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More and more, I am becoming me.

It took me this long to get here.

Fewer and fewer things in this house. A miniature car, bright orange. No more of that corporate work that bound me to this desk from 3 AM, sometimes until 10 PM, sometimes, work that made me less than pleasant (but only sometimes, I think, I hope). Only the books I want to read twice or three times in the house, and the ones I buy now are the ones I want, not the ones I feel an obligation to.

The work I do is the work I want to do. Reading the middle-grade books that carry the grown-up wisdoms. Reading the memoirs that I will teach. Profiling the people and places that inspire me, like Elisabeth Agro, say, who has revolutionized crafts in my city. Talking to other writers in real ways about the real work we hope to do.

I lived decades measuring my life by what I thought of as "real work." I was, I boasted to myself, making the correct sacrifices. I am trying on something new. Living my life as measured by my passions. I don't know how far this will go. But I'd be so mad at me if I didn't try it.

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This coming September, on an old farm in McClure, PA, a group of very-wow writers will be sitting at a big old table in a fabulously idiosyncratic barn talking about Hope Jahren's Lab Girl to kick off Juncture's inaugural memoir workshop.

My thoughts about this near-perfect memoir are here today, in the Chicago Tribune.

There are just four spaces now left in our workshop. If you're interested in the workshop or in the newsletter, please click on this link and let us know.

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When Paul Kalanithi, a rising neurosurgeon, learned his life would be abbreviated just as the most exquisite part was then beginning, he turned to the page to tell his story.

My thoughts on that book are here, in the Chicago Tribune.

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Well, I certainly loved this book and highly recommend it to anyone who feels stuck in a pre-packagedly perfect version of suburbia—or stuck inside the angst that comes from knowing that there is no achievable perfection.

The whole is here, in today's Chicago Tribune.

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I've been working out ideas about home and literature, literature and home for awhile now, and on March 1, accompanied by friends A.S. King, Reiko Rizzuto, and Margo Rabb, my colleagues at Penn, and students past and present, I'll be doing even more thinking about the topic for the Beltran Family Teaching Award event at the Kelly Writers House at Penn.

My newest thinking, in this weekend's Chicago Tribune (Printers Row), with thanks to Jennifer Day, Joyce Hinnefeld, and Debbie Levy, upon whom I seem to first try out my ideas. (Oh, Debbie, you're a gift.)

To read the whole story, go here.

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As a veteran reviewer (veteran = old, in case you were wondering), I still think a lot (every single time) about the responsibilities of critics—particularly when it comes to memoir.

I thought my thoughts out loud this week, in the Chicago Tribune's special edition on memoir. The link to the story is here.

(For my Tribune thoughts on the new Mary-Louise Parker memoir, Dear Mr. You, go here.)

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Oh, I loved this risk-taking, let's think for ourselves, let's not bend to mere chronology memoir by the actress Mary-Louise Parker.

My thoughts about it, in the Chicago Tribune, here.

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Two years ago, the students in my memoir class at Penn were encouraged to read Mary Karr's The Liars' Club—one of those rare chronologically-told life stories that transcends autobiography to become real-live-brimming-with-wisdom memoir. You can't get much more vivid than Karr does with that Club. (I'm also a fan of Lit; both books are featured in Handling the Truth.) And oh, what discussions her words and stories prompt.

I was delighted when the Chicago Tribune invited me to review Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir. The book, which is full of unexpected riffs on a wide range of topics, is especially helpful to those who may be interested in how Karr made, then contemplated, her three life stories. She reports on the writing process, the vetting process, the after glow, and her right to change her mind in subsequent books on the story she lived.

My Tribune review begins like this, below,

When we write about the writing of memoir, we are stuck, up front, with the lexicographer's dilemma: How do we define the word? Is memoir, for example, an autobiographical poem? Is it essay, "new journalism," fiction that feels true, ghost stories, an A-to-Z recounting of me? Is it narcissism, and if it is narcissism, what finally redeems it? Memoir can take many forms. But what, in essence, is it?

