MY KIDS HAVE fewer than four weeks left of school. That means summer, and summer means lots of goodness: balmy weather, barbecue, and best of all, beach reading. True, my beach vacation doesn’t start for a bit, but I’m already starting to pack.

I’m gearing up for a summer of biographies, mostly, as it turns out, of women writers. (Maybe all these lovely writing sisters are having an influence?)

First up (and, I confess, I’ve already started!) is Joan Schenkar’s masterful and inventive life of crime novelist Patricia Highsmith. The Talented Miss Highsmith is a bio unlike any other, appropriate to the prickly, and kind of scary, writer of eerie masterpieces like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Next up is one that’s been sitting on my shelf all year, Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon, a controversial recent bio of Emily Dickinson. Who could resist that title? Not me. Last year, Marion said it was her pick for nonfiction book of the summer…well, I’m a little behind. But I’m catching up!

And for something completely different: Bossypants by my wished-for-sister, Tina Fey. Hey, she could become my best friend, right? It could happen. And even if I can’t have her all to myself, at least I can snort til I want to cry reading her sure to be fabulous and funny memoir.

My final pick (so far, anyway)? A surprise, maybe, as it’s about a motley band of tripped-out brothers, not a sister in the bunch. But I’m dying to read The Harvard Psychedelic Club, Don Lattin’s look at the rise of 60s psychedelic culture in the stuffy halls of Cambridge. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius is about as far away from now as anything I can imagine, so I think the beach is the perfect place for a little time travel.

What are your top picks for your beach bag this summer? You’ve already read Margaret’s lovely memoir, right? You’ve perused our massive list of our sister book picks?  Is the stack already teetering on your nightstand? Or are there new releases you’re counting down to? Tell your sisters.

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THANK HEAVENS FOR sisters. That’s my refrain this week, as I contemplate a tragic loss, and try to find my way through grief. Lucky for me, my sisters have some excellent advice.

Over on my personal blog, my own little commonplace book (virtual, that is), I’ve written about the death of a dear friend. I’m telling my story, inspired by the masterful advice of our own memoir guru, Marion, as she counsels another in grief to construct the list that helps with loss. I’m working on mine.

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MY NOSE WAS buried in my shopping list last week at the market, when a familiar voice interrupted my internal debate (Broccoli? Cabbage? Cauliflower?). The encounter wasn’t a surprise. But the message? An unexpected delight, especially evocative today, the official publication day of Margaret’s beautiful memoir.

It turned out that Ellen, a fellow mom at my kids’ school, a lovely, light-filled woman who I don’t know well, but who always makes me smile, had just discovered TSP. She wanted me to know that she’d found us while searching for info on her favorite astrologer (yep, our one and only Sheilaa Hite). And she wanted me to know that she was loving what she found here. She’s the kind of woman who talks to her own sister every single day, so she knows what means sisterhood. I’ve defined it for myself, in many ways through my life, but with special care since Margaret invited me into this unruly gang we call TSP.

I was an early commenter on Margaret’s magnificent garden blog, A Way To Garden. She came visiting my blog, left a hello, we chit-chat-commented back and forth, and before long, I was trundling down Margaret’s own dirt road to visit her and her garden–our first date. We like to tell people we met online. She and Marion and Anastasia were already sisters of different sorts, but soon they invited me to the party as well. We have lived through some things, the four of us, since our first meeting in Margaret’s cozy house; you can read about some of them in The Book. Mostly, there, though, you’ll read about Margaret and her search for self in a post-power-suit world.

I relate to that search, having packed up my own power suits nearly a decade ago. My motivations were both the same–the frustrations of reining in my own ideas in the service of others–and different: I had a toddler at home who seemed more compelling than many of those boss-like others. It took another three years before I’d trade in L.A.’s fast lanes for my corner of rural paradise-slash-insanity. In the process, I had to redefine myself (yeah, yeah, still working on that one, but coming ever closer), find new friends and face down fears. Mostly mine didn’t slither, like Margaret’s (read the book already if you don’t know what I mean by that snakey reference!), but they had no less powerful an impact on my transformation from a Hollywood television executive to a backroads writer.

Margaret writes in her book of the teachers who helped her find her away along a new, ever-unexpected path. Well, readers, I’m here to tell you, she’s been one of mine. As a mentor and a friend, Margaret is matchless. And when I ran into Ellen, a sweet sister at the supermarket, her effusive praise for this site reminded of how it all started here: escapees from two different rat-races, a couple different kinds of sisterhoods, and connections forged easily in blog comments as in the produce aisle. Sisterhood is where you find it, and I’m blessed to find it here.

