The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.

I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.