The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg is one of my favorite writers; Kate Simon, writing in 1986 for the NYT, described "the clear, direct eye, the firm moral stand eased by a sympathy that flows from intimacy with the human condition. ... Another Ginzburg magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning streak of a plain phrase, a prose whose poetic economy suggests large landscapes."

This volume collects 11 Ginzburg essays on everything from old shoes to the death of a friend to life under Fascism in Italy, and the title essay, "The Little Virtues," deals with what it means to raise children. It is something I come back to again and again as I think about the parent I try to be:

"We must be important to our children and yet not too important; they must like us a little, and yet not like us too much — so that it does not enter their heads to become identical to us, to copy us and the vocation we follow, to seek our likeness in the friends they choose throughout their lives ... For them we should be a simple point of departure; we should offer them the springboard from which they make their leap. And we must be there to help them, if help should be necessary; they must realize that they do not belong to us, but that we belong to them, that we are always available, present in the next room, ready to answer every possible question and demand as far as we know how to."