Just spent a half hour on a leisurely blog-browse. Most of my favorite bloggers manage to post regularly, putting me to shame!

The links below are working now. I supplied a link to the NPR interview over the weekend, but it didn't work. I'm afraid you'll need to google it. It's worth the trouble.

Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, the story of her friendship with Lucy Grealy author of Autobiography of a Face, is a marvel. The writing is so assured, so flawless, making it one of the best memoirs I have read, rivalling Alice Sebold's Lucky. When I heard Patchett interviewed on NPR's The Connection (a superb, insightful interview, by the way), I was mildly interested but thought I probably wouldn't go looking for the book. Two weeks later when I was browsing at the library, the book appeared, and I snatched it up. I'm so glad I did. I'm a hundred pages in, and so far it's a testament to the writer's credo to never give up on oneself or one's writing. I especially loved the description of their Iowa Workshop experiences, at least some of my curiosity about that has been allayed.