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ONE OF THE most flattering moments of my life was the day that (awkward, insecure) 17 year old me was asked by a stranger in a Chicago café if I was Molly Ringwald.

I can still feel the frisson of joy that moment produced, not least because at the time, I was in the company of a boy I adored who I wanted to adore me back. And, let’s face it, being compared to a, at the time, HUGE star cannot hurt your desirability.

Flash forward, oh, a quarter of a century, and I have not forgotten Molly, my would-be teenage resemblance to her (and this was before I started dying my hair, mind you), or my deep affection for the characters she and the late, great John Hughes created together. But Molly (can you blame her?) wants me, and all her fans, to know that there’s been a whole life she’s lived post-Breakfast Club, and it’s given her some good lessons she wants to share.

Share them she does in her lighthearted advice compendium-cum-memoir, Getting the Pretty Back. This is a light, girlfriend-y read, full of tips on food, fashion, parenting and love, with a shocking amount of modesty. Molly is confident in her recommendations, but never imperious; there’s no swinging around of the big stick of celebrity. She seems oddly normal, for a girl who was a star in her teens, decamped to Paris for a ‘normal’ life in her twenties, and is now again in the public eye with a successful television show (ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

While the book is sometimes as fluffy as its cover photograph, it’s also as appealing and seemingly genuine as its author. Though I occasionally wished for a little more depth in the book’s introspection, it made for a perfect end-of-summer read.

Enjoy, and tell us what you’re delving into as the particular delight that is summer reading comes to its end.

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WHO COULD RESIST a book with the subtitle “My Life in a Harem”? OK, probably a lot of people. But I’m not one of them.

Jillian Lauren looks like a model, planned to be an actress, is married to a rock star…and along the way, ended up as one of dozens of women spirited out of their “normal” lives to provide companionship, and sex, to the Prince Jefri, the younger brother of the Sultan of Brunei. She also happens to be a witty and compelling storyteller, with a great command of humor and a gift for self-examination that feels authentic, and never forced.

In a memoir that is much more sensitive and introspective than sensationalized, Lauren outlines her journey from rebellious kid to teen stripper to New York City escort and ultimately her recruitment to be one of the group of girls and young women kept to “entertain” the Prince and his friends.

Lauren clearly delights in remembering and recreating the odd, dysfunctional sisterhood that developed among the harem-mates, who run the gamut from manipulative and mean to much-too-young. It all sounds like it would be pretty tawdry, and some of it is, but Lauren’s gift as a writer is making the reader understand the thousand steps that led her to Brunei, without looking for pity or relying upon sentimentality or defiance. When she falls for the Prince, I couldn’t help but empathize with a young girl’s need (she was 19!) to win the prize: in this case, the love, or at least the attention, of the real-life prince. But particularly wrenching is her inability to deal with coming home, a situation that is so challenging that ultimately, she goes back to Brunei for a second tour of duty.

Lauren is smart, her prose is sharp and unsparing of detail. If you’re in New York City, you can hear Lauren read from Some Girls tomorrow night at 8 p.m. as part of the In The Flesh Erotic Reading series. (The venue? It’s called Happy Ending. Who could ask for more?) Admission is free; if you go, be sure to tell us all about it.

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SOMETIMES, YOU JUST HAVE to read a book. You love (or know!) the author, the subject compels you, something on the dust jacket sucks you in, a review is so provocative you cannot skip it…I have hundreds of different paths to reading, but the one I took to my latest favorite read is roundabout, for sure–and yet, at least for my life here on TSP, it feels totally inevitable.

Gabrielle Burton is a writer, and mother to five filmmaker daughters, one of whom was my classmate in college. Somehow, Facebook asked me to become a fan of my friend Ursula’s mother’s new novel, and not thinking much about it, I did. Excerpts appeared on Facebook intermittently, and I read some of them with interest, but as with too much of the information that crosses my brain, even that which I know I cleave to, if only I had the time to fix upon it, my awareness of the novel dissipated before it caught my focus.

And then I read this dual review on NPR of not just Burton’s new novel, but of the somewhat eccentric memoir that narrates and preceded its creation.

Searching for Tamsen Donner tells the story of a determined feminist, dedicated writer, and mother to five daughters, who, in the 1970s, decided she just had to take her husband and kids on a journey across in America in the footsteps of our country’s most notorious group of pioneers, the Donner party. Burton’s explanation of why she had to make the trip, and what she and the girls found there, had me staying up late, reading in lieu of sleeping or working, shivering in recognition of my own endless painful seesaw between work and family.

