It was an honor and a joy to judge this year's Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography, and I'm still a little stunned by what the reading gave me. Yiyun Li won, for Things in Nature Merely Grow — a book I find almost impossible to write about quickly, because what it does it does by refusing the usual gestures of writing-about. The finalists were Sarah Chihaya's Bibliophobia, Hala Alyan's I'll Tell You When I'm Home, and Anelise Chen's Clam Down. A banner year for autobiographical nonfiction, and one that genuinely restored my faith in memoir as a site for invention.

I did this with Kiese Laymon, Sabrina Orah Mark, Grace Talusan, and Hua Hsu, which is its own kind of education — four readers whose attention I trust, arguing in good faith about what a book is doing and what it's for. I came out of those conversations sharpened.

What struck me , reading these books together, was how much formal work was happening in them, how much thinking about what autobiographical writing can be—how to avoid showiness for its own sake, how to get past certain normie conventions, how to try to tell the truth when the world is full of untruth and missed insights. Really glad to have read tehse books and to support these writers.