"What do you do for a living?" the podiatrist (or the photographer or the woman in the train station) asks, and Joan Connor answers, "I'm a writer," waiting with a cringe for the inevitable rejoinder: "Oh, boy, do I have a story for you " How such offerings, not stories but small reports from the thick of life, become rich reflections on the nature of waiting and writing, language and love, memory and hope, is the mystery of this award-winning collection of essays. Traveling between the poles of Ohio and Vermont, childhood and motherhood, Connor writes of a peripatetic family whose oddities...

The stories in this collection all bear some relationship to history, personal or communal. Several are based on iconic American figures, from William Miller to Margaret Hamilton to Ray Charles. Others evince a feminist impulse to redeem from history the women whose lives have gone unremarked.