In her new book, "The Art of Memoir," Mary Karr — beloved memoirist and Peck professor of literature at Syracuse University — finds herself foiled in her quest for a "Unified Field Theory" for the category. The "first-person coming-of-age story, putatively true" gave the child Karr hope, she writes. Don DeLillo's thought that "a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them" reinforces, for Karr, that "memoir purports to grow more organically from lived experience." A lifetime of reading and writing memoir has persuaded Karr that it is "an art, a made thing." Memoir, for Karr, is many things. Above all else, she suggests, it is a democratic telling open to anyone who has lived.

and can now be found in full here.

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We lost the great Kent Haruf way too soon. I was privileged to review his final book for the Chicago Tribune—privileged to have the excuse to go back and read Haruf interviews and profiles in preparation for the assignment.

Oh, he had so much to say. I wish he were still here, saying.

My full review can be found here.

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It has been a week of many words. A read and review of a very favorite author for the Chicago Tribune. The final page proofing of Love: A Philadelphia Affair, due out in September. The new afterword for the fourth edition of Handling the Truth. Revisions of the talk about home (what we learn about it in the novels we read) for the Moravian Writers' Conference, to be held this very weekend. And then, yesterday, this: the arrival of the proof pages for This Is the Story of You, a mystery set in the aftermath of a Jersey-style storm, due out from Chronicle next spring.

I'm going to leave this particular work until next week—unsure of my ability to read the story right just now. But what I want to say in this moment is this: time is our biggest ally in this writing life. The distance the process—from writing to redrafting to editing to copy editing to proof page reading—gives us from our own work. I needed months between the copy editing of Love and the proofing to see what problems still existed. I needed two years since the publication of Handling to know what else I had to say about memoir (and to be able to say it all in 1,000 words). I needed three weeks to re-read many beloved novels to know what I think about literary home, and then another week of writing and revisions to get the talk in order.

As I have needed time away from Story, which was written more than a year ago, to know if I've written as purely and truly and meaningfully as I could. I won't know, precisely, what is in those pages until I sit with them again. The mystery is a mystery to me. I have one last chance to figure out if it works.

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How I loved this book—for its kindness, for its wisdom, for the way it cracked itself open, quietly. My full review of Bettyville by George Hodgman can be found here, at the Chicago Tribune. It will appear in Printers Row this weekend.

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A few weeks ago, I built tall piles of my many essay collections (old and new) and began to ponder. Rediscovered favorite pieces by Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Ander Monson, Rebecca Solnit, the World War II pilot memoirist Samuel Hynes, Elif Batuman, Megan Stielstra, Stephanie LaCava, Joanne Beard, others. Looked for insights into the empathetic imagination—how it has been managed over time, how essayists, historically, have gotten to the heart of hearts that aren't their own. I read, took notes, looked for patterns, began to write. It was a three-week process that produced just over 1,000 words.

I am blessed that the Chicago Tribune took interest in this piece. I am blessed, too, that I was able to share these thoughts at Bryn Mawr College this past Thursday, in the classroom of the very exquisite Professor Cynthia Reeves.

The essay will appear in this weekend's Printers Row. The online link is here.

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The thing is, I could have written a book about this book. I'd have dedicated a long chapter, at least, to a comparison, side by side, of three particular present-tense scenes in Fuller's first memoir played out against those same three scenes, now recorded with the reflective and rearranging past-tense of this new third memoir, Leaving Before the Rains Come.

Fuller is an exquisite writer. Memories shift.

I wrote what could fit, the full review here.

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In my memoir class at the University of Pennsylvania, we're focusing on failure/mistake memoirs, and what they teach us. To get my own self into a teaching place, I spent considerable time during Christmas and the first weeks of the new year, studying the books that I am teaching—and thinking.

The Chicago Tribune kindly gave me room to put that thinking on its pages.

I'm thrilled to also be able to share that Daniel Menaker, the author of My Mistake and an esteemed editor in his own right, will be visiting Kelly Writers House for a publishers lunch and then my class on February 24th, at Penn.

The Tribune essay can be found here.

