It’s a well-known adage that you have to hit rock bottom before you can change. In Rayya Elias’s case, she hits about a thousand rock bottoms before finally being able to pull herself up. She writes about them all in her debut memoir Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk from the Middle East to the Lower East Side. Following a heartfelt -- if not slightly corny -- introduction from the author’s good friend Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame, we are dropped right in the center of hell, i.e. Elias’s life in the eighties. And though this first taste of it is brief, it’s intense. In this passage, Elias, desperate for drugs -- she’s a full-blown addict at this point -- resorts to prostitution, which ends in a near brush with death and an escape constituting a half-naked sprint through the East Village.

Then just as quickly, the scenery flip-flops to Elias’s childhood in Aleppo, Syria, and -- because of the changing political climate -- soon her family’s move to Detroit when Elias is seven. Over the next sixty or so pages, we watch Elias go from an alienated little girl to a psychedelic-drug-using preteen to a confident young woman who finds herself in punk rock, scores a hair-cutting license and her first boyfriend, and also has her first love affair with a woman.

Just as it seems we’ve waved good-bye to the young, estranged Elias forever, she moves to New York and everything changes. There, a lethal combination of things collide -- Elias’s self-loathing and sexual confusion, her tendency toward drug use and overindulgence, and the excitement of living in New York for the first time. It starts out promising as new beginnings often do: a job at a posh hair salon (she transferred from the one she worked at in Detroit), new friends, new music partners and gigs, NYC nightlife. But a lingering relationship and a sloppy love triangle later, the utterly painful, drawn-out decline of Elias’s life for the next twelve years begins. What starts out as a harmless curiosity for drugs turns into a growing hunger and then an insatiable craving. We witness Elias as she shuffles back and forth from New York to Detroit, girlfriend to girlfriend, one shooting gallery to the next.

In between drug debacles, reminders of Elias’s potential and good fortune permeate the pages. She scores a manager for her solo music career, but after botching a huge performance, she relinquishes. She writes, “I was blowing a lifetime opportunity, the development deal that Michael had given me. But I didn’t know how to stand up, brush myself off, and proceed. And I was so numb from all the drugs that I didn’t even really care.”

Not surprisingly, this type of behavior becomes a pattern. Her relationship with Kim, technically her first girlfriend, takes a dive almost as soon as it begins, and it’s during this relationship that Elias realizes she has a habit. After losing several jobs, getting evicted from myriad apartments, and having a gun pulled on her, Elias finds herself living in Tompkins Square Park, in what is perhaps the lowest of her lows. A touching moment comes when, during this time, Elias’s sister Maya in Detroit dreams that Elias is homeless, and she gets on a plane to head to New York to find her. When she’s not at her last apartment, Maya enlists the help of Kim and her mother to track her down. Upon finding her, Maya takes Elias, covered in gaping sores and track marks, to her hotel, where she offers her food, a warm bath and bed, and a nonrefundable airline ticket. Finally something resonates -- or maybe desperation sets in. “After using, abusing, and exploiting every person I knew in Alphabet City, I was defeated and still homeless. So I went home to Detroit and my family,” Elias writes.

It’s hard not to breathe a sigh of relief here. It seems finally everything is going to be okay. But soon that same feeling resurfaces again -- and again -- to no avail. This move home to Detroit does feel like a turning point of sorts though. From here on out, recovery has entered Elias’s vocabulary. Still, between rehab programs and sober stints, she manages to OD eight months into her most successful relationship yet, get violently beat up, and spend weeks at Rikers Island, which is where she earns the nickname Harley Loco.

Finally, after waking up in her messy room one day to the sound of Katie Couric’s voice blasting through the television and realizing she’s survived a suicide attempt, Elias looks around and knows it’s time to clean up the mess she’s made -- of both her place and her life. And she does, this time for good.

Not everyone gets to experience being a mother or father. Jennifer Finney Boylan is one of the rare few that has experienced both … as well as something in between, which is, in fact, the very subject of her latest memoir, Stuck in the Middle with You. In it she questions herself and a host of others about what it means to be a parent, and other complex issues surrounding gender and societal expectations.

