Hello.

Welcome to Inside the Cover.

Tonight's book is Write for Your Life by Anna Quindlen.

Anna Quindlen is a novelist and award winning journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction and self-help bestseller list.

I have always enjoyed her writing and was quite pleased when my friend Randy loaned me his copy of this recent effort by Quindlen.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Quindlens writing is crisp, conversational and to the point, she does not write to impress but to inform.

In this book, she offers her views about the value and importance of people sharing and communicating their thoughts, feelings and perspectives with those they love, as she writes.

“So what if your writing is only read by one or two people you love and trust who understand?

If those are people who can learn from and value it, isn't that a notable achievement?

A valuable audience?

” Write for Your Life begins with the story of a young girl and her diary, which she named Kitty.

In that diary, Anne Frank provided irreplaceable insight into living day to day, hidden away in an attic from the brutal aims and policies of Nazi Germany.

Quindlen advises that the diary holds another lesson for young and old about what writing can do.

The message is not just as she was a Jewish girl sent to her death, a diarist who would tell the world how one family had been obliged to live because of the imagined crime of their faith.

The message is that writing can offer comfort to us all.

Quindlen also shares a story of the self-named Freedom Writers, a Wilson High School in Long Beach, California.

As a new teacher, Erin Gruwell was saddled with first year students who had learning disabilities, disciplinary issues and juvenile records.

In other words, The Unteachables.

She assigned the students the task of keeping a personal journal.

The students wrote about gang warfare, sexual assault, suicide attempts, apartment evictions and a constant fear of being unmasked as undocumented in America.

Ultimately, the students decided to continue the Freedom Writers project through their four high school years, and their writings were ultimately published as a book.

They made it to the top spot on the New York Times best seller list.

The story of the Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell is one of several that Quindlen uses to illustrate the importance of writing.

A few months ago, I read a book called Yours Truly An Obituary Writer's Guide to Telling Your Story by James R Hagerty.

This is your bonus book for the evening.

Hagerty's Message was much the same as Quindlens.

We all have stories and no one can tell them as well as we can.

While our personal stories may not be as significant as those gleaned from the letters and writings of Karl Marx, Sylvia Plath and Winston Churchill, James Joyce or Franklin Roosevelt, they are and can be important to our families, friends, work colleagues.

Perhaps most importantly, they are important to us.

Let me leave you from this quotation from Write for Your Life.

“From time to time, I have both received and sent such messages and know that they can be terribly meaningful.

Sometimes we assume people know how we feel, and then when we actually put it down in words, we realize how gratitude, appreciation and love take on a larger, more lasting meaning when they are in concrete form.

Perhaps that's the best reason to have what sometimes seems like jury-built occasions-- Valentine's Day, Mother's Day.

Not for the sake of flowers, of restaurant meals and breakfast in bed.

Maybe because on those days, so many of us stop and actually write down the words, I love you.

” Tonight's book has been Write for Your Life.

By Anna Quindlen.

I am happy to recommend it to you.

Goodnight.

And I look forward to our next discussion.