Lee Kofman is a brave and iconoclastic memoirist with a lyrical and barbed pen. Her second book, “Imperfect: How Our Bodies Shape the People We Become,” tackles a vexed subject I never knew I should be fascinated about, namely how our bodily faults impact our lives, our psyches, and our souls. Kofman frames the book around her lifelong efforts to understand and come to grips with her own imperfect “body surface,” as she puts it, but she then ventures out in an astonishing array of directions through her own reading, through sympathetic interviews, and through reflective thought. The writing sparkles, the ideas are never weak-kneed, and the book’s flow is superb. Very much in the seemingly fresh modern tradition of discursive, lucid memoirs, “Imperfect” is a wonderment.
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