Life Stories

Chavisa Woods' 100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism is a book that, as our British friends say, does exactly what it says on the tin—chronicling 100 separate incidents of sexist behavior that Woo...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2019/08/05/life-stories-107-chavisa-woods/

In The Long Accomplishment, Rick Moody takes readers through the first year of his second marriage. It was a moment in time where he'd gained significant control over his addictions, and had extr...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2019/08/04/life-stories-106-rick-moody/

I first met Glen David Gold when he was on a reading tour for his second novel, Sunnyside, which happened to be the name of the neighborhood where I lived at the time; that wasn't the only reason...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2018/12/19/life-stories-105-glen-david-gold/

I met with Minna Zallman Proctor a while back, shortly after the publication of Landslide , a collection of autobiographical essays that orbit around her relationship with her mother. One of the ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2018/07/26/life-stories-104-minna-zallman-proctor/

I first met Michelle Stevens in 2014, back when I was an acquiring editor for a startup book publishing company. We took a meeting with her and her agent after reading the proposal for her book,...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2018/07/25/life-stories-103-michelle-stevens/

I spoke with Elizabeth W. Garber the Monday right after Father's Day, an apt time to be discussing her memoir, Implosion . It's a story about growing up in Cincinnati in the 1960s and early '70s...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2018/07/24/life-stories-102-elizabeth-w-garber/

I met David Hallberg at the midtown offices of the American Ballet Theater, where they'd set aside a conference room for us to talk about his new memoir, A Body of Work. It's about his relentless...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/12/18/life-stories-101-david-hallberg/

For the 100th episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I've been talking to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I wanted to do something special. So, in the spring o...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/12/07/life-stories-100-kat-kinsman-andrea-petersen/

Lauren Marks was an actress in her late twenties when she went to Edinburgh in 2007 to direct a friend's play in the city's annual Fringe Festival. One night, they went out to a bar, and she was ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/12/01/life-stories-99-lauren-marks/

When Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich was in law school, she did a summer internship at a Louisiana law firm. She was firmly against the death penalty, and then they asked if she would be prepared t...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/11/21/life-stories-98-alexandria-marzano-lesnevich/

As I was talking with Andrew Forsthoefel in the spring of 2017 about his 4,000-mile walk across the United States, which he writes about in Walking to Listen , I asked a kidding-but-not-kidding ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/11/20/life-stories-97-andrew-forsthoefel/

In the early months of 2017, I met the British concert pianist James Rhodes, who had come to the United States to discuss Instrumental, "a memoir of madness, medication, and music" as the subtitl...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/11/18/life-stories-96-james-rhodes/

Back in 2016, I had a fantastic conversation with Lauren Collins, a staff writer with The New Yorker who had just published When in French: Love in a Second Language, which is simultaneously a pe...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/11/17/life-stories-95-lauren-collins/

When Okey Ndibe came to America at the end of 1988 at the invitation of fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe to edit a magazine about African culture, nobody thought to tell him about winter. He'd read ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/06/16/life-stories-94-okey-ndibe/

Like many people, I first became aware of James Rebanks through his Herdwick Shepherd Twitter feed, where he posts pictures of his flock and talks about life as a farmer in England's Lake Distric...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/06/15/life-stories-93-james-rebanks/

As I mention at the beginning of this episode, my inner 13-year-old was thrilled at the opportunity to talk to Thomas Dolby about his memoir, The Speed of Sound, because I’d been a big fan...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/06/13/life-stories-92-thomas-dolby/

I spoke to Danielle Trussoni about her second memoir, The Fortress, in late 2016, just a few days after the news had broken about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marriage falling apart. The timing...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/06/12/life-stories-91-danielle-trussoni/

Barbara Schoichet got hit with a triple whammy just before her fiftieth birthday—she lost her job at a movie studio in Los Angeles, her girlfriend left her, and then her mother died. Don't...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/05/02/life-stories-90-barbara-schoichet/

I've known Jamie Brickhouse for a long time; in his former life as a book publicist, he was someone to whom I'd frequently reach out when I wanted to talk to... well, people like him in his curre...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/02/22/life-stories-89-jamie-brickhouse/

I spoke to John Kaag about his memoir, American Philosophy, shortly after the 2016 presidential election, so although we did spend a fair amount of time talking about his personal story, and how ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2017/01/18/life-stories-88-john-kaag/

