The orphans of literature are lucky. They have no one telling them when to do their homework, what time to go to bed or not to talk to strangers.

From Cinderella to Pippi Longstocking, and from Mary Lennox in the Secret Garden to Margot Livesey's Flight of Gemma Hardy, children...

My grandmother never used to phone me, so when I heard her voice on the phone that night in 1985, I was startled.

"I just read your book," she said sharply, "and I don't like it." She meant my first novel, Slow Dancing, which had recently been published by...

I was afraid to see Denzel Washington's recent movie, Flight, because of the flying-the-plane-upside-bit that's at the heart of the story. But when I heard that it was only a brief segment in an otherwise character-driven movie, I gave in -- and kept my eyes shut tight during that scene....

It is said that all books begin with an obsession, and What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most is no exception.

In this case, it's a beautiful winter scarf my mother gave me toward the end of her life, probably the...

Profound, intricate, literary, a little gossipy and more than a little heartbreaking -- such is Marco Roth's echt New York memoir, The Scientists, in which he struggles to make sense of the central burden of his life as an only child in a privileged Upper West Side family....

For high school seniors and their families, 'tis the season for a certain kind frantic extracurricular activity: cranking out college application essays. The notorious Common App Essay -- 250 to 500 words -- has replaced the sonnet, the novel, and the screenplay as the most popular literary form of the...

How important is your college application essay? My favorite comment from an admissions officer in a top college says it all: "A good essay can heal the sick but it can't raise the dead." Translation: It can move a student from the Maybe pile to the Yes pile, but it...

Alimony is one of the most charged words in the English language. A word that opens the door to all kinds of heartache. Divorce. Lawyers. Money. Dependence. Resentment. Who owes what to whom, for how long and under what circumstances?

Connecticut's antiquated alimony laws -- like those of...

"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...