Sudden death, even for a master storyteller like Didion, defies narrative. Hard as she tries, she can't make a plot out of the events that happened to her in the winter of 2003. So she keeps going back to the facts: "You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." On this night, five days after Christmas, Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, had just returned from a hospital visit with their only daughter, Quintana, who was in a coma and on life support. At the dinner table, Dunne collapses, and dies, from a coronary attack. Quintana recovers, then has emergency brain surgery less than two months later. How? Why? Didion wants to know.

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed ideas I ever had about death, about illness...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." Her attempt – fierce, valiant, eloquent – is, in a way, a failure, for one cannot make sense of the senseless. But the book, a kinetic sense-memory adventure that circles backward and forward in time like a film, is a brilliant success. The stages of grief work like wildfire on Didion, sparking recollections both glamorous and mundane of her life and career with Dunne in Hollywood, New York, and Hawaii. The result is as much a memoir of a very full life, as an illumination of the intricate range of emotions that come with unexplainable illness and sudden death. Intense, yes, but also enthralling. ¤

This achingly beautiful novel follows the fate of two girls growing up in a remote province of China during the 19th century, when females were valued solely as vehicles for producing sons. Girls had their feet bound by age six, were not allowed outside the home until they married, and had to obey first their fathers, then their husbands, and finally their sons. but even the tightest reins cannot keep love and beauty from flourishing. As girls, Lily and Snow Flower learn nu shu, a secret women's language handed down through the generations, so that they can send messages to each other even as they are "married out" and then restricted to the women's chambers of their husband's homes. Not until they are both mothers to their own children does Lily realize the real power of this language in allowing them "to write the truth of our lives" and maintain a bond much stronger than any they would have with their husbands, mothers, or siblings. "Our nu shu was a means for our bound feet to carry us to each other, for our thoughts to fly across the fields," Lily says. Too often, historians approach the past with a panoramic lens, focusing on war and work, politics and trade, and other elements of what Lily would call the outer, or men's, realm. In Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, author See uses a telephoto lens to give us an intimate view of festivals and famine, of customs and superstitions, all through the details of the "inner realm" of women. The cultural insights are fascinating, but in the end this is a love story, with all the passion, betrayal, and regret that comes with the territory. ¤

Growing up in Baltimore's low-rent neighborhoods in the 1970s and '80s, David Matthews got called white boy, n -- and Jew. The light-skinned son of a Jewish mother and an African American father, he answered to all three names. But the story – and the identity issues – get even more complicated. Matthews' mother, who had psychological problems, abandoned him as an infant, disappearing from his life forever. His father, a journalist in the African American press who once consorted with Miles and Malcolm, dated only white women, including an evil stepmother type who abused his son. The young Matthews usually passed for white, but that label was as mutable and recalcitrant as the others he sometimes wore. As "a living contradiction of elements that shouldn't have been," he found himself morphing back and forth, either "white by inference or black by implication," depending on who and where he was hanging around.

In his memoir, Ace of Spades, Matthews writes with candor, anger and humor about what it means to be all mixed up. Like the best of this genre, Matthews' memoir balances introspection with cultural commentary, using vivid scenes from his life to illustrate the themes of the times. The story of race and class in all its fine, often crisscrossing, lines is in large part the story of America. Matthews, who stands at the intersections of many of these lines, offers up some important insights about black, white and those myriad gray shades in between.

An astute writer with a sharp wit and tongue, Matthews does not shy away from the touchy subjects. Take, for instance, the internalized racism that made a 12-year-old Matthews call his own father a n -- and attempt to burn a Klu Klux Klan-style cross in a neighbor's yard – a slapstick adventure almost as comical as it is heartbreaking. Or the sexual politics of black men and white women, and how men can manipulate white guilt into physical pleasure (though the author may not be quite as self-aware on this issue as he thinks he is). Proving that there's still something to be said on the subject of cool – which he describes as almost Victorian in its restraint, a kind of effortless control while everything around you is chaos – Matthews adds his own incisive riffs. But he also worries about how displays of intelligence get equated with uncool, and how, in his first year at a mostly black college, he tried to appear dumber in order to seem blacker.

