With this collection of personal essays, Merrill Gerber, a widely and well-published novelist and short story writer, has painted a vivid portrait of herself as a writer and offered an honest glimpse of the inspiration for her own creative process. Through vibrant narratives that self-consciously waver on an ambiguous border between memoir and fiction, Gerber transfixes the reader with genuine accounts of her philosophies and samples of her life. The final three pieces of the collection, originally written as fiction, are included here as memoir to demonstrate her contention that the deepest truths in life can be and often are the greatest source from which to draw the best told lies in fiction. This book will appeal to teachers and students of writing as a study on the craft of writing as well as the general reader interested in the writing process.