Barry Yourgrau actually lives just around the corner from me in Queens, so it was absurdly easy for us to get together to chat about his memoir, Mess—and the fact that this episode was rec...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2016/10/05/life-stories-87-barry-yourgrau/

After Matteson Perry broke up with his "Manic Pixie Dream Girl," he realized that he'd never really NOT been in a serious relationship since high school, and decided it was time to get casual. Av...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2016/09/27/life-stories-86-matteson-perry/

I didn't realize until well into my conversation with Kim Addonizio that she'd written (but never published) a full-length memoir, a straightforward narrative about the breakup of a longterm rela...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2016/09/22/life-stories-85-kim-addonizio/

In the winter of 1992, Emily Winslow was a young theater major getting ready for her next semester when she was followed into her building by a stranger who then forced his way into her apartment...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2016/07/13/life-stories-84-emily-winslow/

In her memoir, Beijing Bastard, Val Wang writes about growing up as a Chinese-American and then moving to Beijing in the late 1990s: "I think a lot of people think I was looking for my roots; tha...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2016/07/12/life-stories-83-val-wang/

When Maria Venegas was a young girl growing up in Chicago, her father killed a neighbor and in the process of evading the police abandoned her and the rest of her family. It would be 14 years bef...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/08/16/life-stories-82-maria-venegas/

Nicole Kear was 19 when she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that, at the time it was discovered, was chipping away at her peripheral and night vision and would, ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/08/10/life-stories-81-nicole-c-kear/

As a New York Times columnist, Ava Chin spent several years writing about her experiences foraging for edible plant life within the city limits. But Eating Wildly isn't just a handbook on how to ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/08/09/life-stories-80-ava-chin/

When Molly Wizenberg's husband told her that he wanted to open a New York-style pizzeria in Seattle, she encouraged him--even though she wasn't convinced it would ever happen. But as his plans go...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/08/03/life-stories-79-molly-wizenberg/

Jen Doll's been to a lot of weddings. Some of them have been great experiences, others not so much. She tells both kinds of stories in her memoir Save the Date... and, along the way, she has a lo...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/08/02/life-stories-78-jen-doll/

Some people will read Listen to the Squawking Chicken and decide that Elaine Lui's mother is not just emotionally manipulative but outright abusive, but Lui has a nuanced perspective on her upbri...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/07/24/life-stories-77-elaine-lui/

Kelly Cogswell went to the first meeting of the Lesbian Avengers in 1992 because she wanted to be able to embrace her lesbian identity more confidently. She wound up playing a role in many of tha...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/07/21/life-stories-76-kelly-cogswell/

Rayya Elias was born in Syria, then came to Detroit with her family just in time for the riots of the late '60s. As a young adult, she got involved in the local punk scene, then escaped to New Yo...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/07/06/life-stories-75-rayya-elias/

Damian Barr grew up in a small town in Scotland in the 1980s that was hit hard by the policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. As his family struggled with the economic hardships ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/07/01/life-stories-74-damian-barr/

I've known Annabelle Gurwitch for years, and one of the things I've always loved about her writing is the ways she's able to find things in her personal experience that we can all identify with, ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/05/30/life-stories-73-annabelle-gurwitch/

Ophira Eisenberg wasn't interested in long-term relationships, and had taken up a casual approach to dating and sex as a young adult. Then she met a man who wanted more than just a fling. Screw E...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/05/27/life-stories-72-ophira-eisenberg/

Katherine Bouton first began experiencing hearing loss in one ear at age 30, and spent years trying to work around the problem without really addressing it. That, she discovered, only made her li...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/05/26/life-stories-71-katherine-bouton/

As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, Julia Angwin has spent several years addressing the surveillance of our online activities. Dragnet Nation is the story of how she set out...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/05/25/life-stories-70-julia-angwin/

When Misty Copeland was growing up, she wanted to be a gymnast, and then she joined her middle school's drill team. She was eventually steered towards ballet classes, and it turned out she had an...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/05/08/life-stories-69-misty-copeland/

When Megan Hustad was a young girl in the 1970s, her parents took her and her older sister with them to Bonaire, a small island in the Caribbean, where they'd decided to become missionaries with ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/04/30/life-stories-68-megan-hustad/

Subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes photo: Kristen Fortier In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m talki...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/04/10/life-stories-67-arlo-crawford/

After graduating from college in the early '90s, Kelly Corrigan couldn't wait to get out of her family's house and make some adventures for herself on the other side of the world. But when her fu...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/04/01/life-stories-66-kelly-corrigan/

In 1988, Su Meck was hit in the head by a low-hanging ceiling fan, further hitting her head on the kitchen counter as she collapsed to the floor. She experienced a traumatic brain injury that com...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/02/27/life-stories-65-su-meck/

When she was a child, everybody had a firm idea about who Janet Mock was--and their idea didn't include womanhood. In Redefining Realness, Mock talks about what it took to become the woman she kn...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/02/18/life-stories-64-janet-mock/

Leah Vincent grew up in an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism that keeps women in strictly regimented subservient roles, impressing upon them from the early age the importance of modesty. Her family ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/02/16/life-stories-63-leah-vincent/

Rebecca Mead first read George Eliot's Middlemarch as a teenager in England, and she's returned to the novel about every five years or since -- and what she discovers in her reading is much diffe...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/02/11/life-stories-62-rebecca-mead/

In 2002, David Stuart MacLean snapped into consciousness on a train platform in India -- but he didn't know that at the time. He had no idea where he was... or who he was. He was told he was havi...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/02/05/life-stories-61-david-stuart-maclean/

Scott Stossel has been plagued by anxiety since early childhood--for more than a quarter-century, he's tried just about every therapeutic technique, every new medication. In My Age of Anxiety, he...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/01/26/life-stories-60-scott-stossel/

Katie Heaney is in her late twenties and she's never been on a date, let alone had a romantic relationship. In Never Have I Ever, she looks back at her history of awkwardness around the opposite ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/01/23/life-stories-59-katie-heaney/

Gary Shteyngart and his family came to New York City from the Soviet Union when he was a young boy, but their parenting style remained, as he describes it, distinctly Russian. Little Failure isn'...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2014/01/18/life-stories-58-gary-shteyngart/

Jonathan Wilson's Kick and Run is a "memoir with soccer ball" that encompasses (among other things) life as a young Jewish boy in 1950s and 1960s London, as a journalist crossing the United State...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/12/16/life-stories-57-jonathan-wilson/

Beth Lisick decided she was done writing autobiographical essays--but as she started work on her novel, she realized she still had a number of personal stories, stories that didn't necessary fit ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/12/09/life-stories-56-beth-lisick/

Nancy K. Miller went to Paris after graduating college in the 1960s, inspired by Jean Seberg in Godard's Breathless and determined to become somebody other than her parents' daughter--and, in her...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/12/01/life-stories-55-nancy-k-miller/

Josh Ruxin and his wife moved to Rwanda eight years ago when he spearheaded an effort to create a model program to alleviate that nation's rural poverty. When it became clear that he and his wife...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/11/25/life-stories-54-josh-ruxin/

Wendy Welch and her husband moved to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, bought a home, and decided to turn it into a used bookstore. They didn't have an easy time of it at first, but as they persevered, th...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/11/18/life-stories-53-wendy-welch/

Ann Mah and Anya von Bremzen both combine personal history with an exploration of national cuisine. When the State Department reassigned Mah's husband from Paris to Baghdad, she used her time alo...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/11/11/life-stories-52-ann-mah-anya-von-bremzen/

One day, Ellen Stimson and her family decided that if they could move anywhere, they'd move to Vermont--and then figured why not? It wasn't a smooth transition; Ellen also decided to buy the town...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/11/04/life-stories-51-ellen-stimson/

The essays in Richard Rodriguez's Darling explore his relationship to religion. Whether he's visiting Jerusalem to probe the shared foundations of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, or discovering...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/25/life-stories-50-richard-rodriguez/

Jessica Alexander has spent much of the last decade traveling from one international crisis to another, from Darfur to Haiti. In Chasing Chaos, she talks about what it was like to plunge into the...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/24/life-stories-49-jessica-alexander/

Patty Chang Anker created the blog Facing Forty Upside Down to chronicle her efforts to overcome some of the fears she'd had since childhood--fear of swimming in open water, of riding a bike, and...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/23/life-stories-48-patty-chang-anker/