Then there's the volatile tangle of black-Jewish relations, an arena in which Matthews is especially shrewd. As a teenager, he realized that claiming his Jewishness could help explain his swarthy coloring and keep him in with the right crowd. Figuring that "Israeli seemed like Jew squared," he talks up the one thing he knows about his absent mother – that she moved to Israel – in an attempt to gain cachet. But eventually this boy with two histories of persecutions starts to wonder, "What was it about Jews and their people that superseded their general alliance with the whole of humanity? Their holocaust, to be frank, paled in comparison to the ongoing deaths – physical, economic, and psychic – suffered by my other people."

In examining his own convoluted story, Matthews is really exploring that one question upon which the American psyche is fixated: "What are you?" As he found out on his first day at school, when the whole student body pestered him for a response, no one can get situated and nothing can get started until that question is answered, the issue of race resolved. In a sense, Matthews didn't choose white; it chose him. But, eventually, he got past both his ability and his desire to pass, and realized the irony that "I had chosen my mother (her whiteness), though she had abandoned me, and ignored my father (his blackness), though he had not."

Ace of Spades makes for a good story, full of profound and painful truths, but it wouldn't necessarily be a good book if Matthews weren't such a talented writer. His likable persona – angry young wimp – and his willingness to reveal his own most shameful moments, allows him to deliver caustic goods. The writing flows between showing and telling, between precise details of the urban landscape and grand pronouncements on the races. And the language is a playful, poetic mix of highbrow and lowbrow that creates a Spanglish-esque blend of black-and-white vernacular. One minute he's addressing the "dear reader" with descriptions of "the susurrus of corduroy trousers," "empyrean aplomb" and "oppidian scandals and minatory apocalypses." Then, just when you're ready to call him an old-fashioned blowhard, he'll drop in a line about "the bucolic suburbs of wherever" or how "times done changed." The one clear thing about Matthews is that he is a man on whom no label will stick.

This article appeared on page E-2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The latest book by this much-lauded cultural critic is a collection of essays examining the many ways we can lose and be lost, and some of the ways we can recover and be found as well. We can, for instance, lose track of time, or lose ourselves in love or activity, as a kind of "chosen surrender." We can also get lost unwillingly in places we don't know or, in the days before everything was mapped, in terra incognita, the places that nobody knows. The world is losing plants and animals even as we discover, or find, new species. And then we can slip into sleep and conjure up lost toys and homes and relatives for, as Solnit remarks, "in dreams, nothing is lost." If this sounds a bit etheral, it is. Solnit is an intellectual writer in the Susan Sontag vein who likes to leap between a personal memory and a statement on the symbolism of the color blue in Renaissance paintings, gluing them together with references to brilliant and obscure figures from history. But just when you think she's too esoteric, she'll throw in a description so precise and astonishing – such as how "heartbreak is a little like falling in love" – it makes you shudder. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a rewarding, if challenging, read. ¤

One of the tragedies of child abuse is that it seems to have a half-life of infinity: its effects just go on and on, so the child who, if he is lucky, grows up to become an adult, never quite figures out who or what he would have been without the abuse. In this wise and heartbreaking book, Moran, who was molested by a church-camp counselor from ages 12 to 15, dares to look at all the complexities of the devasting yet defining moments of his childhood. What's tricky is that the counselor, Bob, who stole his innocence and sexuality, was in some ways a friend, a lover, and a mentor to the young Moran, teaching him about rivers and deer and tractors in the Colorado Rockies. Moran eventually discovers his own homosexuality and then wonders whether he should be angry at Bob for making him that way or grateful for helping him find his true self.