BIOGRAPHILE: In Stuck in the Middle with You, you interview a series of people about parenting, growing up, and change, among other things. A lot of your interview subjects were close friends, but some you were meeting for the first time. In both cases, how did you choose your subjects?

JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: I tried to find people whose experience of motherhood and fatherhood – or for that matter, childhood – spoke to the complex and changing terrain that is modern parenthood. I knew I wanted to talk to my friend Richard Russo whose father was mostly absent throughout his childhood, and yet whom Rick always speaks of in glowing and admiring terms. I knew I wanted to speak to my former teacher Edward Albee, who – on the other hand – refers to the couple who adopted him as “those people.” It seemed like for a year or two there all I did was talk to people about their children, or their parents. Most of … my friends are writers, and it struck me as interesting to ask authors about their experiences, not only because the experiences were unique, but because as writers they were pretty good at telling stories about the crazy things they’d seen their parents do.

BIOG: Did you find it easier to interview friends whose histories you were intertwined with, or strangers who you knew only through their work?

JFB: I think Edward Albee was the hardest interview subject; he started firing questions at me even before I got my coat off. He’s also a member of an older generation of gay men, for whom raising children and having families was not on the radar in the same way as it [was] for people … my age. The only person whom I did not know at all was Barbara Spiegel, who is a little person, the head in fact of the New England chapter of Little People of America. The genetic roulette that dwarves go through when they decide to have children was something I didn’t really understand until I spoke with Barbara. It’s funny, though – that interview I did with her has led to the beginnings of what I hope is a new friendship.

BIOG: What did you do to prepare for each interview?

JFB: In most cases, I read the writer’s work, particularly those books that seemed to focus on the relationships between parents and children. Some of those stories, like those of Augusten Burroughs, I knew almost by heart. Others, like some of the early short stories of Ann Beattie, I hadn’t read in a while and really struck me afresh.

BIOG: Of all the conversations you had, which has resonated the most since and why?

JFB: I think my conversation with Dr. Christine McGinn is the one that most challenged my sense of what it means to be a mother or father. I had known Christine for a while – she is a respected doctor in the transgender community – but I’d never heard her tell the story of how her children came into the world. This is a woman who – when she was a man – saved her sperm, and then ten years later – after she became a woman – used that sperm to have a child with her lesbian partner. Both mothers are the biological parents of their children; and both mothers were able to breastfeed. There’s a way in which Christine’s story really makes you stop and wonder what exactly it is we mean when we describe someone as a mother or a father.

BIOG: I love the way you set the scene for each interview that you conducted. Why do you feel that kind of background is important to include?

JFB: I wanted the interviews to feel like little one-act plays. Some of those situations lend themselves more to that than others. Like, with Timothy Kreider, we were sitting in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel desperately trying to get the attention of our waiter. In the interview with Augusten Burroughs, on the other hand, we were sitting on top of a building overlooking the planetarium in New York on a day that started off balmy enough, but which slowly rose into the nineties. I think you can tell by the way that interview proceeds that each of us, by the end, is melting like a candle.

BIOG: One of the things that struck me most about your story is how progressive and open minded you, your wife, and your kids are. What do you think the secret is to being a well-adjusted family like yours?

JFB: I’m really not sure, although we joke in our family that the two things that hold us together are books and pizza. For one thing, it wasn’t until our boys were well into high school that we finally let go of the “story at the end of the day” ritual that we’d first begun when they were two. Of course the stories changed as the years went by, but for well over a decade, between 8:00 and 9:30 in our house everything came to a halt as we read our sons stories. The kinds of stories they wanted to hear changed over the years, but still I think that really brings a family together. The other element, of course, is pizza. I take great pride in my pizza-making abilities, and slicing up those pies on Friday nights is something we all share. My son Sean says, “Our family is held together with cheese.”

BIOG: You are also very open about your life, which includes, of course, details about your family members. Do you ever worry that what you write about them could have a negative impact on their lives?

JFB: I worry about this all the time. In fact, in my 2003 memoir, She’s Not There, I gave everyone a pseudonym and did my best to disguise us all so that we would never be recognized. When I first started working on this new book, I asked my sons what they would think about my writing about our family. Interestingly, my older boy, Zach, said that he was fine with me telling the story, that in fact it was an important one to share – but his one request was that this time, “You use everyone’s real names.”

