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[...] “I was a madly gay little girl,” she writes, though what I noticed most in her description of her childhood wasn’t her happiness but her confidence. She had appalling handwriting (Sartre used to complain about it) and always “made a mess of hems,” but “as soon as I was able to think for mysel…

But I was learning. I held a party for my summer birthday: I warmed pizza and chilled rosé and turned the patio into a jungly dance floor, going so late that the neighbors behind started yelling. We had Easter Sunday lunch around my dining table, my little brother cooking lamb, my father sneaking a…

When I told my old boss I was getting divorced, she said: “Well, you did get married in a very desultory way.” I puzzled over the comment for a long time, but she had hit on something. I was missing joy, excitement, fun. It’s good to be sensible when you are investing your pension, but if desultory…

I used to want desperately to be a “proper” critic, to be taken seriously, to have a full command of history and theory, but I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want to “admire” writing for its erudition, I want to be changed by it. I want to know what it’s like to be someone else. I want to have th…

When Eliot first began to write fiction, she wrote that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” The best thing an artist achieves is “the extension of our sympathies.” And even if …