Molly Giles is best known as a gifted short-story writer, but this late-in-life memoir produces a different kind of sparkle. It’s a more vulnerable tale than her polished fiction, and the flashes of rage and ambivalence that reoccur throughout the book make it a gripping and sometimes unsettling read. The format is economical and brilliant—each year since 1945 is given its own anecdote, and the years flash by, often centered around Giles’s crossing of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge from Marin into San Francisco or vice versa. The bridge becomes a touchstone, not always reassuring. In the beginning of her life, when she is just three, her family makes a momentous move to Marin from San Francisco. It’s just across the bay, but a very different “scene,” and Giles grows up in a rather stultifying 1950s family akin to Anne Lamott’s, with the same backdrop of alcoholism and zero emotional support. But Giles’s overly dramatic mother was a real writer—she published a novel, just one, in the late 1940s, and seems to have spent the rest of her life bewailing the fact that she couldn’t manage to write another. Giles learned to keep a lot inside, that’s clear.

The present tense narration makes everything vivid, funny, shocking, but doesn’t allow for too much reflection. I would have loved to know more about her parents’ background, for instance. It seems purely Irish American (her younger sisters are called Bridget and Nora). Pregnant, Giles leaves college and marries early, to her steady boyfriend, Dan, who remains a handsome enigma. Her penchant for handsome, masculine men who seem either empty or needy is thoroughly explored throughout the book, as she enters a series of long relationships with men who don’t seem to listen or care, or care but can barely function. Meanwhile, Giles embarks on an initially part-time career as a creative writing teacher (where I met her in the late 1980s), first at San Francisco State, then at the University of Arkansas. Her mainstay remains her home in Woodacre, California, though her three independent daughters soon leave to build lives of their own. When Giles’s writing career seems to stall and her romantic life does as well, she enters a difficult period of questioning her past. There is a dark revelation early in the book; later on, she reveals quietly that she has begun attending AA meetings for alcoholism, a shock to me.

I can attest that Giles was a brilliant teacher at State, much appreciated by her students and clearly “a grown-up.” But it is the primitive, needy, private parts of her own personality that she dares to delve into in this book. Luckily, and characteristically, her students are spared any kind of ridicule. But it’s the family closest to her that sometimes comes in for harsh scrutiny, as well as the men who failed to live up to her expectations. While some chapters are exquisitely polished (the vibrant, almost comic account of her mother’s death, for example), others are more quietly revealing. For example, an encounter with a distinguished doctor on an airport shuttle—an old friend of her parents who scolds her for portraying them harshly in her novel Iron Shoes—provokes this devastating insight, even as she frantically denies the accusation: “The parents in my novel were cruel to their children, two-faced to their friends, casually hateful to each other. They were the parents I knew. But they were not the parents [he] knew, or needed to know.”

And then, in her seventies, Giles meets a man who seems to be both a keeper and a guy who doesn’t need caretaking. There’s a genuine relief and expansiveness in the final chapters, where her grandchildren, too, are clearly the apples of her eye. Still crossing that bridge, for her partner lives in S.F. and she maintains the house in West Marin, she reaches a kind of equilibrium. I loved Life Span—and was startled at the intersections between my life and hers. One thing is for sure, Giles has been a restless spirit, and the constant moving between places in the book, while natural to her, may have somehow preserved her as well. (This back-and-forth movement jumps out at me, because I have stayed in the same city for thirty-six years. And there’s a danger in that.)

But this is not a complacent or nostalgic book and may shock acquaintances who know Giles as a kindly lady, a supportive friend. The female struggles to survive and thrive explored here are universal, but will particularly resonate with women born in the 1940s. I thought of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and my own mother’s life, where she belatedly found her vocation but spent her last years twice-divorced and lonely, hiding the secret of her cancer from everyone but a few.

When I met Giles back in the day, in my early twenties, I had no idea of the life she’d led, the intense effort it must have taken to get where she’d got. I thought her view of men was rather skewed, at the time, but then I wasn’t dating men myself. The courage it took for Molly Giles to fully “show up” in this book must have been immense, too. But I hope it was cathartic. It reads like it was.

Life Span was published in June by WTAW Press. Available in e-book and paperback.