From the first sentence of John Banville's Ancient Light, we are placed in uneasy territory: "Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother." The narrator, an aging actor who is looking back on an illicit affair he conducted when he was a mere fifteen years old, is clearly going to give us too much information. As the information piles up, though, the meaning of it recedes. Soon enough, we realize just how little we truly know: about Alexander Cleave, the actor, and about our own pasts.

First, to what we do know: The young Cleave had a sexual relationship with Celia Gray, those many years ago. Cleave has been hired to act in a film about a literary theorist named, anagrammatically, Axel Vander. His co-star is a troubled actress, vaguely reminiscent of Cleave's daughter, who committed suicide ten years earlier. Beyond that, things get murky, beginning with the idea that Vander appears to have been an impostor. This kind of recursive plotting is Paul Auster territory, but the style is anything but.

Banville's writing is dense and poetic, even as it is elliptical and wordy. When he turns his eye on anything -- the way the dust falls through a shaft of sunlight in a deserted house, for example -- we see it, we feel it. Except that the narrator catches himself repeatedly, questioning details of his own story. How can reminiscences, vague or precise, get so much right and wrong at the same time? Gradually, almost imperceptibly, we are lifted out and up above the story of a foolish, self-centered boy from a long lost summer, into a meditation on memory and writing.

Authors, like other artists, perennially struggle with the truth. Their characters present a subjective view, even as we are asked to trust that it is the correct viewpoint. Actors, of course, have a similar problem: They actually say someone else's words, and they try to become that character, making their own self disappear. As Cleave, Banville recognizes this, and he ruminates on how hard it is to discover truth. "But what was I doing there in her living room, in my scratchy suit, on a Sunday, in the dying days of summer -- what? So often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing."

As Ancient Light inches toward its resolution, it is difficult to ignore the various parallels to Oedipus Rex, twisted though they are. We want to warn all of these characters: Be careful! You shouldn't know this! You can't know this! We can't stop them, of course, because we are only readers. We are left to find our own meanings, clicking through the electronic pages of a story that John Banville wrote based on ideas that began far, far away, like ancient light from a dim, distant star.

I know Nora Ephron as the iconic name behind those rosy Manhattan love stories I couldn't get enough of as a kid -- "When Harry Met Sally," "You've Got Mail," "Sleepless in Seattle." I’ve watched these movies so many times that I became convinced my love life would turn out exactly like Meg Ryan's (and felt slightly betrayed by Ephron when it didn't). But for a woman who mastered the art of the romantic comedy, Ephron's own experiences with love were less than rosy. She reveals this along with an array of personal impressions of aging and life's ups and downs -- during which she always managed to keep her sense of hope and humor -- throughout her 2006 collection of candid essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Ephron writes about divorce as if it were a pair of designer shoes -- something every woman has the right to at least one of -- but also hints at its darker side. "In a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing," she advises in "The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less." Yet Ephron never gave up on love, and despite betrayal, chose to love fiercely in many areas of her life.

In "Serial Monogamy: A Memoir," Ephron details her love affair with food, sparked by The Art of Gourmet Cooking, the first cookbook her mother gave her when she moved to New York in 1962. While she admits to some of her culinary flops, Ephron never stopped delighting in the joy of food.

In "Moving On" Ephron writes about one of her more fickle lovers -- her first New York apartment in The Apthorp on the Upper West Side. Starting at $1500 a month for a five-bedroom (I sobbed when I read that), Ephron falls hard and does not let go, even when building politics get dirty and her rent rises 400 percent in three years. Eventually, she is forced to leave The Apthorp and moves to the Upper East Side, where she reluctantly falls in love again, this time with her new neighborhood.

While much of I Feel Bad About My Neck is about endings -- the end of marriage, the end of cheap apartments, the end of youth and tight necks -- with Ephron there is always a sense that you can start over, that a new beginning is never far behind, especially with a little Botox. "You can always change your mind," she once said. "I know; I've had four careers and three husbands." I'm sure she also meant that you can always fall in love, no matter how many times it has let you down. In these essays, Ephron masters the art of the romantic life and makes you fall in love with her all over again.

Anna Quindlen’s  Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is an insightful, funny, and poignant memoir that you will most certainly re-read again and again. Much like she did with her popular column, “Life In the 30’s,” Quindlen writes invitingly about everyday life, though the focus is now on life in the 50s and 60s, and the aging baby-boomer generation of which she is a part. What’s wonderful about Quindlen’s writing is that she manages to be universally relatable, even when speaking of a very specific set of experiences. A major theme of these essays is, naturally, aging, as Quindlen is now in her late 50s, and I appreciated the different approaches she took throughout the book.

Chapters like “The Little Stories We Tell Ourselves” and “Older” are humorous, but also thoughtful. “Little Stories” recounts the joy Quindlen gets out of being able to stand on her head, or do a one-armed push up: things she always told herself she couldn’t do, especially at the age of 58. An amusing, lighthearted chapter, but also one that carried a striking message about pushing yourself to excel, no matter what the limitations. “Older” speaks of how relative the term “old” really is. What is old? Is it a creaky hip, or hot flashes? Or is it just a feeling, something that recedes into the future as you grow? Again, the chapter seems, on the surface, very directed toward Quindlen’s generation, but in spite of being part of a significantly younger generation, I found myself smiling in acknowledgment every few instances, and reflecting on the chapter later in the day.

Perhaps my favorite chapter was “Girlfriends,” which speaks of the importance of girlfriends in a woman’s life, especially as she grows older. Quindlen writes: “Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter … But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, or, more important, her months and years … She will mention her girlfriends.”

Yes, woven into the chapter are mentions of babysitters, sons who bring home girlfriends, and household chores. But the sentiment is applicable to a woman in any stage of life. After all, what did I do after I read that chapter? I put down Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake and called up a girlfriend. What did we talk about? As Quindlen says, “Who knows? Who cares … What would I do without her?”