BIOG: What do people ask you about your transition from male to female, and your lifestyle in general that most annoys you or most misses the point?

JFB: Well, I think we tend to think of the story of transsexual people – and transsexual women in particular – as a story of someone who has “had an operation.” That’s disrespectful and lascivious, I think. It’s true that the transition is an interesting story, and that the medical community does play an important role in it, but the story of a transsexual person’s life is not the story of a trip to the hospital – or, for that matter, to the large size shoe store. The story of people like me is everything that happens before and everything that happens after.

BIOG: When you first decided to transition, what was your biggest fear? What became of that fear once you actually did transition, and what role does it play in your life now?

JFB: My greatest fear was disappointing the people that loved me, or … putting people at risk whom I had sworn to protect. By this I am specifically talking about my wife and my sons; I knew that I was probably strong enough to endure whatever the world would throw at me. But it seemed cruel to me to force this choice upon my loved ones. I still feel guilty about it sometimes, although frankly I think I’m the only one who does worry about it anymore. My wife is still given to saying, “Marrying Jenny Boylan was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.” I realize that that sounds crazy to some people, but fortunately those people aren’t married to me. I guess I still do what I can to protect my family, and to honor the promises that I made. At the same time, I think my sons would say that they don’t need protecting, that at this point (they’re seventeen and nineteen), they are strong enough to speak their own minds.

BIOG: You write in the book about a novel you were working on for a few years, I’ll Give You Something to Cry About, that wound up not panning out. Do you have any plans to revisit and rework it, or do you think you’ll just put it to bed?

JFB: I’m not sure what to tell you about that, to tell you the truth. That was a novel that I worked on for several years and which I still adore. It may be that the kind of novels I write – which are admittedly comic and subversive – don’t have as much of an audience as I wish they did. Or it could be just that the kind of truth I’ve been able to find in nonfiction is of a kind I can’t quite muster in a novel anymore. It’s an unavoidable fact of my literary career that when I was a man, I was writing fiction; now that I’m female, I write nonfiction. If someone wants to write a graduate dissertation about what’s profound in that, they can have at it.

BIOG: While on a college tour with Zach, you ponder what it means to be a father and mother. You write: “A world in which male and female are not fixed and unmoving poles but points in a wide spectrum is a world that feels unstable, unsafe, unreal … Surely, if we make room for the mutability of gender, we have to accept that motherhood and fatherhood themselves are no longer unalterable binaries either.” I love this. It reminded me a lot of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and h/er ideas. I wondered if you were a fan of h/er s, or if you’re familiar with h/er work?

JFB: Gee, I sure wish I did know h/er. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. How could I not know about a writer named Genesis Breyer P-Orridge?

I do think that the instability business does account for some of the anger and confusion that people have about transgender people. It’s as if folks think we have lived our lives in this curious, difficult way deliberately in order to hurt other people’s feelings, as if all of the suffering that I went through when I was young I went through specifically to piss other people off.

The thing is, though, making room for the many different ways there are of being human in the world doesn’t make the universe more unstable – just the opposite. It makes the world more full of love and acceptance and compassion.

BIOG: What’s next for you?

JFB: I am, I’m sorry to say, already deep into two new books – one work of nonfiction as well as – wait for it! – a novel. What can I tell you? Hope springs eternal.

It’s safe to say that on the long list of things people fear most, aging falls somewhere near the top. Luckily, there are some writers who possess the capability of approaching the oft-dreaded subject with a blend of humor, refreshing insight, and wit. Pushing past their deepest fears, the authors gathered here – who are among those we count in the category of possessing this capability – all face the aging process with a bravery and confidence that is not only more graceful than aging itself, but should be greatly inspiring for all of us.

