Searching, surprising essays on making a life and making sense of life—as an artist, a daughter, a mother, a survivor―from the acclaimed author of Believers.

Lisa Wells came of age on the margins. The daughter of thwarted artists, she grew up in poverty in the Pacific Northwest among rebels and rockers, kids from broken homes united by their love of art. Across this collection, Wells writes with humor and gravity about poetry, poverty, a doomed first marriage, her sister’s death, and the spiritual pilgrimage of motherhood. Both deeply personal and insistently outward-looking, her writing draws from psychology, philosophy, pop culture, and a voracious reading life, probing the possibilities of survival and reinvention. What emerges is a portrait of a mind always hungry—for meaning, for beauty, for insight, for honesty—charting a path from the chaos of childhood to the hard-won, still-precarious stability of adulthood. Candid, funny, dark, and profound, Delinquents is a fierce testament to what it means to improvise a life of your own from whatever means are available.