In 26 intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, novelist Claire Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her father lived his final days, while he was dying. Messud meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the transformative powers of "a single successful sentence."