“I Remember Nothing” by Nora Ephron
Early on in the aptly titled “I Remember Nothing,” Nora Ephron confesses, “I have been forgetting things for years, but now I forget in a new way.” She repeats herself; she uses the expression “When I was young”; she has no idea who anyone is in People magazine. Ephron feels old, which in light of her death earlier this year makes the 2010 book of essays feel like an omen of sorts. Though it’s almost as if, with this book, Ephron was giving her readers and fans (and perhaps even herself) the nod to let them know that she had made her peace with aging and the inevitabilities that come with it.

“Blue Nights” by Joan Didion
“Blue Nights” garnered its reputation as literary icon Joan Didion’s book about losing her only daughter, Quintana Roo. It’s a sequel of sorts to “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her earlier memoir about losing her husband less than two years prior to Quintana’s death. “Blue Nights” is more than a memoir of loss, however; it is also a book about the writer herself growing older. In it, Didion spares us no details. With the same raw honesty that emanates from every sentence the author produces, Didion lets us in on some of her greatest anxieties: her increased focus on becoming frail, her fear of falling on the street, and her fear that she may “never again locate the words that work.” Aging doesn’t play favorites, and it doesn’t make exceptions for brilliant writers, a reality we witness Didion coming to terms with in this book as she writes, “I believed absolutely in my own power to surmount the situation. Whatever ‘the situation’ was …. That being seventy-five could present as a significantly altered situation, an altogether different ‘it’ did not until recently occur to me.”

“Winter Journal” by Paul Auster 
In his latest book, “Winter Journal,” Paul Auster is blunt from the get-go. On page two, only a month shy of his sixty-fourth birthday, he writes, “It is an incontestable fact that you are no longer young,” thus setting the tone for the rest of the book. What follows is a collection of firsts, a detailed list of the author’s addresses over the years, of his scars, his mother’s untimely death, and the degradation of his body as he once knew it. Auster turns the memoir on its side by writing in the second person, and as a result, including the reader in his journeys. You will have a hard time not falling for Auster’s charm and his willingness to open up.

“Somewhere Towards the End” by Diana Athill
When Diana Athill chose to write about old age in “Somewhere Towards the End,” she was not merely speculating what it might be like one day in the distant future; indeed, she was ninety one years old as she wrote it (she’s ninety-four now). Though she may not always say what you want to hear (or, more accurately, write what you want to read) – Athill confesses to losing her sex drive in her seventies and refers to old age as boring on more than one occasion – her sometimes brutal honesty is also her biggest strength. In the first chapter, she observes that there are a plethora of books written about being young; with this she decides to contribute to another conversation, about not being young. “But there is not much on record about falling away. Being well advanced in that process ... I say to myself, ‘Why not have a go at it?’ So I shall.”

“The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty” by Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Not unlike the plot of the critically acclaimed film “Harold and Maude,” author, former professor, and feminist Carolyn G. Heilbrun had made a pact with herself at a young age to end her life when she turned seventy (though, spoiler alert, Maude is eighty and she does end her life). But as she approached that fateful birthday, she found her golden years were full of magical moments and unexpected joys she couldn’t have predicted. Her seventieth birthday came and went. A chapter early on in the book titled “The Small House” is about buying a house all her own in the country, at age sixty-eight, a terrific example of Heilbrun’s independence and unconventionalism, which are at the true heart of this book.

Tell us: What’s the most exceptional memoir you’ve ever read that addresses aging?

Of course there are exceptions, but alongside almost every great literary figure there is a great, often just as creative, other half. He or she is there to support, love, and inspire; to help nurture ideas, foster breakthroughs, talk through artistic dilemmas, and be there during hard times or failures. The partners of famed writers have written some of the most fascinating firsthand accounts of these unions, and we’ve compiled this list to showcase some of our favorite portraits of well-loved authors and the relationships that helped to define them.

“A Ticket to the Circus” by Norris Church Mailer

The union of novelist, journalist, and political candidate Norman Mailer with writer, painter, and model Norris Church Mailer resulted in one potent power couple brimming over with charisma. Known to pal around with folks like Bill and Hillary Clinton (Norris had a fling with Bill the year before she met Norman: “He was pretty hard to resist, I must say. So I didn’t . . .”), Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro, Gore Vidal, and Jackie Kennedy, the Mailers led exciting lives filled with legendary parties and world travel. Norris writes about the blissfully loving and unsurprisingly difficult sides to her relationship with Norman in “A Ticket to the Circus.” She offers a lengthy background of her early life (born Barbara Jean Davis) and includes love letters she and Norman exchanged during the thirty-three years they spent together until his death in 2007 at eighty-four. (She was half his age and his sixth, and last, wife.) He writes in an early letter to her, “You were an oasis on a long trip.”