Burton’s voice is strong, and funny, universal and iconoclast at once.  If you are a woman who does the awkward dance of loving your family, hard, and craving immersion in your own creative life, this book will resonate in your gut like the beat of a huge drum.

Next up on my nightstand: Burton’s long-gestating novel about Tamsen Donner, and her journey, Impatient With Desire. Not to worry, I’ll be reporting back.

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Pleiades and Stardust. Credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo (Deep Sky Colors)

MY KIDS ARE exploding this spring, turning into ever-evolving, endlessly fascinating, newly reinvented versions of themselves. And though I try to pay attention, it seems that many days, I’m just hanging on for the ride.

You know when you just have your head down, as a parent, and you realize that time is passing, and changes are occurring in your kids, but you’re so bogged down in getting through the days that you don’t really stop to marvel at exactly what transformations are taking place? That’s pretty much my normal state, and with my solo-parenting stint still ongoing, I’ve been even more focused than usual on just making my days, collapsing into bed, and getting up to do it all again.

Occasionally, I’ll mention to someone (usually someone whose kids are grown, it seems) something amazing or wonderful or funny the Rock or the River did or said, and they’ll say, with a slightly desperate-sounding urgency, “You’re writing this stuff down, right?” Err. No. Not really. Should I add that to the list of my (many) maternal failings?

I’ve never been much of a journal keeper. Whenever something hilarious or magical happens, I tend to tell myself to make a mental note of just how momentous that particular moment was; I reassure myself that I will, of course, remember it…and 20 minutes later, I’m wondering just what it was I was so determined to preserve. Huge chunks of my own past have disappeared from memory in this fashion, and finally, this spring, I realized I had to change my lazy ways.

Reading the bestselling book The Happiness Project (which I highly recommend: it’s a fast, enjoyable read and full of excellent, actionable, small suggestions for improving your life) gave me a strategy that’s working thus far. Author Gretchen Rubin (who happens, in the interest of full disclosure, to be a college acquaintance of mine) suggests keeping a daily one-sentence journal. One sentence? How hard could that be? She does hers on her computer, and so I adopted the same strategy.

Ok, my entries aren’t daily (and they are often more like four sentences, because I’m a lazy editor late at night) but in the month that I’ve been practicing this habit, I am happy to report that milestones that otherwise would have been buried in mental detritus are forever (or at least until the hard drive crashes) preserved.

Because of my short but sweet journal, I will remember that the River said the day he received his first-ever electric guitar was the very best day of his life. And I will never forget that the Rock, who is just starting to read, and therefore needs to know the spelling of every word she can think of, said at bedtime last week, when I asked her to please, please, quiet down and save her questions for tomorrow.

Her response?

“But Mommy. I just LOVE this WHOLE world. And I am a curious girl.” Indeed.

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IF YOU’VE SPENT much time here, you already know how we TSP sisters feel about the power of memoir, and Mary Gordon’s layered remembrance of her mother is an outstanding example of the genre.

As the title implies, the book is an examination of Gordon’s mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, from every angle. To her daughter, she was both a glamorous career woman and an object of pity, her body pained and twisted by a childhood bout with polio. We learn about her intense bonds to parish priests, her adoration of high Hollywood movies, her late-life marriage and difficult relationships with her sisters. And, of course, because this is Gordon writing, it is her story, too: how she both differs from and is like her mother; how their closeness becomes torture as her mother ages and declines.

For all of us who struggle with contradiction between the deep attachments and bitter divides that only family seems to produce, this book is provocative and delicious. Enjoy, and be sure to tell your sisters what you think.

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MY GOOD FRIEND told me that Mary Karr’s Lit was the best non-fiction she’d read in years, that while she couldn’t bear to put it down, the prose was so divine it made her want to stop after each passage just to savor it. This friend is no easy sell when it comes to writing and reading, so ok: add that book to my reading list, stat.

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that we sisters of The Sister Project are all about memoir. Ours, yours, or anyone else’s, as long as she’s got something to say, lessons to share, and a vibrant voice in which to sing it all out. All of this, I’m happy to report, is true of Karr’s latest book, which is by turns hilarious and so painful you want to put your head under the pillow and weep.

Through the course of the book, Karr finds her voice as a poet, marries and divorces, drinks to excess and then manages to dry out, and finds God. And, relevant to TSP, she’s got a fantastic sister story to tell, too. The book moves forward like a freight train, begging you to stay up too late to read just a bit more. But best of all is Karr’s command of her prose, which reads like poetry: smart, economical, inspired verse. I never read Karr’s bestselling 1995 The Liar’s Club, but after loving Lit, that’s the next pick for my nightstand.