Shahan Mufti is "100% American and 100% Pakistani," born in Ohio after his parents emigrated in the 1970s--and then they took him back a few years later. Today, he frequently reports on events in...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/22/life-stories-47-shahan-mufti/

When Victoria Loustalot was four years old, her father told her mother that he was both gay and HIV-positive. He killed himself when she was 11, before AIDS could fully destroy his health. Years ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/20/life-stories-46-victoria-loustalot/

Dani Shapiro's written two memoirs, Slow Motion and Devotion. Still Writing isn't like either of those two books, but it does draw upon a memoir-like exploration of Shapiro's personal history to ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/14/life-stories-45-dani-shapiro/

Jesmyn Ward's memoir is about her own life, growing up in a poverty-stricken Mississippi community, and how she was able to make a better path for herself--but it's also about five young men who ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/07/life-stories-44-jesmyn-ward/

When Phyllis Chesler landed in Kabul with her Afghani husband in the early 1960s, she was ordered to surrender her American passport; soon, she found herself trapped in his family's home, forced ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/05/life-stories-43-phyllis-chesler/

Gary Burton discovered the vibraphone at the age of six and it wasn't long before he was playing professionally around the midwest. At the age of 18, he swung by Nashville to play on his first re...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/10/02/life-stories-42-gary-burton/

Throughout his adolescence, into his early twenties, David Schickler felt what he described as "the Priesthood Ache," a potential call to the Catholic Church that confused and distressed him beca...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/09/22/life-stories-41-david-schickler/

After "living a life of should" for nearly thirty years, Jessica Dorfman Jones threw it all away--including her marriage--when she fell immediately in lust with the musician who showed up at her ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/09/16/life-stories-40-jessica-dorfman-jones/

MK Asante grew up in '90s "KIlladelphia." His brother was in jail, his mother was in the middle of a breakdown, and his father had walked out--he never formally dropped out of shigh chool, but hi...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/09/08/life-stories-39-mk-asante/

Marco Roth grew up believing that his father had been accidentally infected with HIV working in a medical research lab; his father's condition loomed over their relationship, adding another layer...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/09/02/life-stories-38-marco-roth/

When her long term relationship finally fell apart, Periel Aschenbrand tried to rebound by simultaneously moving into her dead grandmother's apartment and trying to intensify things with her best...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/06/30/life-stories-37-periel-aschenbrand/

When Alysia Abbott was young, her mother died in a car wreck, and her father took her to San Francisco, where he was determined to raise her on his own. She thought he was never able to love anot...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/06/25/life-stories-36-alysia-abbott/

We recognize Andrew McCarthy from his movies, but in recent years he's established a second career as a freelance travel writer--and it happened that in the months before his second marriage, he ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/06/17/life-stories-35-andrew-mccarthy/

Josh Hanagarne has an amazing life story--several, in fact. The World's Strongest Librarian is about dealing with Tourette's Syndrome, but it's also about grappling with religious faith, about pu...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/06/10/life-stories-34-josh-hanagarne/

Alexandra Aldrich is a direct descendant of the Astor dynasty, but the family fortune had long since evaporated by the time she was born. She grew up with her parents living in the run-down serva...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/06/04/life-stories-33-alexandra-aldrich/

When Dale Maharidge was growing up, his father kept a photograph of himself with a fellow Marine, taken on a Pacific island during World War II -- but he almost never spoke about what happened to...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/05/27/life-stories-32-dale-maharidge/

In his "Public Apology" column for The Awl, Dave Bry atones for some of his worst behavior over the years, clueless blundering and thoughtless slights alike. The column was always a bit of a goof...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/05/14/life-stories-31-dave-bry/

Beverly Donofrio decided she wanted to enter into a monastic retreat—she had already begun the search for a suitable spiritual community when she became the victim of a brutal assault in the sm...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/04/08/life-stories-30-beverly-donofrio/

Mary Johnson spent nearly two decades in Mother Teresa's Missionary of Charity, which she writes about in An Unquenchable Thirst. It's a vivid account of what the religious life is really like, a...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/03/30/life-stories-29-mary-johnson/

Domenica Ruta's mom was a drug dealer, and when Domenica herself finally succumbed to addiction, she went full throttle. With or Without You is a powerful memoir about those years, but also about...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/03/24/life-stories-28-domenica-ruta/

