It used to be that writers were asked how they write -- pen, pencil, typewriter? These were the days before novels were composed as text messages. No one cares anymore how writers write. We see them writing in Starbucks or the corner café, with everyone else banging out emails, blogs,...

I have been wrong about a lot of things. Soon after Kathryn Harrison's memoir The Kiss came out in 1997, about her four-year sexual liaison with her father, I predicted that the most recent memoir craze, begun two years before, with Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, would begin to fade:...

In search of a new dresser for Julia late last year, I drove her to Ikea, which, no matter where you live, is always far away. We headed south from Boston in heavy rain, at the start of Julia's winter break in her final year of college. I had volunteered...

The response to my invitation was overwhelming. In a matter of weeks one fiction writer after another [in emails, on the phone and in person] said "Yes", they wanted to contribute to what was then an idea for an anthology on fiction writers and their mentors. Some days I would...

Thank you, Arianna, for sharing the moving details of your family vacation in Greece with us. It's rare - verging on unheard of - for divorced parents to vacation together with their kids, as you and your ex-husband are doing. Leave it to you, with your indomitable visionary spirit,...

Before I knew from high, low and middle brow, there was Radio City Music Hall. Before bling, bra-burning, post-modernism, and even before men who walked on the moon, there was Radio City Music Hall. It opened in 1932, and the chill in the air these days feels an awful...

Note to Team Obama: Forget the Change mantra. Forget the anti-Bush mantra. For heaven sake's, forget metaphors. (No longer part of the curriculum in our schools, except about sports.) Now that Rove has picked Palin to run the show, we're playing on quicksand. We're playing on thin ice. This is...

On Friday, I published an op-ed in the Boston Globe on the particular injustices of Massachusetts alimony laws, which inflict grave financial and emotional hardships on young and middle-age, middle-class people in no-fault divorces. The current laws are so extreme that two prominent lawyers told me that they believe...

This month, Michael Cunningham, Oren Jacoby, Betsy West, and Sloane Crosley, are helping stave off the panic I felt earlier this year when I read "Twilight of the Books" by Caleb Crain in The New Yorker, subtitled "What will life be like if people stop reading?" It's a particularly...

Memoirs seem to have overtaken the publishing industry, displacing novels as literary enrichment and entertainment. When a memoir turns out to be made up, we hear a lot about it in the media, even on the very unbookish Larry King Live. Since James Frey's million pieces of fabrication, the American...

First imaginary sniper fire. Then gun lust. Then drinking shots with the guys. For the next episode of Hillary Rewrites History, we're inviting viewers to write in and make suggestions as to what she might say next. I give her until the end of the week to claim that...

About three weeks ago, when it was abundantly clear that there was really no way for Hillary to clinch the nomination, she reminded me of George W. Bush soon after Florida 2000 -- the loser who refused to concede. To quote Joan Didion in her marvelous early essay, "Goodbye...

A few years ago, I stumbled on a very colorful article from New York magazine about 9/11 conspiracy theories, "The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll." It included the work of one of the theorists, Nick Levis, who categorized our beliefs about why the attacks happened using what he called...

Where to begin when talking about vaginas? - not that we did all that much of it before 1996, in public or private. Eve Ensler, the little lady who started The Vagina Monologues, changed that with this one-woman-show that she first performed perched on a wooden stool in a downtown...

If you're feeling jittery at not having had your fill of her for the last five minutes, you've come to the right place. Welcome to the first meeting of Hillaholics Anonymous, a recovery program for those of us obsessed with Her. And who isn't?

We admit that we are...

In this feverish season of Hillary watching, Simon and Schuster has just offered up the story of another remarkable American woman, Susan Sontag, for us to analyze and interpret through the eyes of her son, journalist David Rieff. His memoir of his mother's final year battling cancer, Swimming in a...

I was on the phone yesterday with India or Jakarta or Micronesia -- wherever Apple goes now for its low-cost phone tech support staff -- registering a complaint about my two-day old MacBook whose keyboard didn't work. It worked intermittently. Or it failed intermittently. Pressing on the keys didn't...

They died within months of each other, these two towering figures, Grace Paley in August at 84, and, just days ago, Elizabeth Hardwick, at 91. As unlike as they were, I think of them in the same breath, as women who touched the lives of so many of us --...