As the Book Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, Phil Jenkins interviewed over 100 A list authors, and harvested a wealth of anecdotes about their  personalities and writing lives. This in a period when Canadian women writers were popping up like tulips on the international scene; writers like Carol Shields, Anne Michaels, Elizabeth Hay, and Karen Connelly.

Examples of the anecdotes from those years include an interview at the National Library with Carol Shields, who was suffering from cancer at the yime. When a young reporter, doing an article on the disease interrupted to ask for a quick comment on cancer.  Carol's response? “I’m against it.”

Margaret Atwood  is an infamously  hard interview. During an interview Phil mentioned that he thought one of her books was “a chatty fable”. She bristled at the word ‘chatty’. Then she asked, suspecting my Liverpudlian accent, "didn’t the Brits say “chat up” when pursuing a possible romantic outing?" Yes, he responded..., "So chat me up", she said . So in his own inimitable style, he did. Then she asked him to chat her down. Only Atwood.

Phil's tales are also peppered with recollections of P.D. James, Bill Bryson, Dick Francis, Yevtushenko, Michael Ondaatje, Farley Mowatt, Frank McCourt and more.