Some of the most praised recent memoirs have been about growing up in poverty [...] The ground of our experience is dark, and all our inventions start in that darkness. From it, some of them leap forth in fire.

The imagination can transfigure the dark matter of life. And in many personal essays and autobiographies, that's what I begin to miss, to crave: transfiguration. To recognise our shared, familiar misery is not enough. I want to recognise something I never saw before. I want the vision to leap out at me, terrible and blazing - the fire of the transfiguring imagination. I want the true dragons.