The Amateur is an inquiry into how we discover our passions and how they discover us. In The Amateur Lesser explores some of the choices she has made in pursuit of an old fashioned but indispensable vocation: an independent life of letters.

She discusses the place - California - in which she grew up; the institutions - Harvard, Cambridge, Berkeley - where she received her formal education; the writers, artists, and performers who deepened her critical understanding; and, finally, the literary journal she founded, The Threepenny Review, which she still edits and publishes out of the Berkeley apartment in which it began nearly twenty years ago.

Lesser describes both the events in her own life and those she has witnessed on stage, screen, canvas, and paper, noting how both experience and art teach us to observe, to discriminate, and to make sense of one another.