Helen Yglesias waited until the age of 54 to make a start on the career she had always wanted for herself…. In the autobiographical essay which opens Starting … she recalls this moment in her life: "I wanted to be on my way as a storyteller. Even though it was very late, I wanted to make a start on what I had always wanted to do."

She proves herself as that storyteller in Family Feeling, her second novel, and now [in Starting] as the voice which organizes and relates the tales of other real people who, like herself, are articulate on the subject of starting—"early, anew, over, and late," as the book's subtitle describes Yglesias's quest….

The book's strength lies in Yglesias's ability to tell stories. Its weakness derives from her insistence, at the beginning and end of the individual vignettes, that the stories are closely related. She makes...