A Life of One’s Own is plainly a book with a lot to offer, much of it up my street: literature; feminism; personal growth. But I wasn’t looking for anything in particular from it. I bought because it was coincidentally due for release shortly after I finally got around to Biggs’ last book, which I thought was superb. That doesn’t leave me with much of a measure of success, but handily, the book succeeds on its own terms, is plain about what those terms are, and makes a strong case for why they matter. A Life of One’s Own is a collection of eight essays on women writers’ lives and works, through which are threaded the author’s reflections on the reworking of her life that began with her divorce. Both elements are handled deftly, but they come together into something more universal. Early in the book, Biggs writes: I used…

I didn’t write about this when I finished it a month or two ago, because I was pressed for time and because I didn’t know what to say about it. I enjoyed it a lot, but I’m not an experienced enough reader of comics or graphic novels to know how to talk about them. But I’ve recently been battered with adverts for Tetris World Tour, a microtransaction-pushing, power-up-laden mobile Tetris game, and it made me think of this page: I’m glad Alexey Pajitnov got paid, but I’m not sure Tetris World Tour is a better representation of the ideals Henk Rogers sets out on this page than the various lovingly-made free Tetris implementations that The Tetris Company has squashed over the years. I don’t read a lot of this kind of creative non-fiction, so I’ve never given much thought about the way it butts up against reality in places like…

These are very different books, but since I read them one after the other, of course I was going to end up seeing similarities.