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The soundtrack perfectly suited to facing your own mortality. ("My Way," "Wind beneath My Wings," and other popular funeral songs need not apply.)

1. "Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo
The first time I heard this song, I couldn't believe how good it was. It imagines death as a raucous adventure. "Who could ask for more?," indeed.

2. "Leader of the Pack" by the Shangri-Las
Jimmy is in a motorcycle gang that hangs out at a candy store. (I question how serious a gang he was in.) That's where Betty meets him. Her family disapproves, so she has to tell Jimmy it's over. He speeds away on his motorcycle and dies. A perfect combo of teen angst and love and loss.

3. "Naked as We Came" by Iron & Wine
Someone is always left behind. This is universally hard to accept. I think all the time about my partner dying in my arms and spreading his ashes 'round the yard. But with all the Diet Coke I drink, I'm likely to go long before he is. You can pry that Diet Coke from ...

In ancient Athens, during the fifth century BC, military service was required of all citizens. To be a citizen meant being a soldier, and vice versa. Because every citizen served in the military, the health of the democracy depended upon the health of its soldiers, and the ability of citizen-soldiers to move fluidly and frequently between the worlds of military service and civic participation. And so it is no coincidence that roughly one-third of the Athenian population would gather each spring in the Theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis to watch plays that expressed the anguish, loss, betrayal, confusion, and horror of war. The Greeks knew that it wasn't adaptive to cry during combat, but they also knew that the emotions associated with war couldn't be bottled up forever, and that they needed to be released in the presence of a community, rather than in isolation.

In the United States today, less than one percent of our population has served in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of compulsory service, we have an all-volunteer army, one that has been leaned upon far too heavily ...

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As a teenager, I didn't pay much attention to posted signs. I was a strange kid — both very confident and very lost. My façade, my own sign posted for the world, was a lie and I knew it. But I believed if I could just be patient enough, a kind of secret door would eventually open to a new land, one that looked more or less the same as the old — same streets, same school, same annoying older brother — but would include a sense of orientation, which meant a sense of the world with my place in it. So, what interested me was the other kind of sign. The kind that might offer a portent of my life to come, or an insight into the way things really were.

There was one sign that was both kinds of sign, though I didn't know it at the time. It was posted on a high black chairlift tower, about two-thirds of the ride up Killington's Bear Mountain. As I remember it now, the wind is whipping, the chairlift pitches and bobs over Outer Limits, the steepest mogul run ...

As a national security reporter, I write about war, weapons, security, and secrets. The question most commonly asked of me is, "How do you get sources to talk to you?"

The Pentagon's Brain is my third book in a series about seemingly impenetrable subjects. The first one, Area 51, is about the highly classified military facility in Nevada. My second book, Operation Paperclip, is about the formerly classified intelligence program that brought Nazi scientists to America. The Pentagon's Brain, which publishes this month, is about DARPA — the most powerful, most productive, and most secret military science agency in the world. For each book, I interviewed approximately 75 insiders — men (and a few women) with direct knowledge of the subject matter at hand, most of whom are scientists, soldiers, and former spies. So, why do these sources talk to me?

The answer is pretty simple: I ask. I also follow an edict: when stymied, look up, not down .

This excellent concept of looking up was conveyed to me by an Area 51 source, Ed Lovick, the physicist who led the Lockheed Skunk Works team to invent ...

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Have you invented a Readerly Term of your own? Email us at readerlyterms@powells.com with the word and definition, and we'll consider including it in our Compendium. Browse all the terms here.

Editor's note: It's been 20 years since the groundbreaking memoir The Liars' Club sent Mary Karr into the literary spotlight with its phenomenal success and widespread acclaim. Since then, Karr has gone on to publish two more bestselling memoirs — Cherry and Lit — and has mentored such revered authors as Cheryl Strayed and Koren Zailckas. In her new book, The Art of Memoir, Karr turns her attention to the memoir form itself and offers an illuminating guide to the essential elements of the craft.

As supplements to the new book, we're thrilled to present a selection of "Memoir Tutorial" videos, courtesy of HarperBooks. In the first piece, Mary Karr addresses the triumphs and challenges of the literary memoir genre. In the other two pieces, authors Lena Dunham and Gary Shteyngart discuss the memoir in general and Karr's work in the genre.

We hope you enjoy this exclusive video premier!