I have a friend named Rachel, who is a Holocaust survivor. Rachel is a short woman, with loosely curled hair, faded to white. Her eyes are brown, and the skin of her cheeks is soft when she kisses me hello. A scent of baby powder always lingers around her. Rachel and I have talked many...

I’ve always considered myself an extrovert. I love travel, people, and I’m an incurable optimist.  I’m generally loud and outspoken and public speaking is a thrilling challenge. As I began to read Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, I wondered whether I would find it truly engaging...

Rosamond Bernier, daughter of an English mother and a Jewish Hungarian father, was raised in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia where Rachmaninoff came to dinner but refused to remove his fur coat. When Philip Johnson plans your wedding, and Aaron Copeland gives you away as Pierre Matisse seats Andy Warhol on the bride’s side, a...

Random House 2011 It’s the punch of the first sentence in Darin Strauss’s memoir, Half a Life, which left me wide-eyed and eager to keep reading: “Half my life ago, I killed a girl.” At eighteen, Strauss was driving his father’s Oldsmobile when his high-school classmate, sixteen-year-old Celine Zilke, “made a crisp turn” on her...

Sarabande Books 2011 My tolerance for excitement is low. So it was with trepidation that I agreed to chaperone my son’s sixth-grade class to an environmental learning center where the capstone of the week was the zip line. Students and chaperones alike braved the ropes course, high in the crisp autumn sky among birch and...

University of Missouri 2011 The first time I read E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” it seduced me. I was in graduate school when a professor assigned it, and the essay brought back scenes from all the years I had once spent at a lake in northern Wisconsin. The same lake my father had...

Grand Central Publishing 2011 My classmate stiffened beneath the warm beam of the spotlight, centered on a curtainless stage in the high school auditorium. Her performance gripped the audience’s attention. She was not alone, however. He leaned ever closer, puckering in anticipation. She was nervous but prepared, as she had announced the previous day, “I’ve...

St. Martins Press 2010 To earn cash, Thoreau famously hoed a two-and-a-half-acre field one summer—seven hours a day “making the earth say beans instead of grass”—but thereafter planted only a garden. As he tartly observed in Walden, “The farmer is endeavouring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the...

In the following Q&A, contributor J. Luise Eberhardy and author Jane Brox talk about how a writer faces the challenge of reinventing her writing self, and the importance of image and metaphor to connect historical voices with present concerns about artificial light. Time magazine placed Jane Brox’s most recent book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial...

Lyons Press 2009 Two women huddle near a computer screen preparing for a Skype call with a young blog consultant. One woman is a seventy–five-year-old visual artist. Computer is not her native language. The other a writer and a competent computer user, thought she could help as she knew a few things about digital conversations...

Free Press 2011 As a divorced mother of two, I often feel as if I’m at war. I combat stacks of bills, clogged toilets, kids who balk about excess chores, dying oak trees that threaten to fall on the house, unresolved feelings for my ex-husband, and sharp mood swings related to perimenopause. I experience constant...