I had a baby.

Yesterday a colleague of mine was having lunch with her old boss.

"She's a woman of a certain age," she said.

I wasn't sure exactly what that meant (It turns out this particular age is 76).

However, it got me thinking that I'm a woman of a certain, well, other age. The age where babies and husbands and suburbia - the have or the lack - take up a lot of room in the imaginations and conversations of me and my friends.

That's why I like Sara Levine's "Baby Love" so much. Levine is the chair of the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and I had a chance to hear her this past week at the Green Lantern's The Parlor Reading Series in Wicker Park. She's a fantastic reader - sly and funny. In this one myopic narrator she defines an urban, intellectual motherhood. Someone you might recognize from Facebook; a zealous contributor and maternal pioneer set to record her singular experience of mothering. But beneath the incredibly witty, tongue-in-cheek tone, Levine gets at something much more universal - a confounding reality of parenthood - the simultaneous need to both nurture and let go.

http://necessaryfiction.com/stories/sara-levine-baby-love-

Okay, maybe I'll take a look at those pictures from the Anne Geddes-lookalike photoshoot that just showed up in my newsfeed. After all, they do grow up so fast.

The Greatest American Novel?

Mike Dorf, lawyer, cultural advocate, and adjunct faculty for the Arts Administration & Policy program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has made the following statement. Twice.

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is the greatest American novel.

Of all time.

Who am I to disagree?

Hopefully by the end of this Biblioyear, I will contest his claim with a list of my own.

A Weekend with the Glass Family

I took a break from Raymond Carver's Collected Stories to reread JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey. They are perfectly paced, but feel a bit slight to me. What's interested me more is the report that Salinger spent his years in semi-seclusion creating an entire Glass world. How many writers devote their entire writerly oeuvre to one family? It's either brilliant or crazy making.