Molly Giles is an award-winning fiction writer. Her first collection of stories, ROUGH TRANSLATIONS won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers award. Four subsequent collections—CREEK WALK, BOTHERED, ALL THE WRONG PLACES, and WIFE WITH KNIFE, have also won awards, including the Small Press Best Fiction Award, the California Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, the Spokane Short Fiction Award, and the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize. She published her first novel, IRON SHOES, in 2000, and twenty-three years later, published its sequel, THE HOME FOR UNWED HUSBANDS. Giles has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaii, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at numerous writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. Her work has been included in many anthologies including the O.Henry and Pushcart Prize (three times), and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arkansas Arts Council. She has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Book Reviewing, been awarded residences at MacDowell, Yadoo, and The House of Literature in Paros, Greece.
LIFE SPAN, a memoir in flash form, is the first book of nonfiction from award-winning fiction writer Molly Giles, and a rare pleasure for her admirers—old and new. Giles distills her experiences of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge since that first sunny day in 1945 when she rode from San Francisco to Sausalito in a moving van with her father who had just returned home from fighting in World War II. Readers travel with her, as every transit yields an insight, an expectation, a regret, or a challenge in the life of a woman whose steadfast love of writing fuels her way. In this story of a woman with brains and desires, Giles details her journey as a writer, narrating the complexities of ambition, hope, betrayal, love, and wild joys. Smart, buoyant, and funny, not least at her own expense, LIFE SPAN is for everyone who loves good writing and cares about the perseverance of a woman who dared follow her heart’s ambition.