Elizabeth Benedict

"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war?" Abraham Lincoln is said to have asked Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1849, was an instant bestseller and dramatized the horrors of slavery for all to see, years before the fighting...

It doesn't happen often that a memoir reminds me of one of the masterpieces of the personal essay, Joan Didion's love letter to New York, the classic "Goodbye to All That." Despite its frilly cover, Charlotte Silver's Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood is a rightful...

This is not news: Writers are famously cranky, infamously jealous, hopelessly self-involved. But several years ago, I unleashed a whole lot of gratitude and love in a group of wonderful writers.

It happened like this: In 2008, hours after writing a tribute for Tin House...

Because alimony laws vary from state to state, the national media have usually steered clear of the issue. But that is changing fast, with "Fox and Friends" recent broadcast on the subject and USA Today's sweeping article on the reform movement, "Should Alimony Laws Be Changed?,"...

A month ago, some friends in New York wondered aloud where to go for a few weeks this winter to get away from the cold. They mentioned Spain. I countered with Miami. They were skeptical. They remembered Miami from back in the day: the dull place our Jewish grandparents went...

Strong weather usually moves from Florida up the East Coast. But in this case, the winds of change are going in the other direction.

Call it the Massachusetts Miracle: A grassroots organization founded and run by a man who owns a printing and copy store, Stephen Hitner of

Back in the day, Michael Ondaatje had the dubious distinction of being "a writer's writer," shorthand for fabulous, literary, and out of reach for ordinary folk.

Since The English Patient -- the Booker Prize-winning novel and the Academy Award-winning film -- he's an international star, and each...

There are still stories to be told about the Holocaust and its aftermath, and Evelyn Toynton's second novel, The Oriental Wife, belongs on the shelf with the very best of them. Despite the title, it's the story of a group of German Jews who move to America in...

When creating a new website, I had to decide which of my literary hats to lead my bio with: "novelist, journalist, editor" or a "journalist, novelist, editor." All three of us -- me, myself and I -- coach high school students on writing college application essays, and a friend, the...

The end of the 30-year-old Space Shuttle Program is old news, but every layoff hits every worker and every family hard when the pink slip finally comes. And a new round of layoffs is scheduled for October.

The folks who lose their jobs at the Kennedy Space Center have a...

In case high school seniors and their parents aren't jittery enough about what lies ahead -- College App Apoplexy -- The New York Times raised the stakes recently with an article that spent a day or two on the "most emailed" list: "For a Standout College Essay, Applicants...

In every corner of the country -- California, Massachusetts, Florida -- spousal support is in the news. These last two weeks have been a crash course in what we talk about when we talk about alimony.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has done an about-face on spousal support for Maria Shriver, whose own...

This is not just a case of he said, she said.

This is a scenario better suited to the movies: the powerful man and the hotel maid. She enters his high-priced suite, thinking it's unoccupied, and before she learns better, he emerges from a room naked and tries to rape...

A Widow's Story is called a memoir, but the word seems too slight for the grandeur of what Joyce Carol Oates does in this work of startling intimacy, humanity, humility, and wisdom -- "Wisdom one might do without," she says, "if wisdom springs from terrible loss."

Working from...

"Which do you prefer -- sex or a pastrami sandwich?" one guy asks another, though it's not a proposition but a light-hearted survey. "To tell you the truth," the other guy says, "sometimes the sandwich." This exchange is lodged in my memory, overheard a dozen years ago at a restaurant.

You may have heard Massachusetts is a liberal state. You may have heard it was the first state to legalize gay marriage (true!). You may have heard about those crazy Kennedys--Senator Ted was a liberal before Scott Brown went to his first tea party.

But on the subject of alimony,...

The last time I visited Florida was when my father died in 2002, and the time before that was when I moved my aunt up north from a retirement community. Call me "down on Florida" -- until two weeks ago, when my mate and I spent ten days in Miami,...

News flash: The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother wasn't the original title of the memoir du jour. The publisher wanted The Helicopter Mom from Hell, but rumor has it that author Amy Chua had a temper tantrum, and that was that.

When the publisher offered another, The Battle Hymn...

All books published posthumously come to us shrink-wrapped in heartache, from a voice we know has already been extinguished. There is more sadness still in a subgroup of this category: books that come from manuscripts abandoned during wartime or hidden for safekeeping and discovered when the fighting is over, when...

Call it going cold turkey. Earlier this summer, I knew I had to seize -- and slightly alter -- E.M. Forster's famous command, "Only connect..." So off I went to a cabin in the woods of Maine with no Internet or cell phone service in order to "only disconnect." I...