Faking It

I love to read. I love to read anything. And I really like biographies, especially lately. For some reason I've been picking them up without knowing what they are. I know that sounds odd, you would know a biography when you see it. Except that I don't. "The Boys of my Youth" by Jo Ann Beard and "Driving with Dead People" by Monica Holloway made it onto my shelf without me knowing what they were; but I've also read "Lucky" by Alice Sebold and "The Mistresses Daughter" by A.M. Homes in the last 6 months. For whatever reason, I respond to them when I see them on the shelf. (P.S. I'm also promoting all of the above if you need something to read. All = awesome!!) The nature of all writing is expository, I think. Even in fiction you, as a reader, always learn more about the author than they probably meant. And when it's intentional, when a writer deliberately let's you in on whatever secrets they have, the amount of restraint th...

I'm a curious person. Pretty much everything makes me think. And every once in a while a piece of writing really stands out because of how it's written, what the topic is, just because it came along at the right time. This is the long awaited, or rather, long talked about, by me, review of the book that has, essentially, consumed me for a couple of years. A few years ago the family took Erin to the airport to send her off to Germany for the summer. While there I saw a book in the Borders store called "The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship" by Jeffrey Zaslow. I read the back and was intrigued at the idea of a book about a large group of women, who have been friends for their entire lives, and that one had died under suspicious circumstances early in their twenties. I didn't buy it then and forgot the name. A few weeks later I saw a review of the book in the Arizona Republic. It was hanging up at a Starbucks in Scottsdale. One of the wait...