Life Span

"Molly Gile's memoir Life Span is a must-read for fans of her fiction, and will no doubt garner her many new readers. Often shockingly truthful and characteristically wry, Giles provides connected vignettes of her relationships with her parents, lovers, husbands, children, and grandchildren, a life span of reflections on her desire for and disappointments in many forms of love. But one abiding love sustains her and drives her forward-her writing. And it is her intuitions about storytelling that enable her to weave together recognition of what is indeed true and deeply felt."

-Amy Tan

"Until now, Molly Giles has been known for her wry and profound fiction. With this memoir, she has turned her gimlet eye on herself and her own life, and the result is a reader's delight. Epigrammatic and beautifully authentic, Life Span had me laughing out loud and then sighing at its insights, and I didn't want it to end. With this svelte book, Giles manages to conjure an entire life, offering snapshots of California in the last eighty decades, and showing how the creative life is ignited, and then by turns fostered and obstructed, by forces more powerful than ourselves. I loved this book."

-Edan Lepucki, New York Times Bestselling author of California and Time's Mouth

"Molly Giles's Life Span is a clear-eyed, deeply evocative portrayal of a writer's life in the Bay Area and beyond. The glimpses over the decades-of girlhood, of motherhood, and more-are by turns heartbreaking and hilarious. In her determination and compassion, Giles inspires. A bittersweet and beautiful memoir."

-Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City

"Wit and wisdom are ablaze on the pages of Molly Giles's revelatory memoir, Life Span. In tightly rendered prose, she turns her sharp eye inward and examines, without mercy or reserve, her life as daughter, wife, mother, grandmother, and most of all, writer. What results is an unabashedly warm and deeply self-aware memoir that values love and family, and storytelling above all else."

-Susanne Pari, Author of In the Time of Our History & The Fortune Catcher

"What is a life? It's an accumulation of stories, moments that linger and haunt and needle. Molly Giles captures those moments to tell her life story. Life as a quilt, a collage, full of human connections and disconnections, told with sharp dialogue, impeccable timing, and a biting humor that is so distinctive it deserves its own adjective: Gilesian. Molly Giles can't be copied, though, as the best writers can't. She must be read, over and over again."

-Grant Faulkner, the Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story