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Cathy Alter’s closest friend told her that their relationship was over if she didn’t make some changes — so she wrote a book. That’s simplistic, but pretty accurate. Alter knew that she had exhausted the goodwill of everyone in her life and had to do something, so she came up with the idea of following the advice of a different woman’s magazine in a different area of her life each month for a year. From very small steps (learning how to properly wrap a sandwich) to big ones (meeting her boyfriend’s mother), Alter doggedly sticks to her “program,” and the results are astonishingly rich — as unlike the glossy magazine fodder they’re based on as possible.

Enjoy meeting Cathy Alter here, and let us know what you think!

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Look at how big that book jacket is over there!

Well, Cathy Alter deserves a big book jacket, and not because she’s a big woman (she’s tall, yes, but quite slender), but because she had a big idea and she ran with it. Why hadn’t someone else already hit on the idea of following a different women’s magazine each month for an entire year to see how it would change her life? I dunno, but the thing is, even if Cathy didn’t think of it first, she thought of it and followed through with it.

This, my friends, is a woman with moxie. She followed through with her idea through a year that could not have been planned if she’d tried. If you’d written the script of Alter’s life, you could not have written anything more perfect for her than what happened to her in real time (but more on that when we post my interview with her on Wednesday).

In the meantime: We’ve got ten copies of Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over available to the first ten readers to be selected at random from all responses who tell us which magazine’s advice you would follow if you had to choose just one.

My choice? Real Simple. I need to declutter everything!

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It isn’t often that someone manages to do something new that is also something meaningful, which is why Frank Warren’s PostSecret site has become so popular — and why the project that launched the site has now resulted in a fourth book, A Lifetime of Secrets, that was released yesterday from HarperCollins.

Today’s interview with Warren reveals his humor (as he shows a postcard on which a woman worries about her purse collection) and compassion (as he tells the story of the postcard he received that still haunts him). The author also discusses his commitment to suicide prevention, and why that grows out of personal history. I hope you’ll enjoy the video and agree that meeting Frank Warren is a delight and a privilege.

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Have you ever had a secret that you desperately wanted to share, but couldn’t? We all have, and Frank Warren, a Maryland small business owner, realized in 2004 that not only does everyone have a secret — if we all had somewhere to reveal them that was safe, it might not only do us good individually, but also comfort us collectively to see that other people have the same private fears, desires, impulses, and actions.

Warren got a small grant for a community art project and started Post Secret by handing out 3,000 blank stamped postcards, to strangers, addressed to his home in Germantown, Maryland. He asked the people he gave them to to reveal something they’d never told another soul, to remain anonymous, and to decorate the blank cards in any way they wished.

The response astonished him then — all 3,000 cards came back — and continues to do so today, as Warren has received over 175,000 postcards from all over the world. (He posts a selection of twenty-odd new ones each Sunday at PostSecret.com.) He’s received so many and various secrets that he’s published four popular books: ‘Post Secret,’ ‘My Secret,’ ‘The Secret Lives of Men and Women,’ and now, ‘A Lifetime of Secrets.’

‘A Lifetime of Secrets’ brings together cards from people aged eight to eighty, and as Warren points out in our interview (to be posted on Wednesday), putting these different secrets from different stages of life together reveals that our concerns are more alike over the years than they are different. Children worry about death, and elderly people still have fears.

If you can’t grab a copy of Warren’s new book immediately, take a look at the brand-new Post Secret video here.

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There has been such a glut of memoirs in recent years that I’m surprised no one’s tried an interview series or television show just about them (Oprah’s not reading this, but if any of her peeps are — call me!). I find many memoirs stale and copycat, so I tend not to read too many of them.

However, that means when I find a memoir I really like, I’m very happy. A few very good memoirs include ‘Truth and Beauty‘ by Ann Patchett, ‘A Whole New Life‘ by Reynolds Price, and ‘Occasions of Sin‘ by Sandra Scofield. How did I choose these? Each one deals with an aspect of life — disfigurement, debilitating illness, a family’s religious heritage — that Mary Gordon writes about in ‘Circling My Mother.’

A few other recent memoirs I must mention: of course, ‘Eat Pray Love‘ by Elizabeth Gilbert! Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Brother, I’m Dying‘ is a rare look at family function rather than dysfunction. ‘The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit‘ by Lucette Lagnado combines the exoticism of mid-20th-century Cairo with a lyrical attention to language.

What are your favorite memoirs? I’d love to hear about them here on Author Author! If you are more comfortable emailing, I can be reached at the reading writer at gmail dot com.

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Full disclosure: I am a huge fan of Mary Gordon’s work. She explicates and illuminates the 20th-century female psyche in very careful ways in her novels (’Final Payments,’ ‘The Company of Women,’ and ‘Pearl,’ among others) as well as in her short stories.

Gordon is now publishing her second memoir, ‘Circling My Mother,’ and as I explained in my earlier introduction to that book, she is doing much more than simply throwing a bunch of recollections and facts down on the page. Gordon, long a writing teacher, is an artist. She might demur at being called “An Artist” – but she wouldn’t deny that she is working as an artist. As I discovered in this fascinating interview, Gordon has thought long and hard over the years about what it means to mine your own life for material. As you’ll hear, she has some very strict rules about how and when and what she’ll use in her work.

After we finished taping, Gordon needed to hop into a car for a radio interview in downtown D.C. It was a cool, wet day, so she decided to put on her rain coat before leaving. The rain coat itself was a rather complicated garment: “I got it in Finland years ago, and I rarely get a chance to wear it,” she told me. It took her a while to finish closing its snaps and ties, which she did without rushing. “The thing is, if you don’t put it together just right, it doesn’t work.”

With that, Gordon turned around, ready to leave and resplendent in the Finnish coat, with its pointed hem and colorful trim. She’d fastened it just right – much as she does with her prose.

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Mary Gordon is best known for her novels, which include ‘Final Payments’ and ‘The Company of Women,’ books the defined a certain generation’s relationship to feminism, Roman Catholicism, and how the late twentieth century affected both. This week, I’m honored to present my interview with Gordon, whose new memoir is titled ‘Circling My Mother.’

Gordon published ‘The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father,’ a memoir of her attempt to know her father (he didn’t make it easy; for example, Gordon never knew during her religion-heavy childhood that her father had been born a Jew) over a decade ago. It’s taken her that long to come to terms with her experience, memories, and legacy of her mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon.

After several fits and starts, Gordon says she realized she couldn’t take a linear, narrative, traditional approach to capturing her very much loved but very very difficult mother on the page. Gagliano Gordon, whose body was twisted by childhood polio (one leg was six inches shorter than the other), who succumbed to alcoholism, and who sufered from Alzheimer’s Disease for the last 11 years of her life, also dressed and groomed herself impeccably, had a respectable career as an executive secretary, and took her faith seriously both in daily practice and lifelong intellectualism.

In other words, Mary Gordon’s mother loomed large in her daughter’s memory, and in order to wrap her mind around her mother, and our minds around her own, the author has chosen to paint her mother in distinct chapters, each of which deals with some facet of Gagliano Gordon’s outsized personality, from “My Mother and Her Friends” to “My Mother’s Perfume” (Arpege). I use the word “paint” deliberately, since the book opens and closes with musings on the work of Bonnard — “Bonnard and My Mother’s Ninetieth Birthday” and “Bonnard and My Mother’s Death.”

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