Phillip Lopate, who began as a novelist and poet, has grown into the foremost American source of perspective and wisdom on the subject of autobiographical writing. In 1994, he solidified this role with The Art of the Personal Essay, a thick anthology including writers from Plutarch to Joan Didion. He directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the author of more than a dozen books, including three personal essay collections.

Earlier this year, Lopate published To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, a conversational guide incorporating the tips and insights of a writer and teacher at the peak of his mastery. It has quickly become one of the the most referenced and dog-eared books on our bookshelf, and here’s why:

1) He includes an authoritative and eclectic reading list of genre-defining autobiographies, essays, and memoirs, from the classic to the contemporary, organized by subject. Some of our favorites from the more than 300 titles he includes are Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage.

2) He admits to his discomfort with the evolving classifications of “creative nonfiction,” “memoir” and “lyric essay,” settling on “literary nonfiction.” If he’s not totally clear on what it all means, then we feel reassured about our own questions. “Nonfiction writers are the resident aliens of academia,” he writes. As enrollments in nonfiction MFA programs continue to increase, Lopate is doing all he can to legitimize the validity of writing about one’s own life and promoting professional outlets for personal narrative.

3) He helps writers achieve the necessary distance between their circumstances and their story by offering insight into how to turn oneself into a character. “When I sit down to write, I hear a voice in my head. Who sent me that voice?...All I know is that I keep listening for the voice to surprise me, say something out of the ordinary, provocative, mischievous, borderline dangerous…I wait to pounce with glee on some received truth,” he writes. It is only at the editing stage that he constructs or fabricates what he refers to as an “object” -- his persona on the page.

4) In the chapter “On the Ethics of Writing about Others,” Lopate provides tongue-in-cheek instruction on how to write with honesty and confidence about loved ones (“If you plan to write about friendship, make lots of friends, because you are bound to lose a few,” etc.), but he also offer practical tips derived from his own experience: when he first began writing about his family, he changed the names of his siblings, but not his parents, since his parents were already established, and his siblings were still in the thick of navigating their own young lives.

5) He reminds us that there are no right answers, only right efforts. Exploring the subject of how to end an essay, he admits that the conclusions to his own essays often arise from a combination of fatigue and optimism that “a possible solution, an intriguing glimmer” might function as an ending. He consciously leaves readers with some unresolved things to work out on their own, and after tinkering with lines and paragraphs as much as he can, he leaves them alone. He writes, “I am not interested after all in perfection; this ending will serve, it is good enough, it will have to do.”