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Destiny’s Consolation Prize, or “Forget Domani”
“Hi,” I said, laughing out loud, “and I’m Virginia Woolf!”
THE WEED-STREWN LOT OF PLOT #5
Memory will not be restricted to the needs of memoir. Memory is not merely unruly, but anarchic.
Passports and Visas
The past became like the creatures in Where the Wild Things Are, baring its terrible fangs, breathing its terrible breath.
M2M Unboxing Day #2
Memoir classes are especially poignant: the nature of the genre requires trust.
The Unruly Past
All pasts are unruly. All pasts resist the tidy, codifying insistence of the page, resist the will of the writer.
Unboxing Day
What, for an author, could be better than unboxing day?
Fools Rush In
I said I always wished I could see uniform trade paperbacks of my work, books that could sit on a shelf and actually look to be related, visibly related, instead straggling like unruly foster children from different homes.
To The Lighthouse
To The Lighthouse is an unequaled, exquisite cocktail of temporality and mortality.
The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s MemoirBryher
She must have been one of the most cosmopolitan women of her era. Maybe any era.
Ready for My Close-Up
Authors who write about film are the very people for whom the term nerdgasm was invented.
Boswell’s London Journal
These pages pulsate with the life of the great city Boswell loved, with youth, and confidence and bouts of doubt and longing.
Olive Kitteridge
Nearly a century apart Sherwood Anderson and Elizabeth Strout created unique modes of storytelling where one character’s deepest heartache or greatest failure is but a footnote in the life of another.
Gene Fowler
Gene Fowler is a raconteur of the Old School, rooted in the rough-and-tumble world of reporters, men who bellied up to the bar, wrapped their ink-stained fingers around the bottle, and told each other mostly true stories.
The Club
The Club, above all, expands on the famous Samuel Johnson quip: “He who is tired of London, is tired of life!” The thump and bustle of 18th century London throbs in these pages.
Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell By David Yaffe
This heartbreaking saga was the life of the woman who made brilliant the bittersweet “Chelsea Morning” when “The sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses….” Is there no justice?
West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan
Each time I return to FSF’s novels, his stories, his letters and essays I am saddened, even touched by the talents he squandered. If only….. hangs over the last dozen years of his short life. In some ways I marvel at what he did accomplish, given the self-destruction everywhere apparent.
Resurrected Women: Jean Rhys
Her characters are the very sorts of women for whom the words louche, ennui and outré were created.
Resurrected Women: Barbara Pym
Perhaps this moment, now, when all our lives are sequestered, made small, compact, cloistered, perhaps this is the moment to return to Barbara Pym: savor your small pleasures.
Jane Eyre
When I first read Jane Eyre, perhaps at age twelve or thirteen, I was intolerable for months. Southern California was very short on wild moors, and I longed for them.
Memoir in a Jar
I opened the back door and walked into a house that was cold, dark, empty, and worst of all, silent. I had just returned from taking my youngest son to university 1300 miles away where he joined his brother. The day your child leaves home is every bit as momentous as...
We Need to Gather: November 9th, 2016
The phone kept pinging in the night, text after text, for the most part, as I glanced at them, numbers without names. I tried to sleep through them. I tried to sleep at all. I didn’t want to wake up to a world where Donald Trump would be the President of the United States.
Also By Laura