“Elegy for Iris” by John Bayley

British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and her husband, the literary critic, novelist, and Oxford professor John Bayley, managed to achieve the kind of relationship perhaps every writerly couple wishes for: one of constant support and mutual affection, along with a healthy dose of freedom and independence. Murdoch, a critically acclaimed novelist (ranked twelfth on a list of “The 50 Greatest British writers since 1945” by The Times of London in 2008), was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the mid-nineties and died from it in 1999 at the age of seventy-nine. “Elegy for Iris” is Bayley’s simultaneously loving yet heartbreaking tale of his life with Murdoch, before, during, and after her battle with the disease. Bayley splices painful anecdotes of a deteriorating Murdoch with rich and often amusing stories of their rich life together, including Murdoch's uncharacteristic arrival to a ball wearing a “flame-coloured brocade” and subsequent fall down a flight of stairs.

“About Alice” by Calvin Trillin

From his work as a novelist, poet, and journalist for the The New Yorker since 1963, Calvin Trillin might be the more widely recognized writer in this relationship, but it’s obvious from his writings about his late wife -- the writer, educator, and muse born Alice Stewart -- that she was equally exceptional. “About Alice” is his heartfelt tribute to her and the story of the cherished relationship the couple shared until Alice passed away as a result of treatments she was undergoing for lung cancer (on September 11, 2001, no less). In the bite-sized book -- it’s just under eighty pages -- Trillin, with characteristic wit, brings their love story to light from their early courtship through Alice’s brave battle with the fatal disease. After Alice’s death, as Calvin is going through a pile of letters from empathetic fans, he receives one that sums up the magic of Calvin and Alice Trillin: “Yet I got a lot of letters like the one from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, ‘But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?’”

“Must You Go? My Life With Harold Pinter” by Antonia Fraser

When playwright Harold Pinter and biographer Antonia Fraser met, they were both taken; Fraser to Sir Hugh Fraser, a member of Parliament, and Pinter to actress Vivien Merchant. But that didn’t stop them from quickly falling for one another, leaving their respective partners, and becoming involved. Less than nine months after they met, the two began living together, marking the beginning of a thirty-three year relationship that lasted until Pinter died from liver cancer in 2008. “Must You Go?” is a very detailed --sometimes too detailed -- account of their shared life told through a series of diary entries written by Fraser. Though it drags on a bit, there are certainly delectable moments to relish, such as the time Pinter enters the room and seizes Fraser’s diary and writes in it, “I love you wildly and that is my solace.” Though they didn’t find each other until they were in their forties, their love seems like kismet.

“At Home in the World: A Memoir” by Joyce Maynard

Many people have surely fantasized about writing notoriously reclusive author J.D. Salinger a fan letter, though the list of people who have received fan letters from Salinger is presumably much shorter. Joyce Maynard is among them. When she was eighteen, after writing a cover piece for the New York Times Magazine, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life,” Maynard received a letter from Salinger praising her story and cautioning her about fame. This single letter turned into a series of correspondences, and after twenty-five or so exchanges back and forth, Maynard dropped out of Yale and moved in with Salinger, who was a good thirty-five years her senior. In “At Home in the World,” Maynard reflects on their almost-year-long affair and the lasting effect its abrupt ending had on her afterward. (Salinger tired of Maynard rather quickly, though the feeling was, to say the least, not mutual.) Years later, as she looks over the letters one last time in preparing to sell them to an auction house, she writes: “I came to a passage warning of the extraordinary danger of letters from strangers, and the power of words on the page. Jerry Salinger was right: A letter can be a dangerous thing, as I now know well. Ironically, no letter I ever received exerted more destructive force then the one I was even then holding in my hand.”