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Earlier this week I spoke of Eula Biss's first book, The Balloonists, and how it made me think. This weekend, in the Chicago Tribune, I'm reflecting on Biss's new book, On Immunity, a book that has been generating much press for its artful exploration of the social ramifications of personal health decisions. My review begins like this, below, and continues here.

You read Eula Biss' new book slowly, with care. You are not sure, at first, where it is going. The topic is immunity, also inoculation, also vaccination, epidemics, social responsibility, vampirism and the impossibility of completely knowing. There are episodes of bright, emboldened insight. There are incidents — sometimes still and sometimes cinematic — of personal story. There are playground questions and interviews with scientists, Achilles and Dracula, myths and birth and a child sleeping. There are others, and there is us. There are the invisible airborne germs and the visible, struck down dying.

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Earlier this summer the impeccable Bill Wolfe invited me to write a short piece for his beautiful blog, "Read her Like an Open Book" that focuses on the work of women writers (their methods, their work). I had been thinking a lot about books that matter and the clicking tock, about the world we're in and the role of writers. And so I wrote a quick piece on the topic that began an interesting conversation out there in the virtual world.

A few weeks later urgency was still on my mind, and my dear friends at Chicago Tribune gave me room to expand on the thesis. This time I included books—both fiction and nonfiction—that have lately impressed me as significant.

That piece runs here today.

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I want to love every book I read. I crack the spine eager with hope. I struggled, unfortunately, with Lydia Netzer's new novel, a book that has elsewhere earned raves as well as raised eyebrows.

My review of the book is now live in Printers Row Journal. It begins like this, below, and can be read in its entirety here.

If you are a reader intoxicated by the strange, a reader for whom conceits matter more than characters and song, then Lydia Netzer's "How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky" is the sort of book that may well live up to its billing as a funny valentine. If, on the other hand, you read in search of stories that ultimately transcend ideas, then this second novel by the best-selling author of "Shine Shine Shine" may furrow your brow.

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Readers of this blog know that I take no pleasure from reviewing books that dodn't turn out to be quite my kind of book. I know how hard writing is. I know how big the hopes of writers are. I am the last person in the world who wants to disappoint, or hurt.

But when reviewing for the Chicago Tribune's Printers Row and elsewhere, my first responsibility is to the readers. And so I admit that I was challenged by this new immersion memoir by Rachel Bertsche, despite the fact that I suspect that the author herself is kind and openhearted.

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I was honored to be asked by the Chicago Tribune (Printers Row) to reflect on Maya Angelou and her dazzling career. I re-read and read newly. I watched more than two dozen interviews. And over and again, as I worked on the piece, I watched the great life force that was Maya Angelou read her best poem, "And Still I Rise." I encourage you to listen, too. It will change your day. Put some jazz into your shoes.

My piece begins like this:

She bought her clothes for their colors in secondhand shops — "beautiful reds and oranges, and greens and pinks, and teals and turquoise" — and wore them in happy mismatch. She danced feathers and a few sequins to Alvin Ailey's leopard print G-string — shaking everything she had. She spoke French, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Fanti and easily (mesmerizingly) recited John Donne, William Shakespeare, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes, even Publius Terentius Afer, an African slave born nearly 200 years before Christ.

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This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.

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She worked the Melrose Record Shop selling John Lee Hooker and Charlie Parker; sang her heart out at the Purple Onion; toured Europe as the premier dancer in "Porgy and Bess"; lived in a houseboat commune with "an icthyologist, a musician, a wife, and an inventor"; and once described her life, to a rapt Merv Griffin, as one in which she'd been "obliged to be clever, to dance quickly, to edge-walk."

She brought poetic intimacy to the political; compassion to the margins; fervor to the campaigns of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Barack Obama; and smothered chicken, smoked pork chops and spoon bread to tables wrapped by friends.

and continues here.

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For the Chicago Tribune I reviewed an extraordinary collection of short stories, Immigrant Voices, edited by Achy Obejas and Megan Bayles.

My thoughts are here.

