"In this trenchant memoir of reading and writing, Pamela Erens returns over a lifetime to George Eliot's Middlemarch. The calm, understanding, and generosity that she finds in Eliot's masterpiece--albeit differently, at different moments in her own life--inflects Erens's own account of becoming, and being, a mother and a writer. This short book is filled with wisdom."--Claire Messud, author of Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other...