This is an astonishing balancing act of a book, and actor/writer Moran, who won a 2004 Obie (off-Broadway theater award) for his one-man play of the same name, writes with nuance, power, and a graceful precision. The Tricky Part stumbles a bit in its final section, when Moran gets a tad explain-y about the 12 Steps, therapy, and other keys to his recovery. But most of the book is filled with vivid descriptions of his Denver Catholic boyhood, scenes so potent they tell the story of one, and every, abuse. ¤

Just how, exactly, does one critique the latest book by someone routinely referred to as "one of the world's greatest living poets," who has published more than 30 books of poems, prose and translations and won every arts award imaginable, starting with the 1952 Yale Series of Younger Poets (selected by none other than W.H. Auden) and including the Pulitzer Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship? Might as well just give him an A+ on his new essay collection, "The Ends of the Earth," and call it a day.

But W.S. Merwin deserves and demands a closer look. And not just for his connection to history and his dedication to language, his careful articulation of the archaic and the arcane, or for the insights into nature and humanity that can only come from an elder poet. Yes, the essays in "The Ends of the Earth" often seem like homework: They are not easy, sometimes not even entertaining. But they are good for you nonetheless.

At first glance, the topics of the eight essays have little in common. A description of the annual monarch butterfly migration to Mexico stands alongside a long, slow meditation on the Orthodox monasticism of the Holy Mountain of Athos.

A prodding profile of a New England publisher that is better left unread is followed by a piece on the loss of native species in Oahu. Merwin devotes several fascinating chapters to European explorers – people who were indeed reaching for the ends of the Earth – such as French seaman Jean-Francoise Galaup de La Perouse, who sailed to Hawaii in the 18th century, and Sydney Parkinson, the artist/naturalist on board Capt. James Cook's Endeavor.

But lean in a little closer and the connections between these chapters start to emerge. First, there is Merwin's poetic sensitivity: his remarkable eyes, ears, nose and mouth as he conjures up the sight of a monastery ("a rambling mass of architecture, like a child's cardboard palace that has been left in the rain"); the sound of 35 million butterflies like "A breeze echoing. An exhalation without an end," the feel of the Greek sun in October when "the locals still sit under the vines of the one open cafe, the half-inch of retsina in their glasses glowing with the long light off the sea." Then there is his ambling pace, meticulous, noticing everything, no matter how long it takes. These essays come off like extended poems, lacking in plot but laden with wisdom and rich, evocative images.

Known as much for his environmentalism as for his intellectualism, Merwin becomes here the consummate natural historian. Whether he is describing the co- evolution of the milkweed plant and the Danainae family of butterflies that feeds on it or the experience of an airport Marriott, "where I seemed to enter a framed picture of a hotel lobby anywhere," Merwin logs his observations with a detailed and almost detached scientific tone.

Like Parkinson, who methodically drew and painted more than 1,000 portraits of plants and animals that the Endeavor's naturalists "discovered" in the New World, Merwin seems to be recording his impressions for posterity.

He is also conveying his concern, and his work here reads as a chronicle of the fragility and decay of the world. In chapter after chapter, the author tries to preserve dying cultures and traditions, religions and paintings, whole ecosystems and ways of life.

ost captivating are "The Tree on One Tree Hill" and "Name in the Sand," which profile, respectively, the explorers Parkinson and La Perouse, born with "that craving for somewhere far away." While Merwin celebrates their passionate and well-intentioned curiosity, he also examines the corruption of that craving by the imperialism that funded it. From naming and classifying new species, to colonizing native lands, to trampling sensitive habitats through tourism, that curiosity has often led to disaster.

In the final essay, on the Neanderthal skeleton excavated in the Bouffia Bonneval caves in France, he imagines the death of this early man. "[T]he voices of every human he had known would fall silent, one by one, and then the language in which they had spoken to each other would be forgotten. ... After many thousands of winters the last descendants of the people he had known would stop breathing, just as he had done, and the last of the animals they had hunted would be gone, and his entire way of recognizing the world would no longer be known." In "The Ends of the Earth," Merwin seems to be documenting his language, his understanding of history and the world, before all links to them are gone. Whole species and even human races have died out before, he suggests, and so the ends of the Earth are not necessarily so far away.

