Steven Saylor usually writes about people who lived long ago and far away—USA Today calls him “a modern master of historical fiction”—but in these remarkably revealing essays he turns an insightful gaze on his own life, ruminating on his mother’s death, his Texas hometown, and his marriage to another man. These three essays, says Saylor, “may be the closest thing to an autobiography that I’ll ever write.”

Also included is the prize-winning short story “Kinder, Gentler,” a rare piece of autobiographical fiction written when Saylor lived on Castro Street in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS crisis.