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In today's Chicago Tribune I'm reviewing Mary Coin, the new novel by Marisa Silver. The piece appears in Printers Row, the Tribune's truly comprehensive (and always intriguing) book coverage that can be received digitally for a low annual subscription fee.

I share the first two paragraphs of the review here:

A photograph, Marisa Silver writes at the end of her new novel, is “an alchemy of fact and invention that produces something recognizable as truth. But it is not the truth."

It is as if Silver is writing about her own new novel here—about the melding of history and imagination, probability and conjecture that frames Mary Coin. The story turns around the iconic Depression-era photograph known by most as “Migrant Mother”—that young mother in a roadside tent, those distance-seeking eyes, those two dirty children snuggling away from the scrutinizing thievery of the camera’s lens. “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.” That’s the caption you’ll find if you search for the photo on the Library of Congress site. And then you’ll find this explanation, written by the photographer herself, Dorothea Lange.....

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I had the great privilege of reading Reply to a Letter from Helga by the Icelandic novelist Bergsveinn Birgisson (translated by Philip Roughton) for the Chicago Tribune.

Yesterday the review appeared in the Tribune. I share fragments with you here, with the hope that you will seek out the book and read it for yourself. It moved me deeply.

From my review:

It is a story built of sheep horns, tussocks, gale winds, fishing huts, bone button holders, wolffish skin lampshades, young puffins, half-dried cod and one lovingly smoked corpse of a woman dead too long in a remote stretch of frozen landscape. It is folk tale and philosophy, a farmer's sensibilities and his favorite remembered poems. It is, most of all, elemental.

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I had the privilege of reviewing Enid Shomer's glimmering Twelve Rooms of the Nile for this weekend's edition of Printer's Row (Chicago Tribune).  From the opening of the review:

Enid Shomer makes beautiful sentences; she always has.  As a poet and writer of short fiction she has dazzled, forging unexpected liaisons between found details and arcane history, simple living and extravagant loss.  She knows a lot—about the world, about words.  She forces readers (this one, anyway) to crack the binding on the old two-volume Shorter Oxford.  What does proleptic mean?  How close an alliance can intellect and jackdaw be said to have?  And when is the last time you saw pentimenti used to describe the veins in a keening woman’s temple? 

Shomer keeps you on your toes, I’m saying, and with The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, her first full-length novel, she has given herself the surely unexpected and inevitably complicated task of pairing two nineteen century personalities—Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale—in a shared adventure up the Nile.  History places the two in the same vicinity at the same time, we learn from Shomer’s back-page notes.  History does not make the claim, however, that the despairing author and eventual Angel of the Crimea ever met in that fated year of 1849; if anything, the two merely glimpsed each other in passing.  Shomer is interested in what might have been, and she dedicates well over 400 pages to this intriguing fancy.

Let’s talk about the imagery first.  Let’s choose a word:  magnificent.  This is the Nile, this is Egypt, this is desert sun and camel rhythms, Harem seduction and “spavined mules.”  This is what Enid Shomer does best.  I’m a river person, and have always conceived of my rivers as female, have always called them “she.”  Shomer makes me almost believe in the Nile’s masculinity....

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A few months ago, two books showed up at my house for review for the Chicago Tribune, a paper I've had the privilege of writing for over the course of many years.  Both had August publication dates.  Both were intriguing.  The first was by the actress Molly Ringwald, and I, but of course, had corporate work to do.  "I'll just see what this is about," I told myself, but once I opened When It Happens to You, Ringwald's debut novel in stories, I could not stop reading.  The book contains exceptional writing—chilling, precise, moving.  It tells the story of a marriage through interlocking tales.  It is polished work, considered work, and I said as much in the Tribune. 

This morning I share my first two paragraphs, below.  The rest appears in Printers Row, the weekly book magazine that Elizabeth Taylor launched six months ago.  Filled with reviews, interviews, stories by readers, children's thoughts, trends, this is essential reading for book lovers and can be ordered digitally (by those of us who don't live in Chicago) for just $29/year.  Check out a sample issue here.

