From Powell’s Books in Portland, the Harrods of bookstores, I bought an armload of books to distract my mind from all the mounting stress. Four, to be exact. After I came back home, I noticed that my four books just so happened to form a pleasant colour scheme with their spines:

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson, in a soft pink-red.

Between You and Me, by Mary Norris, in a bright yellow.

Britt-Marie Was Here, by Fredrik Backman, in a lime green.

It’s All Relative, by A.J. Jacobs, in a bold blue.

This gave me a slight jolt of happiness. Four books which have nothing to do with each other, except that I bought them in the same purchase, forming a matched set. I arranged them in rainbow order, along with the black-clad The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows from Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company, and took a picture of my set before I sorted them into their alphabetical-by-author-last-name order on my bookshelf.

To-day I finished Mary Norris’s Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Mary Norris is a copy editor at the New Yorker, and I think I first heard of her in relation to Benjamin Dreyer’s style guide, Dreyer’s English. She didn’t write the New Yorker review for it (that would be Katy Waldman), but her memoir has been mentioned often in the same breadth as it, and now I can see the resemblance. Copy-editor style guide memoirs are a microgenre coming into focus, and these two are my most salient examples so far.

Which is not to say they are entirely similar. Dreyer’s book aims more for the style-guide end of the spectrum; chock-full of rules and admonitions, shimmering with a personality iconoclastic and erudite, but what we do get of his biography is scant. Norris’s book, on the other hand, is much more of a memoir. Each chapter is nominally about a category of punctuation and grammar rules, which she does explain in edifying detail, but she allows herself to use them more as a springboard for relaying episodes and characters in her own life.

Which is quite lovely, because she’s a very witty observer of her own life. And she has a way with prose; her sentences make me smile. I think my favourite sentence of hers would be the understated Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.

There’s also this bit, on whether to comma or not-comma the phrase “stout, middle-aged woman”: Wasn’t it the same as “a fat old lady”? “Fat and old”? “Old and fat”? An old fat lady? “An old fat lady” suggests that the fat lady in the circus is being hounded out of her job by an ambitious new fat lady, at which point she will become just another fat old lady. I was driving myself mad.

This passage amused me, not just because it brought back Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon and the minutiae of adjective ordering, but also because it suggests a writing prompt. The fat lady in the circus is being hounded out of her job by an ambitious new fat lady is the most delicious writing prompt I’ve seen in prose recently that is not explicitly about writing prompts. (Without that last clause, I’d have to hand the prize to a random Redditor, for You’ve been in the elevator for what seems like hours and it’s still going down.)

Even the Comma Queen worries herself silly over specific cases of comma placement. This is reassuring for the rest of us mortals.