Emily Rapp's The Still Point of the Turning World is a powerful memoir about finding out that her infant son had Tay-Sachs disease -- how do you raise a child knowing that he's going to die soon?...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/03/16/life-stories-27-emily-rapp/

Ashok Rajamani's The Day My Brain Exploded is a memoir that does what it says on the cover -- in it, he talks about the arteriovenous malformation in his brain's blood pathways that burst one day...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/03/10/life-stories-26-ashok-rajamani/

Cynthia Zarin talks about her essay collection An Enlarged Heart, revealing how a 400-word magazine item gets expanded into an 8,000-word personal essay and how the types of children's books she'...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/03/01/life-stories-25-cynthia-zarin/

Nick Flynn's third memoir is partially about the experience of watching as a movie gets made of his first memoir -- but it's also a meditation on the nature of memory and our attempts to preserve...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/02/28/life-stories-24-nick-flynn/

Sarah Manguso's The Guardians is a powerful story about coming to terms with the death of a close friend, and an attempt to understand how her friend's condition had deteriorated so poorly in his...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/02/27/life-stories-23-sarah-manguso/

Michael Hainey never really understood how his father had died when he was just a kid. And when he grew up, he realized there were a lot of holes in the story he'd been told. Eventually, he decid...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/02/26/life-stories-22-michael-hainey/

Jacob Tomsky has spent his professional life making your hotel stay more pleasant... even when you didn't deserve it. (You know who you are.) Heads in Beds is an all-out memoir that reveals what'...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/02/25/life-stories-21-jacob-tomsky/

Dara-Lynn Weiss became notorious after writing an article for Vogue about how she'd put her 7-year-old daughter on a strict diet. We talk about that backlash, and about what's changed in the time...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/02/05/life-stories-20-dara-lynn-weiss/

In the late 1980s, David Esterly spent a year at Windsor Castle, recreating a wall hanging by the late 17th-century master carver Grinling Gibbons that was destroyed in a fire. The Lost Carving t...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/01/23/life-stories-19-david-esterly/

Sonia Taitz's The Watchmaker's Daughter is a story about growing up as the child of two Holocaust survivors -- and not realizing until later in life how many other people her father had helped sa...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/12/28/life-stories-18-sonia-taitz/

Everyone around Susanah Cahalan thought she was having a psychotic breakdown. One doctor looked past the surface details to diagnose anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Brain on Fire is t...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/11/26/life-stories-17-susannah-cahalan/

Alex Witchel and Will Schwalbe have written two powerful memoirs about being an adult and coping with your mother's deteriorating health. Two very different stories that still resonate with each ...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/10/24/life-stories-16-alex-witchel-will-schwalbe/

A Sense of Direction is Gideon Lewis-Kraus's account of pilgrimages that took him across Spain, around the Japanese island of Shikoku, and finally to a Hasidic religious festival in Ukraine.

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/09/09/life-stories-15-gideon-lewis-kraus/

Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails is a multi-faceted memoir that reveals the downward spiral Anthony Swofford went through after the success of his first memoir, Jarhead, digging into his efforts to r...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/09/05/life-stories-14-anthony-swofford/

It's one thing to decide to eat only the meat you've hunted yourself. It's another thing to do that while living in New York City. Steven Rinella makes it happen -- and we talk about a lifetime o...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/09/03/life-stories-13-steven-rinella/

Daniel Smith opens up about Monkey Mind, his "memoir of anxiety" -- and how the anxiety of writing actually affected him more than revisiting his traumatic past. We also talk about the therapeuti...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/08/15/life-stories-12-daniel-smith/

Coming to My Senses is the story of how Alyssa Harad transformed her life when she developed a love for perfume in her mid-30s. She didn't set out to write a memoir at first--the original plan wa...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/07/30/life-stories-11-alyssa-harad/

When she learned that her mother died, Cris Beam reflected on the circumstances that had forced them apart, and decided to tell that story in Mother, Stranger.

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/07/09/life-stories-10-cris-beam/

Gary Marcus, a psychology professor specializing in language and cognitive development, was 38 years old when he decided to ignore all the previous life experience that suggested he had no talent...

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2012/07/02/life-stories-9-gary-marcus/

In Don't Kill the Birthday Girl, Sandra Beasley combines her own life experiences dealing with severe food allergies with a broader medical and cultural overview of what we know about allergies a...

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