Frances Lefkowitz is the books editor for Body & Soul magazine and has a short story in the current issue of Glimmer Train.

This article appeared on page M - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Ann Marlowe's trouble with love has been that she does it with her brain. "For most of my life I've intellectualized love, deciding who was worthy or good for me rather than following my heart," she writes in her new memoir/cultural critique, "The Book of Trouble."

For someone so cerebral, she's also spent a lot of nights taking pleasure in the physical. With more than her share of bed partners over the years, she's long argued that "sex was everything." Then, at 44, the hip New Yorker falls in love with a highly improbable mate – an Afghan Princeton man 10 years her junior – who promptly breaks her heart. Suddenly she realizes what she's been missing all these years: the emotional connection. Not that she gives up on sex – she and her lover spend most of their time together naked – she just comes to the conclusion "that the reason it [sex] was everything was the emotion it called forth." This brief affair and its ragged aftermath awaken her to the value of feelings and the difference between a relationship and a romance: "Relationships take root in the mind, love in the body," she declares.

The trouble with "The Book of Trouble" is that it purports to be about the discovery of true love, but everything we hear about the affair – and we hear it all in this play-by-play, including analysis and color commentary, cell-phone calls, voice mails and full disclosure on what exactly she e-mailed him and just how long it took him to e-mail back – makes it sound like your average fling, albeit an intense one.

Marlowe, a cultural critic in the Salon.com mode, is a smart writer with a clever, interesting mind and a talent for making broad, provocative statements that make sense as well as create sensation. Her first memoir was an unsentimental look at her years as a heroin user; she fell somewhere between addict and recreational user and was able to give it up without cold sweats. In her new book, she tries to drop the cool detachment and get vulnerable instead. "I'm ashamed of how lightly I used to take love and angry that it's the norm in my culture," she confides.

Too bad the object of her affection comes off as such a cad, and the affair as just another short-lived dysfunctional relationship between a man who doesn't want to commit himself and a woman who doesn't want to ask him to do so.

Her lover, Amir, has issues with drinking, intimacy and rudeness; he alternates between telling Marlowe how much he loves her and telling her how much he'd like to go to bed with her tall, hot friends, then reminding her that he plans to follow the Afghan custom of arranged marriage to a virgin, preferably one who is also a cousin. Marlowe's behavior is not much better: She says she's tired of the manipulation that passes for affection, but then calculates her every move. The worst part is watching Marlowe pick at the relationship like a scab: necessary for her, not so compelling for us. The relentless on and off of the on-again, off-again romance gives it a banality that is clearly the opposite of Marlowe's experience.

Perhaps Marlowe shouldn't denigrate herself for being such an intellectual. The most fascinating passages in the book are the ones that take a personal experience, put it in cultural context, extrapolate on it and then offer up a new insight into how, say, arranged marriage is not as foreign a practice as we like to think it is or how Western courtship is a "ritual in which a man feigns submission in order, ultimately, to dominate." In one scene, she has trying-to-forget-Amir sex with a Turk who tells her that too much talking can ruin a marriage. Mulling it over later, Marlowe remembers the line from Rumi she uses to practice her Persian calligraphy – Be silent that the lord who gave you speech may talk – and comes to the conclusion that "the deepest and finest parts of our nature may not be in our speaking but in our listening, not in our intellect but in our feeling."

Marlowe is at her strongest dissecting the cross-cultural vagaries of love, intimacy, gender roles, family and marriage (though she's got a bit of an obsession with that cousin marriage thing). Her ideas are informed by her travels to places that most of us will never get to, except through her vivid descriptions: an Afghan family compound during the Ramadan holiday, the world of the international press corps in Baghdad, New York dinner parties with Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi. A Jewish woman who feels more at home in Muslim Afghanistan than in Israel, Marlowe comes to some fascinating conclusions about the differences and commonalities among Jews, Arabs and other Semites.

