I landed my first book contract in the middle of the hardest year of my life — I asked a friend how she was doing the other day. She told me, honestly, that professionally things had never been so good; personally, they were brutal. I’ve had essentially the same sort of year. Last August, my father fell and broke his hip and suddenly my long-distance care coordination…

is this a new kind of privilege? — Last Sunday, I bought “Conversations with Friends” by Sally Rooney. In Kyiv, it’s rare to stumble on a book in English without Stephen King’s name on it, but I found it. It was jammed between Rooney’s larger novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You” and another book the name of which…

Or, how a fictional character taught me to love and accept my body — I recently finished the audiobook of Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein, which catalogs the sexual practices and assumptions young women develop living in a culture that often disparages female bodies, and especially their sexual organs, as “gross.” …

She taught us to tell the stories that made us uncomfortable — Once in a while, you read something that is so indelible in its tone and temperament that it immediately changes what you imagine writing is all about. That is how it was for me with Joan Didion. It’s not that I recognized myself in her writing, which is why you…

Reflections on ‘success’ as an author — What is a book? I’ve been asking friends and colleagues this question for months. My second book proposal was turned down earlier in the year with a near-universal refrain of “we can’t figure out how to market it,” and afterward, I took a serious look at the pinnacle of achievement…

The author of “Writers and Lovers” talks about her new short story collection, “5 Tuesdays in Winter” — When Lily King’s novel Writers and Lovers was published in March 2020 — a coming of age tale about a woman starting her writing career in Cambridge, MA — the book quickly earned a following for its earnest depiction of the struggles and realities of a writing life, quickly becoming…

Enough with the tropes. Let’s get real. — Alt text for this illustrated essay appears below the photos

Sometimes the lessons you learn from writing a book aren’t quite what you expected — I’ve heard that a lot of writers have a similar origin story: They’re reading a novel and suddenly stop. “Holy crap,” they say, “I can do better than this!” Then they close the book and sit there, or they fall down and lie there, dazed. “I can do better than…