Serious Face

The collection opens with an odd discovery: the author's own face turns up in a photograph more than a century old. That small coincidence sets the tone for thirteen essays about people who sit at the edges of ordinary life. One piece follows a hospice director who has lost three limbs and works where life gives way to death. Others look at a collapsing bird-breeding operation run by an aging farmer known as the Pigeon King, a multimillion-dollar scheme that unraveled around him, and at a first-person account of getting out alive from California's deadliest wildfire.

The book's range keeps widening from there. A French eccentric who claims his home sits at the center of the world is building a town to prove it. The author also stays with a man during his first day of freedom after twenty-one years in prison. Across these pieces, the writer records the hopes and anxieties of the people he meets with humor, insight, and kindness, and the stories add up to a varied picture of human ambition, error, clumsiness, and decency.

The central idea running through the essays is that our weakness, rather than our achievements, is what binds us together. The author asks whether, even in moments of catastrophe or in the strange absurdity of daily routine, we can learn to accept the people we actually are underneath the composed expressions we present to others.