It somehow feels very like Elizabeth McCracken to write a craft/process book about writing that began as the footnotes of an earlier draft of another book. And then very like her to write about this in the craft book itself—an aphoristic, zestful, and darkly happy trip through her writing/teaching life, full of excellent, grandly amusing advice. Won over by the mixture of jokes, wisdom, and good sense, readers are likely to become partners in her defiance of the whole idea of a craft book. McCracken is a wonderful teacher—when I was a baby writer, she was my workshop leader for one splendid week at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She was kind and funny and made us feel like real writers. Very necessary, because, like so many writers trying to figure out what stories we wanted to tell and how, we doubted ourselves constantly, even as we piled up draft after draft of fortunately unpublished novels (some of the best luck of a writing life is in what we don’t get published). She also demonstrated to us the best way to use wipes to remove stains from clothes, dazzling us with her aplomb and lack of embarrassment about living as (in) a body in public. A constant theme of her writing and teaching: reminding everyone to create characters who live in the world in their bodies, to capture that experience.