This is an excellent essay collection. I am typically rigidly stubborn about being able to distinguish between what is fact and what is fiction, but because the writing is so good in these essays, I had no problem with Beard's use of creative non-fiction in memoir. (In one essay, she is not even born.) The essays are not presented in chronological order, so it's interesting to decipher where certain events fit in.

"The Fourth State of Matter" is an absolutely tremendous essay and by far the best among them (it was published in The New Yorker and is worth looking up on its own), while "Coyotes" actually stymied me for an entire week because I kept falling asleep (and is completely different in style than everything else in the book)