Though she has trouble with love – and with summarizing her love troubles – she has a gift for riffing back and forth between the personal and the global, and landing on some fascinating insights about the way we live.

Frances Lefkowitz is at work on her own memoir/cultural critique, "How to Have Not," about growing up poor, white and female in San Francisco.

This article appeared on page M - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Mary, a smart, single, successful woman teetering on the edge of 40, meets Matt, a cute younger guy, in a bar. They have a few drinks, then go back to his place, a disheveled room he rents in a house that's "more of a boardinghouse than an apartment," and spend a passionate night together. A month later she discovers she's pregnant, and to her own - and everyone else's - surprise, she decides to keep the baby. When she tracks down her one-time lover, to break the news that he's now a father-to-be, Matt - in another surprise - says he wants to be a part of the pregnancy, birth and upbringing. He just doesn't want to be anything more than friends with Mary. If this were a movie (like last summer's lightweight comedy "Knocked Up"), mother and father would fall in love as they got to know each other, and baby would make three.

But this is real life, and Mary F. Pols' story, told in her new memoir, "Accidentally on Purpose," is a bit messier than the Hollywood version. For one thing, there's her convoluted relationship with 29-year-old Matt, an unemployed and decidedly unambitious boy-man compared with Pols' Type A personality. Though he makes his position clear from the get-go - friends for the baby's sake - he and Pols often end up in bed together in a kind of friends-with-benefits arrangement, and then arguing over the ambiguities in their relationship as if they've been married for years. After much back-and-forth, they finally settle into their roles as co-parents, though things still get strange, especially as they start to date other people. Then there are all those real-life logistics, like maternity leave, infant day care and flextime work schedules, all made so much more difficult when there's only one official parent. And of course there's the awkward explaining the pregnant Pols has to do to with friends, strangers, colleagues and family - including her Catholic father and baby-to-be's other grandparents. Come to think of it, maybe this is a movie plot after all.

Pols, who was a film critic by trade, tells her story with the kind of brazen honesty that will make some readers cringe and others nod their heads in empathy. Sharp, witty and slightly self-deprecating, she alternates clever, camera-ready one-liners with intense self-revelations about parents, children, love and family. To save money for a deposit on a new kid-friendly apartment, Pols decides to move temporarily into an Airstream parked in a friend's backyard, an experience she describes as "the ultimate lesson in humility: pregnant by a man I'd met in a bar and about to move into a trailer." But the deeper she gets into motherhood - the book takes us from pregnancy through toddlerhood - the less flippant she becomes. On her 40th birthday, she holds her 5-week-old son and realizes that "I'd beaten the biological clock, the thing that had been tormenting me, but I didn't feel like gloating. I'd imagined besting that clock might be like finishing a marathon, high on adrenaline and ready to mount the podium and pump your fists in the air. Instead I felt something so much softer, something I couldn't quite define."

Soft is indeed something that's difficult to write about, and readers may tire of Pols' long passages on her sweet Maine upbringing, the boyfriends who broke her heart and the cute things her baby does in the car seat. Divulging Too Much Information is the occupational hazard of a memoirist, who ideally will be able to select the details that carry not just personal significance, but cultural relevance as well. Though Pols' honesty is admirable, it is sometimes tedious.

Underneath the softness, however, lies a story that is quite relevant. For all those women nearing 40, desiring children, and struggling to find a mate, the question of "Why don't I just do it by myself?" eventually surfaces. New books about choosing single motherhood offer nuts-and-bolts advice on sperm banks, custody and costs. But what is it really like to have a baby without a partner? And is it the better alternative to marrying someone you don't really love, just to have a baby? Or is choosing to be a single parent much like deciding to "climb Everest without an oxygen tank," as Pols wonders? "Accidentally On Purpose" addresses these questions with firsthand candor, humor and insight, as the author comes to realize that despite the complications, having a child on her own was "the single most empowering act I could undertake." {sbox}

This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle. Frances Lefkowitz has just been nominated for her second Pushcart Prize.