Author Grace Paley.

In Art and Madness, her memoir of the literary 1950s, writer Anne Roiphe describes going into labor by herself in a snowdrift, unable to waker her sleeping playwright husband. Over the years, she learns her own power, charting her course through feminism and a life in art.

After Hustvedt suffered several unexplainable seizure-like episodes that defied medical diagnoses, she decided to chart her experiences -- and the murky intersection between mind, brain and body -- in a new book, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.

Brown wrote the novels "Civil Wars" and "Tender Mercies." Her newest is called "Before and After." It's the story of a family's struggle to survive tragedy: their seventeen-year-old son Jacob conceals his darker side from his parents until the chief of police comes looking for Jacob one night in connection with the murder of his pregnant girlfriend.