Kate White, bestselling author and editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan for fourteen years (until earlier this month, when Joanna Coles took over the post), knows how valuable her hard-earned wisdom is to career-minded young women. In the introduction to her new book “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know,” White details the story of her professional trajectory and clues readers in on her motivation to write the book. “Why am I so eager to share my favorite secrets?” she asks. “Because I’m at a point in my career where it costs me nothing to do so -- and I’m grateful for all the advice that’s been offered to me.” At 345 pages, “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This” is jam-packed with life lessons. Here we share the top ten, culled from some of our favorite chapters.

1. "Ballsy Strategies for Finding a Job"

Did you ever notice that when you read about people with successful careers, you often learn about their unconventionally bold moves? Kate White is no exception. She scored her first “real” job at Glamour after winning the magazine’s Top 10 College Women contest her senior year, and her next job as senior editor of Family Weekly by making a list of the magazines she admired in a notebook and using her contacts to reach out to people on that list. Terri Wein, cofounder of executive coaching firm Weil & Wein, weighs in too, offering the modern day version of White’s technique: use spreadsheets instead of a notebook!

 2. "9 Things You Should Never Do in a New Job"

When first starting a new job, it’s hard to get it all right -- you want to turn in good work, impress your boss, and always be on time, if not early (another key point White gets into later in the book). There are so many nuances to master and unspoken rules to learn. Before you break into a cold sweat thinking about all of your new responsibilities, digest this chapter and feel your fears melt away. Among its takeaway: never turn up your nose at grunt work, don’t get too cozy with coworkers while on the job, and don’t forget to tell your boss you like the work!

3. "Now Knock Their Socks Off"

After you’ve mastered what not to do in a new job, the next obvious step, of course, is to “Now knock their socks off!” This chapter is about taking things to the next level. Anyone can tick off a bunch of items on a checklist, but how many people go the extra mile? See what needs to be done, and then take things a step further. Write a story without an assignment. Ask for more work! (What boss can say no to that?)

4. "Always Ask for What You Want"

Often, even when we know what we want, it can be daunting to come right out and ask for it. White nails it on the head when she writes: “Why are we such scaredy-cats when it comes to asking? We’re afraid that if we ask, it will seem as if we’re overstepping our bounds.” The good news? That’s not the case. White encourages that you do ask, and that you make sure to do it “in the right way.” In this chapter, she talks more about what that right way is, and she reminds readers to leave emotions at the door. In other words, be tough! Her concluding piece of advice: have backup proposals clearly in mind in case they say no.

5. "12 Ways to Get Buzzed About"

Before Kate White was the household name she is today, well, she was still Kate White; you just hadn't heard of her. Here, White reveals many of the steps she took -- and that you can take, too -- to become buzz-worthy. Some crucial points she shares: develop a signature look, and get out there -- in person, not just virtually. 

6. "Career Breakthroughs: The Very Simple Formula"

In the first part of the book, White focuses on helping readers figure out what exactly they want to do professionally and how to land that position. Since success doesn’t end here, White has developed a very simple formula for plotting a series of strategic moves: Ask yourself if you’re really ready to take on the job you’ve been dreaming about, if you’re creating enough opportunities for yourself and not just waiting for them to come along, and if you’ll be ready to hustle when openings arise.

7. "It Pays to Be a Little Paranoid"

One should not aspire to be a worrywart, nor be in a constant state of panic, but a mere smidgen of paranoia is not a bad idea. In other words, be aware and be prepared. “I need to be on the alert for danger, spot it early, and, when possible, act on it before things turn ugly. I recommend that you do the same,” Whites says. At the end of the chapter, she lists “14 Things to Be Paranoid About,” including suddenly being excluded from important meetings and an economic downturn. Take note.

8. "Terrific Time-Management Tricks"

Time-management is one of those skills that can always be improved upon. Here, White shares the names of two time-management book authors she highly recommends and lets readers in on a few of her own tricks. Find the time of day when you’re most in the zone, prioritize, and don’t wait until all your ducks are in a row to start something; jump in head first, and then get organized, she urges.