How about you, sisters? Do you have a story to share? Tell us.

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IHAD TO BREAK the news to my mother last night. A huge player in our shared history was gone. Her face went white, and she looked like she might cry. As we sat down to dinner (a dish I re-christened Cold Comfort Chicken Potpie) she looked down. “I just can’t believe it’s gone.” She was talking, of course, about Gourmet magazine.

As long as I can remember, Gourmet was a fixture in my home, and hers. It cluttered my mother’s kitchen and her nightstand, but every issue, no matter how dogeared, was carefully saved. Mom was not just a loyal subscriber, she was a true believer.

When she moved from North Carolina to California eight years ago, to be near her first grandchild (that would be the River, beautiful boy of mine), Mom started cleaning out her basement and garage, and the first of several boxes arrived at my house, things she couldn’t rationalize keeping, but couldn’t bear to see us without.

Included were many of the 40-odd volumes of bound back issues of Gourmet, dating back to 1943, the magazine’s third year. The blue-bound tomes now line the shelves in my dining room; the first time I (nervously) cooked dinner for editor Ruth Reichl, she looked around, smiling, and said that it looked a lot like the Gourmet library.

Somewhere in my basement, awaiting excavation from the towers of boxes and cartons that arrived with my mother when she moved in with me last March, is a letter written to me in 1973 or 1974. That year, I’d become immersed in the Pippi Longstocking books. An avid reader, I could handle the books occasionally awkward, translated-from-the-Swedish phrasing. But I was mystified by pepparkakor. It was clearly some kind of cookie–but what kind, exactly? In those pre-Internet days, I had two choices to solve the mystery: a trip to the reference librarian at the Chattanooga Public Library, or a letter to “You Asked For It.”

“You Asked For It” was my favorite section of Gourmet. Readers wrote in, asking the editors to please, PLEASE, intercede with the God of Fancy Restaurants to procure the recipe for the Roquefort Cheese Soufflée enjoyed while on vacation in St. Maarten, or the God of Long-Lost Recipes in hopes of acquiring the definitive method for making Iced Tea Cakes. Month after month, the editors came through. My mother knew that if anyone could not only solve the mystery of pepparkakor, but provide the best and most thorough response, it would be Mr. Mac (aka Earle MacAusland, the magazine’s original editor, who served from 1941 to 1980) and his crack staff.

Indeed, MacAusland and his elves answered, and how. The enthusiastic letter charmed even a cookie-focused 8-year-old, and along with much encouragement for a young girl to keep on cooking, those kind magazine people included a sheaf of annotated recipes and a veritable treatise on gingersnaps. As it turned out, I didn’t like pepparkakor nearly as much as Pippi did, but no matter. Like my mother, I was turned into a lifelong Gourmet devotée.

That’s not to say we were without perspective: In the 80s, we wondered at the magazine’s future, as it seemed more inclined toward high end (read: out of our reach) travel than culinary exploration. But as it shifted back to a more balanced perspective, we were reassured.

You can imagine, then, maybe, the anxiety and excitement I felt when, over the last few years, I got to know and befriend the impossibly lovely Ruth Reichl, the current, and, it appears, final, editor of my favorite magazine. As background: I used to work in Hollywood. I’ve met my share of people who are actually important, and many more who just think they are. Movie stars don’t make me nervous. Meeting Ruth for the first time? Much to my husband’s amusement, I was a mess. Luckily, Ruth is kind, and patient, and our friendship survived my initial butterflies.

Yesterday, I heard the news of Gourmet‘s closing from another friend, also a former editor at Gourmet. I was really shaken. Not only because I felt terrible for Ruth, whose passion for the magazine is profound, and whose devotion to the betterment of food for the benefit of the planet is consuming, but, frankly, for what Gourmet‘s demise means for all of us, for American culture, and arts, and letters, and yes, cooking. My mother said, as she stood stunned in the kitchen when I told her, “This is a terrible thing. For America. For American culture.” I couldn’t disagree.

There are other food magazines I read and enjoy, but none, for me, combined perfect recipes (tested until they worked, every time), excellent writing, and a deep sense of the importance of cooking and food to our communities, our heritage and our health. Gourmet was unique. Gourmet was relevant. Gourmet was a part of my family’s cooking experience, for more than 43 years. Thank you, Gourmet. For me and my mom, without you, cooking will never be quite the same.

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