“A long and dedicated reader of Joyce Carol Oates—such as I am—will find this memoir to be a rich and precious baize onto which her considerable life’s work can be pinned; so much we want to know about this prodigious American talent is finally revealed. For others, it will be an arresting opening chapter, a setting out of vivid human matters, leading onward to the novels, the stories, poems, essays, plays . . . a suddenly indispensable beginning. But for no one will it not be a compelling and at times mysterious testimony to a life of letters like no other I know.”—Richard Ford “This captivating account of the growth of a writer’s mind puts [Oates’] new collection of essays firmly in the tradition of similar autobiographical works by writers such as Goethe, Wordsworth, and Joyce.”—Philadelphia Inquirer