A friend once told me that there are two ways to determine if someone is exceptionally intelligent. One is if the person in question has memories from a very young age, and the other is if they develop romantic feelings for others early on. If there is, in fact, any truth to this argument, then Jo Ann Beard is a genius. (And even if not, I’d still like to argue that Beard is a genius.)

Beard’s essay collection The Boys of My Youth­ – which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this month – opens with a “pre-verbal” memory, as she calls it, from her time as baby, lying in her crib. Her favorite childhood doll, Hal, is there too. (Perhaps a crush, completing the full genius criteria?) Moving forward, Beard seamlessly transitions to a more recent memory from adulthood, introducing a pattern we continue to see throughout the rest of the book: the delicate back and forth dance she does so well.

We see Beard perform this dance in “Cousins,” which starts out, in a bold move, with Beard and her first cousin Wendell merely fetuses in their mothers’ bellies (pre-pre-verbal!). By the next page we see grown-up Beard and grown-up Wendell driving to a bar on a Saturday night, singing along with Fleetwood Mac. Later the girls are tripping at an Eric Clapton concert, but soon it’s back to them as kids playing with Barbies. In the middle of the essay, the girls’ grandfather dies. It’s out of this tragedy that one of the most touching lines of the book is born. After Beard’s aunt places little-girl Beard on her lap during the funeral, Beard writes, “I’m too big to sit on a lap, my legs are stiff, and now my heart has a grandpa in it.” This is just one example of many lines that have the power to give you butterflies in your stomach.

Another essay, “The Fourth State of the Matter,” begins with Beard’s dying dog and failing marriage, and then somewhat unexpectedly turns out to also include the school shooting that took place at the University of Iowa in 1991, in which Beard was almost a bystander. The essay, which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1996 and is said to have jumpstarted Beard’s writing career (it was my own gateway to this collection), is a true anomaly. It carries you through so many complex emotions, so successfully, that you come out changed on the other side – likely forever.

In the twelve essays that make up The Boys of My Youth, some as short as two pages long and others as long as fifty-six pages, Beard manages to maintain a consistent, even-keeled tone whether she’s talking about camping in the desert with her (now-ex) husband, or having a meltdown on the phone with her best friend, Elizabeth. No one could accuse Beard of shying away from the heavy subjects either. Instead, she approaches each one with her signature fearlessness. Her husband is thinking about leaving her? She embarks on a road trip alone (partially in hopes of making him miss her). While on that road trip, she is followed and verbally harassed by a maniacal stalker on the road. But rather than lose it, an understandably terrified Beard stares death in the face through an open window, and somehow manages to escape it.

Beard’s writing is so powerful in The Boys of My Youth­ that it left me needing to take time-outs in order to collect myself; it made me laugh out loud, alone in my apartment; and it had me so spooked that I once missed my subway stop and traveled in the wrong direction all the way till the end of the line before realizing what I had done. At times it simply exhausted me, in that I liked it so much. Beard, as a writer, is on a planet all her own, and the life form that grows there is incredible, enviable, awe-inspiring. I feel lucky to have had the chance to visit for a time.