Because it was the soonest that I could get it up and going! Every woman writer I know, whether she is just starting out or has written five novels and been nominated for the National Book Award, is in need of some new ideas and fresh sources of support. Writers have been getting dwindling advances and less and less of what they need from publishers; at the same time they are being asked to do more than ever before, to market, to promote, to brand, angle, to blog, and all on their own dime.

I know how much is expected of authors even if they publish with a major house. I also know, however, that many authors have become extremely skilled and expert in this new marketplace even if they’ve done so begrudgingly. Why let all that knowledge effectively go to waste, to die when an individual author’s book reaches the end of its publicity life cycle? She Writes was founded on the psychology of abundance. More is more. None of us has anything to gain by withholding what we’ve learned from each other.

The idea behind She Writes is to share our knowledge, to aggregate and harness the information each of us has hard-earned, and make it available to our community in an organized, efficient way that will make all of our lives easier. Why should every writer have to reinvent the wheel every single time she publishes something new? Why not help each other out so we all have more time to write, and write well? She Writes also makes it possible for writers who live outside of New York to find each other locally, to form writing groups, salons and form other offline relationships that writers, who work in isolation, really want and need.

How does the site work?

At its most basic level, the site functions a lot like Facebook – which is nice because it’s very intuitive for new members as long as they are familiar with social networking. Writers can join and make a page where they can upload book covers, post excerpts, blog, post events, import existing blogs, start discussions with other writers, join or start groups based on genre, region, or anything else they fancy (there are more than 80 groups already on She Writes), friend people, and seek out professional and artistic support.

A crucially important part of She Writes, however, will be our She Needs Help section, which we are building out now. We will be hosting webinars from the best in the business on everything from "Twitter for Writers," coming up next week, to fiction workshops, offering vetted, top-quality services to authors, including editing, event production and marketing help, and organizing a grass-roots network of She Writes salons all over the country and the world to support and host our writers when they publish and tour.

As of now we have members in all 50 states and 71 countries, after just four weeks. The potential for growth is enormous.

Why focus on women?

Women write important books, they are published and they are powerful, but at the same time women who write are still treated as "women writers" and not as writers, period. I would say to my sons -- you are welcome to join She Writes (all men are welcome) -- but as long as it remains true that a book about a man coming of age in New York can be considered a literary work, while a book written about a woman coming of age in New York will almost certainly be labeled chick lit and given a pink cover, as long as the major literary prizes are almost always awarded to men, and the editors in chief of the major literary magazines are almost all men, and as long as 85 percent of the bylines on our Op-Ed pages are written by men, women need to band together and organize in an effort to have our contributions taken more seriously.

Women are no longer on the outside of publishing banging on the door and to get in, but women continue to be excluded from the kind of status that men are granted by default.

Don't male writers need support networks?

I am sure male writers are also in need of networks and new ideas when it comes to publishing and promoting their books. The problems in the current publishing model are deep and widespread. But all you have to do is ask yourself what it would mean to start a network called He Writes and the answer to this question is self-evident -- men do not start from a point of being labeled and pigeonholed by their gender. Until they do, it’s hard to imagine a need for a group that specifically supports their efforts. 

Published in 1996, "Infinite Jest" was David Foster Wallace's second, and ultimately final, completed novel, and has become known equally for its sprawling attention to detail, its near impenetrability and its effectiveness as a doorstop. Often compared to experimental fiction like "Ulysses" and "Naked Lunch," its list of characters (and their fictional filmographies) alone may be longer than some entire novels. In the foreword to the paperback release, penned by Wallace's friend and contemporary Dave Eggers, he promises that the book isn't actually daunting, and that its author is indeed a "normal person." But that's no consolation to the legions who have quit reading the book partway through. Baldwin admits that before he started the project, he had only read about 75 pages -- but they'd stuck with him. "It sat in my library for so long that I no longer even saw it when I scanned the shelves," he said. "But based on what little I had read, I knew for a fact that I would enjoy all 1,000 pages. I can't say that with such certainty for, say, 'Don Quixote.'"

When Wallace died last year, I felt an itch of hard-to-place sadness for this man I did not know, whose work I had barely began to graze. His writing seemed made for me, set on the outer cusp of the television generation and the dawning of an Internet era; the humor, the tennis and the weed all mixed in a curious haze. With his long, stringy hair, eternal stubble and ubiquitous bandanna, Wallace was like an untouchable older brother, his stereo bass bumping from down the hall and his intrigue limitless.

