Mistakes make us human

To live a full life is to make mistakes.  Unlike Fitzgerald’s suggestion of "personality as an unbroken series of successful gestures," for most of us life is messy, complicated and often filled with regret and anger.  When we look back we realize we are,  in some strange and mysterious way, the sum total of all that we have done.  The meals we’ve eaten, the books we’ve read and the people that we have touched and have touched us.  Together it forms kind of life mosaic, unique and often compelling.

Such has been the life of Daniel Manaker. Through the hallowed halls of the New Yorker, where he worked for twenty-six years, to the pinnacle of power in publishing at Random House and Harper Collins, through the death of a mother, a brother and his own battle with cancer, he now shares his unique mosaic with us in his new memoir My Mistake

My conversation with Daniel Menaker: