing with the rest of your life?

Hobbs did not take the easy way out in telling this story. He might have written memoir only, recreating his impressions of the guy with whom he lived for four Yale years, talking, exclusively, about how it all seemed to him. Instead Hobbs goes all the way back to the beginning, relying on hundreds of hours of interviews to find out who Rob was, to learn the complexities that riddled his heart.

I have written in the margins of almost every page of this book. I have thought about what I hope my students will find as they read. This book should be required reading for everyone. But for now, to entice you, here is Rob, as he was introduced at his high school graduation, in the pages of Hobbs' book:

The headmaster spoke of a boy who woke up at four-thirty six days a week to lifeguard at the pool, who taught himself to swim as a freshman and who was now among the top ten butterflyers in the state, who led quietly and by example, who spent hours each week officially and unofficially working as a math tutor, who would have been valedictorian if a C in freshman art class hadn't knocked his grade point average down to a 3.97—third in the class—and who had grown up with nothing and now had college acceptances to Hopkins, Penn, and Yale

And then here is Rob, now that his days at Yale are over. He has graduated brilliantly (despite a thriving pot business on campus). But he has returned to Newark with no real plans, only a desire to take care of those he loves, and the willingness (or the arrogance) to court danger:

Rob's role as a dealer was already more complicated than the next guy's, because he was now a Yale graduate tagged with all the many stigmata that simple word carried in this neighborhood's underworld. Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League. 

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Daniel Menaker's memoir My Mistake fills me with a desire for confession.

I'll keep this unnaturally brief: Once, aged twenty-five, attempting to strike out on my own as a writing consultant, I misspelled the word "renown" in my proposal. I did not get the job. Once, after the publication of one of those Kephart memoirs, I discovered a mistake or maybe even two; I barely left the house for the next three months, afraid that any perceived movement on my part would lead to the discovery of my crime. Once, dead tired after a transatlantic flight, I picked up the wrong suitcase from the Heathrow carousel (see, even here, I am giving myself an excuse). Once, a few posts ago, on this very blog, I misspelled the last name of Eula Biss. I have been wrong and failed to apologize. I have apologized for mistakes I never made, also typically a mistake, for the gesture rarely silences the accuser. I have forgotten the lady's name at church. I have intuited incorrectly. I have supposed and I have suspected. I have given bad advice. I have been impatient. I fell on the double axle in my last skating competition while floating to a West Side Story number.

My Mistake. Singular. What a brilliant title for a brilliant book by a former fact checker and fiction editor for The New Yorker, former Random House executive editor in chief (he worked with Colum McCann, people), and still and always author. I have dog-earred one thousand of its 234 pages. I have felt a certain bliss just sitting and reading this personal and publishing history, gossip and innuendo. These stories about William Maxwell and Michael Cunningham, Alice Munro and Tina Brown, Anonymous and an MRI nurse with a ripe sense of humor. These explications of New Yorker style. These truths about the a death of a brother, the terror of anxiety, the budding of a new spring.

My Mistake is musical and funny, heartbreaking and consoling. It is insanely readable. It is the sort of thing I would have read aloud, except that I was on the SEPTA Quiet Car while turning many of its pages, and the rules were being strictly enforced.

Let me read out loud, then, on this blog.

On the cult of The New Yorker:

However consciously or un-, The New Yorker, a kind of Jonestown of the literary/journalistic realm, encourages in its employees an ethos of superiority, essentialness, and disregard for fad and fashion. Shawn himself, in his words and demeanor, appears to disavow any self-importance. He wants to be taken as a quiet, modest man who puts the greatness of the institution he runs above all else. This faux-modest version of occupational vanity, in combination with native timidity, keeps very intelligent people in the same, often dead-end, jobs for years, simply because they can say, in this modestly quiet voice, that they work for The New Yorker. Great institutions, so long as they are small, will often (a) eventually take themselves too seriously and (b) try to camouflage their pride with self-effacement.

On panic, a condition with which I am much too intimately familiar:

But for pity's sake don't dismiss this affliction as a chimera or a ruse or a plea for attention or any of the other at least implicitly condemnatory assessments that so many so often make of it. It is all too real, itself and nothing else, and it can be disabling. It came close to disabling me for life. The prospect of lunch with a colleague was torture. Flying was a sentence. Social life an ordeal. It's no wonder that with Valium always on my person and the need to lose myself in something that would take my mind off this dread, I throw my energy into fact-checking so violently. I start psychoanalysis and keep the Valium in the shirt pocket over my heart. This goes on, gradually abating, for many years.

On publishing:

It's my strong impression that most of the really profitable books for most publishers still come from the mid-list—"surprise" big hits bought with small or medium advances, such as that memoir by a self-described racial "mutt" of a junior senator from Chicago. Somehow, by luck or word of mouth, these books navigate around the rocks and reefs upon which most of their fleet—even sturdy vessels—founder. This is an old story but one that media giants have not yet heard, or at least not heeded, or so it seems.

Okay, obviously, I am a fan. Such a fan that I decided, mid-course or maybe sooner, to assign My Mistake to my Penn students in the spring. I can't think of a more complete introduction to life and forgiveness, facts and foibles, literary thinking.

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It was a weekend of many friends and many faces. Talking memoir, then book marketing at the annual Push to Publish conference. Performing a "Blurred Lines" cha-cha with my husband at the gorgeous Goodhart Hall on the Bryn Mawr College campus (we're still standing). Setting off for a perfect Sunday with our son, a day that ended with this glimpse of New York City magic.

In the week ahead I'll be at Montgomery County Community College (Tuesday evening) and at Trinity Center for Urban Life (Thursday evening) to give a talk I've titled "RIVER DREAMS: History, Hope and the Imagination," a keynote on behalf of the Schuylkill River's designation as the 2014 Pennsylvania River of the Year. The events are free and open to the public, and we hope you'll consider joining us. More information can be found here.

I also hope to be able to finish reading (and subsequently blogging) Daniel Menaker's My Mistake, a terrific memoir about the life of this former editor. We make mistakes (I've not yet met a perfect person). Some deeply change the course of our lives, or the lives of others. Some are cheek-blushing, oh-damn foibles from which we learn. Menaker's book (I'm halfway through) yields, above all else, perspective. I look forward to sharing more of it here in days to come.

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