As I ease into my 20s and the one-year anniversary of his death approaches, "Infinite Jest" suddenly seems within my grasp -- in large part because the Infinite Summer project injected a fun and contagious competitive spirit into something that had come to seem like a Herculean solo undertaking. The Web site lays out a "summer syllabus" of target page numbers by date, dividing the novel's intimidating 981 pages (plus 388 endnotes) by the number of days in the summer, which adds up to about 75 pages per week. Infinite Summer provides playful (but helpful) tips and guest essays -- largely personal accounts, including one from a seasoned four-time reader of the book and another from the singer of indie-rock band the Decemberists, Colin Meloy, who admits that "Infinite Jest" has lingered on his shelf ever since an impulse buy in 1997.

On the hyperactive discussion forums, everyone from Wallace virgins to connoisseurs can offer interpretations and suggest topics (organized by the reading schedule in order to prevent spoilers). One reader wondered about the book's setting -- a futuristic hybrid of the United States, Canada and Mexico referred to as the Organization of North American Nations or by the acronym ONAN -- sparking a conversation about the biblical character Onan and the notoriously wasteful practice of masturbation (i.e., onanism). Elsewhere, the novel's reference to a "trial-size dove bar" sparked a debate about whether Wallace was referring to the chocolate or the soap. Eventually, a fan -- whose source claims to have asked the author personally -- announced definitively that it was, in fact, a reference to the ice-cream bar. Puzzling over this kind of pop cultural minutiae is all the more fun when reading along with a few thousand of your closest Internet friends.

Of course, "Infinite Jest" also captures what Wallace called "a real American type of sadness" -- that of "a white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated" guy who is successful, and yet terribly lonely and adrift. Which makes the idea of bringing so many people together for a communal reading of the book all that more meaningful. To some, the "book club" may seem like an archaic social experience -- connotations of housewives and airport novels abound -- but many Infinite Summer participants enjoy the, well, infinite possibilities of this Web project. Paul Debraski, a New Jersey librarian who finds himself reading 20-25 pages on his one-hour lunch break, was initially attracted by "the camaraderie of achieving something big in a group" without the geographical limitations of a traditional book club. Cynthia Newberry Martin, a 52-year-old fiction writer, had kept "Infinite Jest" on a "to-be-read" shelf since 1996, but sets a goal of only 11 pages a day, keeping her on schedule. Baldwin insists that the greatest strength of an Internet-based book club is the concept of an archive, allowing someone on any schedule to check in whenever it is convenient. "Someone could read 'Infinite Jest' a year or five years from now, following along with the site as they do so, and feel as if they are part of the community despite the temporal separation," he said.

Also reading along are blogging superstars like Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress (reading on the Kindle) and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, while essay contributors to the site include Jason Kottke and even Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch. In good company, I resolve to keep plugging along, even as I fall behind, fearing the online shame and personal disappointment that would accompany surrender. In a book where one paragraph can sometimes stretch across three pages, an army of fellow readers provides not only extra aid in deconstructing this intricate epic, but also playful pep talks that cement solidarity and make finishing this book both a private and social experience.

As for Baldwin (who is about 100 pages ahead of schedule), he says he is surprised by the viral success of the project. Though he claims to have "zero reliable metrics" on Infinite Summer's participants, Baldwin monitors the project's presence on social networks including a Facebook group, blog comments and Twitter followers, who have taken to discussing the project using the #infsum hash tag. "It's important to understand, my goal in organizing this event was simply to encourage myself to read the book," he said. "That Infinite Summer wound up encouraging thousands of others to do likewise is just gravy."

This week, we shine the spotlight on first-person narratives: A young backpacker's life unravels on a trip to China; a novelist traipses around Italy in search of adventure; a girl grows up with a white dad who wants her to act black; a movie star helps a sensitive young woman make it through a turbulent childhood and a "mean little deaf queer" comes out (and grows up) with honesty and good humor.

