SCRATCHED is an intimate account of the uses a child, and the adult she becomes, will find for perfectionism and the role perfectionism will play in every part of her life. Between the ages of 27 and 37, she published five books with Knopf, and her short stories appeared in The New Yorker magazine. But after this extraordinary start to a career came twenty years of silence. She wrote, or rather published, nothing at all. Why? SCRATCHED is the remarkable response to that question. Her early publications secure her a coveted teaching job at Stanford University. As she toggles between the campus in Palo Alto and the Mendocino coast where she lives, raises her son Gabriel Tallent, Elizabeth grapples most deeply with the perfectionism that is and has always been home to her. That she does it with wit, humor, and heart makes her memoir an extraordinary work. What a brave book this is, that repeatedly searches for the emotional truth beneath the conventional surface of existence.