I'm not much on cooking, so I'm putting off Bloom's recipes from The Seven Deadly Virtues until Monday...
But I've looked at pretty much everything else; and for our more immediate purposes, the chapter dealing with the author's health problems is, to me, the most helpful as to the drafting of our personal academic essays.
Not only does Bloom relate an effective (and affecting) narrative, she also explains why it is effective. Often, we mistake the word narrative as the inclusion of every detail we can remember during a personal episode. But Bloom emphasizes the idea of exclusion -- i.e., including only that content which will ultimately serve the narrative as an art form and not the precise recording of fact, as if filling out a data sheet or an accident report. Even the deliberate sidestepping of absolute accuracy is deemed an occasional necessity.
Incidentally, there's an interesting article from the U. of Connecticut's website on Bloom's book that includes audio recordings of her discussing the The Seven Deadly Virtues, etc. in particular -- and creative nonfiction, in general.