 

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

By Susan Jane Gilman

It was a plan inspired by a paper placemat at a Rhode Island IHOP, but Susan Jane Gilman and her friend Claire, newly minted Brown graduates, were too young and romantic to see this as inauspicious. They decided to team up for an around-the-world backpacking tour, beginning in China. They didn't know each other that well, and they made something of an odd couple: Gilman a funny, voluble New Yorker from a family of modest means, and Claire (a pseudonym, for reasons that soon become clear) a wealthy WASP determined to prove to her overprotective father that she was "not some pampered little princess." "Let's be Don Quixote, Huck Finn and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one -- except with lip gloss," was what they told themselves.

Since the year was 1986 and the People's Republic of China had been open to independent travelers for "all of about 10 minutes," it took only about 10 more minutes before squalid guest houses, sweltering heat, weird food, the impenetrability of the Chinese language and the sudden realization that "we didn't know one soul in the entire hemisphere" began to batter their resolve. Gilman found herself wondering how famous travelers like Hemingway and Captain Cook had managed it. "Then it dawned on me," she writes. "Most of them had been completely drunk all the time."

"Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven" is a frequently hilarious and ultimately moving coming-age-story disguised as a classic backpacker's memoir. There are the homesick collect calls to relatives ("You've got three thousand dollars, an Ivy League education, and an enormous pair of bazooms," Gilman's grandmother told her. "The world should have your problems, bubeleh."), the hellish wrangling with the Chinese bureaucracy, the intense yet fleeting alliances with people met on trains or in hostels, the unexpected and overwhelming moments of exhilaration, and of course the irritable sniping inevitable between any two people who spend most of the day together under stressful circumstances. Gilman, for example, bridled at what she regarded as Claire's melodramatic "playacting" -- the superimportant "reports" she went off to write at times, her insistence that people they met on boats and restaurants were "contacts" sent by her father and his associates, the fear she professed whenever she saw anyone who looked Middle Eastern.

The reader will recognize the true nature of Claire's difficulties much earlier than Gilman did. When her friend disappeared in Guilin and their great adventure dissolved into a frantic search followed by nightmarish negotiations with Communist officials and police, Gilman got a growth experience far more transformative than the average Lonely Planet itinerary can offer. It's a page-turner ripe with odd little ironies -- the water purifier the women carried went unused, but that 900-page copy of "Linda Goodman's Love Signs"? That wound up saving the day -- and finished off with midlife update at once wistful, gratifying and wise. Which, when you think about it, is more than you can say of "On the Road." -- Laura Miller

The Last Supper

By Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk's engaging memoir of three months spent roaming Italy begins with a desire to escape -- not from anything specific, but from the dull, familiar feeling of familiarity. She is weary of Bristol, the British city where she and her husband are raising their daughters, and more than that, she despises the gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction that has crept over her. As anyone who's read a bit of E.M. Forster knows, the English have long used Italy as an exotic escape valve. ("In novels I read, people were forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment's notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm and cultured surroundings. It was a cure for everything.") As the family speeds along the French coastline she feels the dark clutter of her English world flutter away in the sunlight. And yet once they settle into their Italian farmhouse, she is frustrated to find that the family has not undergone a magical Mediterranean transformation. "Did we come all the way here to behave exactly as we do at home, while dogs bark at the wire fences and the mist hangs sodden on the hills?"

"The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy" is not your typical rosemary-scented, ready-for-cable ode to renovating a rustic house and rubbing shoulders with jolly peasants. A very talented novelist and observer, Cusk has a knack for drilling down into the thick of things and finding strangeness in even the most ordinary experiences. (Her autobiographical "A Life's Work" is one of the most bracing, dark books ever written about new motherhood.) Rather than looking for a sensual vacation, Cusk has in mind nothing less than a rearrangement of her senses. Once in Italy, she dedicates herself to a twofold process: making herself at home with the locals (particularly the Scottish-Italian taxi driver who takes the family under his wing and forces them to play endless games of tennis in the staggering heat) and pursuing aesthetic enthrallment. As she writes self-mockingly, "We will learn to fillet an Italian city of its artworks with the ruthless efficiency of an English aristocrat deboning a Dover sole."

Madonnas and altarpieces and relics fly by, as Cusk (and her remarkably patient, art-appreciative young daughters) traipse the Piero della Francesca trail and chase Raphaels and elbow their way through the museums of Florence. The author approaches everything she sees through the prism of history and literature, allowing herself to be captivated by her surroundings even while she is trying desperately to detach herself from the tourists all around. Cusk may hate tourists -- her descriptions of them are usually hilarious and sometimes cruel -- but she makes a passionate, sharp-tongued tour guide in this book about fleeing the ordinary in search of something beautiful. -- Joy Press

 I'm Down

By Mishna Wolff

If you're going to spin a tale about your impoverished, racially conflicted childhood, you might as well be funny about it. How else could Mishna Wolff explain to the reader of "I'm Down" that she grew up with a white dad who lived life as if he were black and expected her to do the same?

