Critical Praise

"[Karr] seems to have been born with the inability to write a dishonest-or boring-sentence."

—Time

"Affecting…Karr’s lurch toward faith is narrated with her familiar irreverence and humor, but this tone does not preclude a more heartfelt expression of the value of faith."

—The New Yorker

"Reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art."

—The Boston Globe

"Searing…[Karr] has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go. Explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer…Karr writes with such intensity and poetry…This struggle to reconcile her past and present, her family and her future, is the steel-wired ribbon that not only runs through this affecting book, but that also connects it to Ms. Karr’s two earlier memoirs-the bright, elastic thread on which she so deftly strings the colored beads of her tumultuous life."

—The New York Times