Jed Perl on Reading Nick Lyons’s Fire in the Straw March 12, 2021 A few months ago my friend Nick Lyons, long admired for books about his passion for fishing, published a beautiful memoir, Fire in the Straw. Reading the book has underscored, in a personal way, the gap between life and literature that so many of us take for granted. I’m familiar with quite a few of the stories in Fire in the Straw—subtitled Notes on Inventing a Life—from the conversations that Nick and I have had over the years. But as I’m turning the pages of the book everything feels new. That’s where the difference between life and literature comes in. I had heard about some of the traumas of Nick’s childhood. But I hadn’t met the boy he introduces in his memoir—“I was skinny and freckled and had a queasy feeling”—who stands at the entrance to the “gray gabled” boarding school where his mother, after the death of his father, leaves him to pretty much fend for himself for a couple of years.