Wolff's dad -- who styled himself in a short perm, "a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains and a Kangol" -- divorced her lily-white hippie mom when she was a kid, and took custody of Wolff and her younger sister. While her mom is laying one kind of politically correct guilt on her ("Honey, oppressed people of the world make Barbie so a big corporation can get rich. Now is it really worth that kind of karma for a doll?"), Dad is unleashing another kind of guilt -- about skin color and privilege. He pressures her to fit in with their African-American neighborhood, goading her to toughen up and demand respect when kids call her names like "marshmallow turd." It isn't until Mishna learns the art of capping -- throwing insults -- that she starts to thrive and transform into the humorist she is today.

But just as Mishna is relaxing into her new role as ghetto smartass, her mother yanks her into an upscale white school on the other side of town where the unspoken rules couldn't be more different. Getting into a fight isn't a power play here; it's a sign that you've lost self-control. And playing dumb is uncool among the angsty rich girls who sit around drawing horses (and later listening to the Cure). Wherever she is, Mishna is never quite at home: At school she is always a little too rough around the edges, and at their broken-down house, her father and his string of African-American girlfriends warn Mishna against getting too uppity.

"I'm Down" is full of funny incidents that probably weren't so funny at the time -- like when Mishna's dad punished her for taking part in a faux-satanic ritual at a slumber party by forcing her to ... join the local basketball team, populated entirely by African-American amazons hoping to get to college on a scholarship. That would teach her a lesson! Of course, it actually does teach her a lesson, as do so many other semi-traumatic events along the way. Although the book sometimes relies so heavily on wit that it's hard to separate emotional turmoil from comedic setpiece, Wolff's affection for her family and friends -- and for the prickly, clueless honky girl she once was -- makes "I'm Down" more than just a joke. -- Joy Press

My Judy Garland Life: A Memoir

By Susie Boyt

Great movie stars are our magnifiers. They take some precious morsel of our humanity, a chip of diamond, and blow it up to the size of the MGM Grand, making it magnificent. Yet because they exist in a realm where ordinary people seem irrelevant, hardly anyone ever talks about how a star can change the way you feel about yourself. Susie Boyt, who became obsessed with Judy Garland after seeing "The Wizard of Oz" at the age of 3, does just that in her memoir, "My Judy Garland Life." Her book is an unusual mixture of appreciation, biography and autobiography, but its most fascinating aspect, is, paradoxically, not the shimmer of the star, but the portrait that emerges, via a tantalizing trail of revelations, of the author herself.

"That girl should work two hours and then be taken home in an ambulance," the actress Ina Claire once said of Garland; "how she gives of herself!" For Boyt, growing up in Britain as the conventional youngest child in a family of unflappable bohemians, Garland "proves something I've all my life believed, that nobody else in the world thinks is true." The Judy Garland credo, as Boyt sees it, is that "to be the person with the strongest feelings in life is to be the best." Garland's determination to strip herself bare, to funnel every modicum of her energy into her performances and to sing with all of her engulfing emotions utterly exposed to her audience, communicated to Boyt that her own "highly sensitive" temperament was more than OK. It was heroic.

The daughter of painter Lucien Freud (whose grandfather was Sigmund), Boyt was raised by her mother, the sort of woman who, upon receiving a modest inheritance, bought a small cargo ship, pulled her four children out of school and set about raising them on the high seas. But this, like her parents' separation, all happened before Susie was born. She grew up in an environment rather like a Victorian laundry, with pots on the stove boiling the yellow out of old bloomers for the vintage clothing store her mother opened after the ship project went bust.

