From Lorrie Moore's earliest reviews of novels by Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron, to an essay on Ezra Edelman's 2016 O.J. Simpson documentary, and in between: Moore on the
writing of fiction (the work of V. S. Pritchett, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Stanley Elkin, Dawn Powell, Nicholson Baker, et al.)... on the continuing unequal state of race in America... on the shock of the shocking GOP... on the dangers (and cruel truths) of celebrity marriages and love affairs... on the wilds of television (The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Into the Abyss, Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Making a Murderer)... on the (d) evolving environment... on terrorism, the historical imagination, and the world's newest form of novelist... on the lesser (and larger) lives of biography and the midwifery between art and life (Anaïs
Nin, Marilyn Monroe, John Cheever, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, among others)... and on the high art of being Helen Gurley Brown... and much, much more.
They include her childhood home in Mississippi; the house of Mrs. Gray Nichols, a magical childhood home - away - from - home; her first «adult» house, which she shared with her first husband, the late painter Ed Ross; the Berlin studio in which she started this series; and the home of author Anaïs
Nin, whose
writing helped shaped her ideas of what it is to be an artist.