9. "Setting Boundaries"

While sometimes it can be tempting to work 24/7 (imagine all that you’d get done!), that tendency is far from healthy. Productivity expert Julie Morgenstern, who makes a guest appearance in this chapter, equates using handheld devices late at night to “drinking a can of Diet Pepsi just as you’re getting ready for bed.” Morgenstern also suggests screen breaks to help us think, and checking email around five times a day for twenty or thirty minutes at a time rather than every few minutes, all day, every day.

10. "Make Your Back-Pocket Dream a Reality (While You’ve Still Got a Day Job)"

If you have a “back-pocket” dream that you want to pursue, don’t let it fall by the wayside because of your career aspirations, White advises. She doesn't advocate that you quit your day job after knitting a few killer pot-holders, but suggests: “You don’t have to do everything at once. Think of yourself as a serial achiever, someone who will probably live a long life and can take on different goals when the timing is right.”

In writing the inspirational “Spirit Junkie: A Radical Road to Self-Love and Miracles,” Gabrielle Bernstein is well aware of the mass appeal of a good spiritual transformation story. In her early twenties, Bernstein was a typical Manhattan party girl -- she looked to men, nightlife, drugs, and material possessions to make her happy. She ran a public relations firm and buried herself in work to avoid facing feelings of deep dissatisfaction. Then in 2005, she hit rock bottom was forced to shift gears and seek a healthier lifestyle.

That’s when Bernstein’s love affair began -- not with a man, but with “A Course in Miracles,” a self-study curriculum that focuses on forgiveness in daily life.  It was the spiritual activist and author Marianne Williamson who introduced Bernstein to “the Course” and eventually became her guru, as well. Helping to carry Williamson’s message into the twenty-first century, Bernstein writes: “The more I committed to this new belief system, the less I replayed my past in the present. In time I began to release those fears and witness miraculous changes. This realization was revelatory in that I’d awakened to the fact that if I stuck to the Course’s plan I could truly relinquish my fearful patterns.”

Although she preaches the Course’s unparalleled benefits, the potential for criticism of its jargon is not lost on Bernstein. She warns readers of this from the outset and promises to “Gabbify” her own language in relating its core teachings. She does that by coining words like “~ing,” which stands for inner guidance (as in, “Add More ~Ing To Your Life," the title of her previous book). Hokey or not, it’s clear that “A Course in Miracles” changed Bernstein’s life for the better: “What mattered most was the guidance the Course had to offer me at a time when I needed it most.” Now a successful motivational speaker, life coach, and author, Gabrielle Bernstein emanates positive vibes and self-love on every page of “Spirit Junkie.” Listen to the clip below to learn about the start of her journey to a healthy life.

Unlike his fellow inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, Clarence “Bob” Birdseye is no household name. You would be hard-pressed to find someone, however, whose life hasn’t been touched by his most successful invention, or innovation: the flash freezing of food. Thanks to Mark Kurlansky -- the author behind bestsellers “Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World,” “Salt: A World History,” and “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell,” to name a few -- the world now has access to his life story with the “Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man,” published last spring.

In “Birdseye,” Kurlansky excels in telling the story of an off-the-cuff individual with insatiable curiosity and an enormous appetite for advancing modern technology in his own quirky way. Born at the tail end of the 1800s, Birdseye stayed there in spirit even as his fellow inventors moved forward. Kurlansky writes: “Clearly, Birdseye was shaped by the nineteenth century. Even as an inventor, he used nineteenth-century industrial technology for nineteenth-century goals ...Yet his impact on how people lived in the twentieth century was enormous.” Tonight as you defrost a bag of peas from your freezer,  listen to this excerpt about the early life of Birdseye, and consider the story of the man behind the dinner on your table.

While most American children in the mid-1950s were busy going to school, frolicking on the playground with friends, or committing offenses like teasing their siblings, New York City-born Jon Roberts, née John Riccobono, was often missing school to escort his Mafia criminal father “to work.” At age seven, Roberts witnessed his father commit cold-blooded, casual murder, an event that would undoubtedly change his world forever and begin to shape him into the callous, some say psychopathic, adult he would later become.