Boyt portrays herself as an unexciting "old-fashioned girl," a chubby, stagestruck child turned domestic angel (she likes to bake, wash her father's dishes and fantasize about being Garland's faithful housekeeper). But she offers ample hints -- a college boyfriend who dies in a tragic accident, rock stars greeting the dawn on her roof -- that her life has been anything but drab. Her ruminations on the spiritual cost of dieting, the delicate art of consolation, the dignity of suffering and the importance of hero-worship are unfailingly funny and perceptive. "Do psychoanalysts share their fellow human beings' desire for a place where there isn't any suffering?" she writes, wondering what her great-grandfather would have thought of Garland's rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." "If so, they are very altruistic." It would be altruistic to wish Boyt had a more comfortable childhood, but without it, we wouldn't have this thoroughly delightful book. -- Laura Miller

"Mean Little deaf Queer"

By Terry Galloway

The most significant moment of Terry Galloway's life happened before she was even born. During a family stint in post-WWII Germany, her pregnant mother was given the antibiotic mycin to treat a kidney ailment. The drug helped cure the infection, but also led to fetal complications -- and Terry's creeping deafness. In her meandering, beautifully written memoir, Galloway recounts her path from Germany to Texas, from hearing to nonhearing and back to hearing again, and from her chronically insecure youth to a career as a stage performer and writer.

She also makes her way from bed to bed, men to women -- having, among other dalliances, a foursome with a classics professor, his wife and her mistress, and an affair with a cocaine smuggler. "Mean Little deaf Queer" manages to be more intriguing and more entertaining than most coming-out memoirs, partly because it tackles the intersection between sex and disability (a sexually inexperienced Galloway can't hear her early female lovers giving "urgently needed information" during sex) and partly because of the honesty and good humor of her prose (during a sojourn at a "camp for cripples," she reacts to losing a swimming race by pretending to drown).

Despite the frequent darkness of her story, with trips to a psychiatric hospital and multiple suicide attempts, Galloway never lapses into preachiness or self-pity, and the result is an unusual memoir about an unusual life that is both oddly uplifting and  eminently readable. -- Thomas Rogers

Michael Connelly

He started out as a reporter, and his latest book deals with the crumbling newspaper business (of course, it’s also a thriller). Connelly is a bestselling novelist and the creator of LAPD detective Hieronymus Bosch, a character that he has featured again and again in works like “The Concrete Blonde,” “The Overlook” and the forthcoming “Nine Dragons.” He had kind words for the books of George Pelecanos. Connelly’s books have appeared in 35 languages.

Mary Karr

We found Mary Karr signing autographs and giving away copies of her latest memoir, “Lit,” which details her descent into alcoholism and depression and then her emergence into the writer she is today. A professor of literature at Syracuse University, she has written poems, essays and three memoirs. The first two, “The Liars’ Club” and “Cherry,” spent substantial periods on the New York Times bestseller lists. Karr has also been a fellow at Radcliffe College and held a Guggenheim fellowship.

Jonathan Lethem

Brooklyn's own Jonathan Lethem has published nine novels as well as novellas, comics and fiction, including “Motherless Brooklyn” and “You Don't Love Me Yet.” His most recent book, “Chronic City,” will be published this fall. Although he says he will spend much of the summer outside New York City, he plans to reach for Balzac to stay connected to the urban vibe.

Sarah Dunant

Sarah Dunant was excited to share three new books that she can’t wait to pick up this summer (after which she’ll rest her eyes and lie down in the sunshine, she says). Dunant has written eight novels and two screenplays, and has edited two books of essays, also fitting in a stint working at the BBC. She lives in London and Florence.

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman writes fantasy, children’s books, graphic horror, short stories, screenplays, journalism, poetry and drama. He gained a cult following with his “Sandman” graphic novel series and is the author of “Stardust,” “American Gods,” and “Coraline” (the latter recently made into a movie and a musical). Born in England, he now lives in Minneapolis.

Berkeley Breathed

An award-winning cartoonist based in Southern California, Berkeley Breathed is the creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic “Bloom County” and the series “Opus.” He also writes children’s books such as “Pete and Pickles” and “Flawed Dogs – The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster,” which will be published in September.

Diana Gabaldon

Diana Gabaldon is the author of the “Outlander” novels, New York Times bestsellers that Salon has described as “the smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D.” She holds degrees in zoology, marine biology and quantitative behavioral ecology.

Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson were sitting together signing their latest book, “Peter and the Sword of Mercy” (the fourth in a series based on Peter Pan, which will be published in October). A Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist, Barry has 30 books to his name. Best known for mysteries and thrillers like “Chain of Evidence” and “Parallel Lies,” Pearson has written more than 20 novels.