Two paragraphs, then, from my Tribune review:

A novel in stories, a good one, is like a well-built house on a breeze-infused day—windows open, doors unlocked.  Stand in the right place, and you’ll feel the stir.  You’ll see surfaces give way to shadows, sunlight pool and recede.  You’ll see that flicker just beyond—in the far room, at the turn of the stairs, back among the orchids in the broad bay window.  The floor is solid.  The walls are plumb.  Little else is absolute.

When It Happens to You, the first book-length fiction by the actress Molly Ringwald, is a well-made house—thoughtfully designed, conscientiously crafted, open to the intrigues of weather.  A fraying marriage stands at its core—a philandering husband, a wounded wife, an angry six-year-old daughter, and a suite of frozen embryos.  The old woman next door, a playmate’s mom, a fallen TV personality, a young violin teacher, and a cross-dressing child will all, somehow, be implicated in the familial mess—or feel the reverberating consequences.  Regret will hang heavy, but it will not cure. 

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It's been a decade or so since Elizabeth Taylor of the Chicago Tribune invited me to review Robb Forman Dew's novel, The Evidence Against Her.  I didn't know Robb at the time, but I quickly grew enamored of her gifts, her craftsmanship.  I didn't, in fact, expect that I ever would know Robb, nor imagined that she'd find the words I'd ultimately write about her novel.  I was wrong, of course.  Robb found my words.  She wrote me a letter.  And soon Robb and I were friends.

In the intervening years, Robb sent books, she sent a tapestry she'd found in an old barn, she sent notes, she sent encouragement, she sent praise of a novel on which I worked.  She sent us—her large coterie of writerly friends—something we might do in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the name and address of a school to which we all might send boxes of brand new, hand-picked books.  Robb proved to be one enormously generous soul, and then things got quiet as she settled into work again, and I waited for what would come next, and next.

I just now finished reading Robb's masterful new novel—its title as clever as the rest of it.  Being Polite to Hitler carries forward, from The Evidence Against Her, a certain Agnes Scofield and her close-knit, famous-in-Washburn, Ohio kin.  It takes us to October of 1953 on through to the early 1960s on the wings of some of the most gracious writing you'll ever find and some of the most seamless historicism I've ever seen in a novel.  No doubt Robb  did her homework for this story—sourcing the telling details of Yankees games and Sputnik, home perm kits and development housing, polio and fashion.  But more importantly, none of it feels heavy or dug in.  It's just life as Agnes Scofield knows it, and what's most important, always, is Agnes and her kin.

I could conceivably quote from every line in this book; I've dogearred the whole, darned, gorgeously packaged volume.  Let me quote, selfishly, from something that struck me as quintessentially Robb—her ability to unpolish a good woman just a bit, so that we can see ourselves (or perhaps our someday selves) within her.  From somewhat late in the book:

People liked or loved you or they didn't, according to their own needs.  Not a single night of the months in Maine had she lain awake agonizing over the possibility that she might accidentally have slighted someone, or that she might have exhibited favoritism to some member of the family as opposed to another.  She knew perfectly well that she was capable of—and had indulged in—a certain spitefulness now and then, and generally she had apologized.  If she happened to slight someone by accident or through ignorance, or just through a failure to rein in her tendency toward bossiness...  Well, she no longer tormented herself about it.  Her newly hardened indifference was unexpected; it was a state of being that she hadn't known existed.

After finishing Being Polite to Hitler, I went back and read my review of The Evidence Against Her.  That review begins like this—words that strike me as still utterly relevant and true.  Read Robb Forman Dew.

Perhaps the only thing more bewildering than gauging one’s own mind is imagining the minds of others—the

3 Comments on Being Polite to Hitler/Robb Forman Dew: Reflections, last added: 2/13/2011

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bermudaonion said, on 2/13/2011 11:51:00 AM

Your lovely words have made me anxious to read this book.

Amy said, on 2/13/2011 11:56:00 AM

It sounds wonderful!

Lilian Nattel said, on 2/13/2011 12:46:00 PM

What a great review. I'm adding her to the list.

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