Life Span

"Molly Giles's memoir Life Span is a must-read for fans of her fiction, and will no doubt garner her many new readers. Often shockingly truthful and characteristically wry, Giles provides connected vignettes of her relationships with her parents, lovers, husbands, children, and grandchildren, a life span of reflections on her desire for and disappointments in many forms of love. But one abiding love sustains her and drives her forward-her writing. And it is her intuitions about storytelling that enable her to weave together recognition of what is indeed true and deeply felt."

"Until now, Molly Giles has been known for her wry and profound fiction. With this memoir, she has turned her gimlet eye on herself and her own life, and the result is a reader's delight. Epigrammatic and beautifully authentic, Life Span had me laughing out loud and then sighing at its insights, and I didn't want it to end. With this svelte book, Giles manages to conjure an entire life, offering snapshots of California in the last eighty decades, and showing how the creative life is ignited, and then by turns fostered and obstructed, by forces more powerful than ourselves. I loved this book."