Because You Have To: A Writing Life

Part memoir, part handbook, part survey of the contemporary literary scene, Joan Frank's Because You Have To: A Writing Life is a collection of essays that, taken together, provide a walking tour of the writing life. Frank's aim is to form a coherent vision, one that may provide some communion about realities of the writer's vocation that have struck her as rarely revealed.

Frank offers what she has learned as a writer not only to other writers, but to those to whom good writing matters. H...