When his father asked him that fateful day, “Did you see anything?” Roberts had the sense to reply that he hadn’t. He also had the sense, years later, to realize that in watching his father commit such a serious crime with no consequences or even mention of what had happened (his father’s driver, Mr. Tut, was the only other person there and he didn’t so much as acknowledge the act), it altered him in an irrevocable way. Roberts says in reflection: “I believe the shooting changed me. It made my reactions different from a normal person’s. I learned not to get emotional. I learned to observe without reacting or crying. My father trained me in that incident to be like a soldier: not to let what I saw get to me, to move on. I was a little kid. I didn’t reason this out. It seeped into me as instinct.”

Learning of this story, it’s almost impossible to imagine Roberts becoming anything but the remorseless criminal he eventually grew into. In “American Desperado,” written by Roberts himself (along with Evan Wright, the pseudo-Gonzo journalist and author of “Generation Kill,” about a group of Marines as they invaded Iraq, later turned into an HBO miniseries), we follow his downward spiral from one genre of criminal activity to the next. First stop, small-time Mafia dealings; next, Vietnam, where Roberts first killed someone; then on to running NYC nightclubs for several years until a brush with the law drove him to Miami, where he soon became a major drug trafficker in the Medellin Cartel. The stories in “American Desperado” are rich with details so vivid they're almost surreal; listen here for a powerful excerpt from an early chapter.

With the same vigor and precision used to crack the Watergate scandal, Carl Bernstein of the famous investigative journalist duo Woodward and Bernstein digs deep into Hillary Rodham Clinton’s life and career in his 2007 biography “A Woman in Charge.”

His depiction of Clinton in multiple roles -- as student, lawyer, First Lady, and United States senator, as well as daughter, wife, and mother -- is illuminated by the more than two hundred interviews he conducted with Clinton’s loved ones and colleagues.

Bernstein starts at the beginning, painting a picture of a young Hillary growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois in a family of “odd ducks,” including her father Hugh Rodham -- a “sour, unfulfilled man.” As harsh and tough as Rodham could be, Bernstein notes, there was a positive side to him; Rodham and his wife believed that children could pursue almost any dream, and that influence must have been formative for Clinton.

Naturally, the complex relationship between Hillary and Bill is a focal point of “A Woman in Charge,” which investigates its very public ups and downs, as well as its impact on and drawing out of their personal and political strengths. In a passage that reveals volumes about both Clintons [page 556 of the hardcover version], Bernstein cites a comment made by political columnist David Broder during Hillary’s 2008 presidential nomination campaign: “Her marriage is the central fact in her life, and this partnership of Bill and Hillary Clinton is indissoluble. She cannot function without him, and he would not have been president without her. If she becomes president, he will play as central a role in her presidency as she did in his. And that is something the country will have to ponder.”

The outcome of the campaign is no secret, but Hillary’s evolution as one of the world’s most powerful and trailblazing women continues to fascinate. For more insight into her story, listen to the excerpt below.

Thomas Cahill’s “A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green” [also subtitled "How a Forgotten Child Became a Man and Changed a World"] is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. While it probes weighty themes of race, class, and the utter corruption of our so-called legal system, it also invokes reflection on growth, forgiveness, and the power of spirit.

At eighteen years old, Green was one of a few men involved in an armed robbery in Houston, where he lived. The victim, who pulled a knife amid the mayhem, was subsequently killed by gunshot. It wasn’t Green who pulled the trigger, but he was blamed for the crime. Twelve years later, he was executed by the state of Texas.

In many ways, Green never had a chance; his circumstances, if not predetermined, seem inevitable in hindsight. An unstable family life led him to the streets, alone at age fifteen, and before that he lived in a storage shed with his brother, selling drugs to support them both. At age nine, his father gave him a gun for self-protection.

It seems there are only two roads to take on Death Row: pursue a spiritual path toward inner peace, or lose faith and give up. Green chose the former. He used education and strength to transform himself into the poised, calm, strong “saint” he became. After reading Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s book “No Future Without Forgiveness,” Green was inspired, and his anger was replaced by forgiveness. (Tutu, who was a supporter in the fight against Green’s death, visited Green in prison before he was killed.) Listen below as Cahill reads an excerpt from his book about when he first met Green and entered his story.