Last year, for my birthday, my wife gave me a copy of “I Remember,” an unusual memoir by the artist Joe Brainard. It’s a tidy little book, less than two hundred pages long, made entirely from short, ...

For people who have taken career breaks, four little words—“What do you do?”—can provoke dread. It seems to conceal a bundle of judgments: What’s your social status? What’s your income? What’s your ...