Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives.

Narratively, how sweet it would be to describe in words that she learned to roast a chicken, she never took another pill again, she now takes care of me through cooking. But that’s not the truth.

My mother is an urban peasant and I am my mother’s daughter. The city is our natural element. We each have daily adventures with bus drivers, bag ladies, ticket takers, and street crazies. Walking brings out the best in us.

Everything I had going against me he had going for him. Us young Black dudes who were slanging were hated, hunted and haunted for our role in the drug war. He was praised and honored and rewarded with overtime.

The author unearths the story of Frank Yerby, one of the the most prolific African-American novelists in history.

When a young author started her novel years ago, she saw it as a romance. She sees it differently now.

On the bohemian poet’s hidden career as a prolific copywriter.

On life as a police patrolman.

What it means when an investigative reporter’s undercover work is framed as a personal journey.

The author ponders the dissolution of his own marriage, and others.

The allure of dangerous sports.

A memoir of Santa Cruz.

An informational interview during which the author is advised, “Find a rich husband, and then you can work at whatever you like on the side, and it doesn’t matter, because you already have money.”

“When I was fourteen, I had a relationship with my eighth grade history teacher. People called me a victim. They called him a villain. But it’s more complicated than that.”

How our memories become contaminated by inaccuracies.

A profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, whose bestselling memoir may have sunk her literary career.

“I love my mother a not-normal amount.”

Diary of a veteran gadfly.

Writing a “stunt memoir” in the waterpark capital of the world.

Growing up with Charlie Brown.

Nora Ephron on adolescence.

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves.

Coping with a brother’s suicide.

We tell stories about the dead in order that they may live, if not in body then at least in mind—the minds of those left behind. Although the dead couldn’t care less about these stories—all available evidence suggests the dead don’t care about much—it seems that if we tell them often enough, and listen carefully to the stories of others, our knowledge of the dead can deepen and grow. If we persist in this process, digging and sifting, we had better be prepared for hard truths; like rocks beneath the surface of a plowed field, they show themselves eventually.