Review of Life and Art by Richard Russo

*Life and Art* by Richard Russo (2025). Published by Knopf.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

During my time job hunting, in-between applying to jobs here and there, it happened to coincide with an economic crisis worldwide, which meant I had even more extended time applying to jobs. So in order to fill my nights, and not go completely insane from the monotony of applications, I tapped into my advance copy collection.

I mainly get advance copies of books through NetGalley, where publishers send me widgets to read books mainly nowadays (I don’t even really request them—they just kind of appear and I pick the ones I like to read), or directly through email when people are asking if I want to read something they’re putting out in the coming months.

Life and Art was one of the books I requested a while back on NetGalley, but procrastinated on reading. I do think that when I did eventually get to this, it was the right time, as I could appreciate more what Russo was writing about.

Let’s get into the review! Much love to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of the book.

Essays reflecting on Richard Russo’s parents, upbringing, and how it grew into his writing.

Before we get into the details of this review, I have a confession to make: I had no idea who Richard Russo was before picking this book up on my Kindle. Which is kind of shameful to admit, as I see from this book he’s a pretty prominent and well connected writer, and he even has his own Wikipedia page. I should’ve encountered him before now.

So going into this book I had no personal connection or knowledge about who the heck Russo was or what he did. The essays in this collection are split into two themes introduced in the title: Life and Art. We begin with the Life section, where Russo, in his essays, talks about his family.

Now he’s brave because he starts this collection off with an essay about his conservative sister-in-law and her husband getting COVID and hospitalized. He’s very specifically dissecting how they refused to get vaccinated and didn’t believe in the pandemic really, but when it happened to them, they were like “how could this happen to us” and didn’t accept responsibility for what was happening now.

It was with this introductory essay I knew Russo was brave and willing to go into territory about his family, which a lot of writers tend to avoid because of the fact your family members are most likely going to read what you’re writing. Russo mainly discusses his parents those in these essays, connecting the sister-in-law to his father, who was racist and conservative as well (he did have one black friend and would claim said friend was not like the others).

I found the Life essays to be a deep dive into Russo’s personal history, even when we get into the mundane like what kind of books he was reading during the COVID-19 pandemic and how he was basically just giving out mini book reviews and synopses in the essays at times.

Life sets us up for Art, which discusses more craft and the literary side of Russo’s life. I didn’t care for the Life essays as much, but I could appreciate how they helped me understand contextualize the writing side of his life. One essay that stood out to me is how he discussed perspective and how writers drop themselves into others perspectives, but people often expect to dissect it as a prism of the writer’s own experiences.

Like when he wrote about a divorced nun with a handful of issues, people expected him to have experienced those issues firsthand, which isn’t necessarily true. As a writer myself who blends fiction with reality, I appreciated these kinds of discussions and insights about the craft!

Overall Thoughts

I’d say I enjoyed reading these essays, but I don’t know if I would return back to them. As mentioned before, the essays that caught my eye more were the Art ones, but even as I was reading through those, I found myself getting lost in the narrative he was creating and actually getting bored.

I read a lot of nonfiction and essays, and when you start getting bored, or at least in my case, that marks the beginning of the end. My attention was dwindling and by the time I got to the end, I only found a handful of essays here and there to be ones I actually wanted to ruminate and reflect on.

I do really appreciate what Russo had to offer, and I think this is a solid collection of essays. It just wasn’t something that captivated me—it was just there. And maybe that was because I wasn’t invested in Russo going into this, so I was a bit more critical because I wasn’t a fan of his work already.

Go check this one out if you’re interested though! You might love it more than I did; that’s the beauty of taste being so subjective.

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