All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the reliable narrator who will tell the story that needs to be told? Using some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Vivian Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, and Oscar Wilde. This book teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.--Adapted from jacket.

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