Voices on Addiction: A Review of The Recovering
As recovering addicts, we must love ourselves back to the source, love our shameful bits and decimations and not just our reconciliations and resurrections.
...more
Posts Tagged: addiction
Struggling toward Truth: Porochista Khakpour’s Sick
Khakpour gathers courage, again and again, as she reaches into the most painful parts of her life, excavates them, and holds them up to the light.
...more
Coming Clean
Intellectually, I know Gracie’s mom loves her and needs help. In practice, I just want my daughter safe.
...more
Being Human: A Conversation with Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour discusses her new memoir, Sick, the difficulty of receiving good medical care, and the blessing of online community.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #138: Melissa Broder
“We have what we need inside us already, it’s just a question of uncovering it, of remembering who we are again and again.”
...more
Voices on Addiction: Spontaneous Combustion
I remember hunger the way other children remember love.
...more
Splintered Doors
This journey is ongoing. But I know this: my daughter will never have to break down a door.
...more
Discomfort, Desire, and Drugs: Talking with Ben Gwin
Ben Gwin discusses his debut novel, Clean Time: The True Story of Ronald Regan Middleton, the book’s unique structure, and writing satire.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Melissa Broder
Melissa Broder discusses her debut novel, The Pisces (Hogarth, May 2018), the importance of love between women, and mermaid sex.
...more
A Myth of Her Own Making: The Pisces by Melissa Broder
Broder opens up a fantastical vein to offer a glimpse at how we might find each other again.
...more
The Girl Next Door: Pot Docs and Loss on the California Coast
[A]s with any documentary, every one of our stories eventually becomes a ghost story. On a long enough timeline, that is.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #131: Lisa Wells
“I always feel like I’m starting over. I don’t know how I ever wrote a poem. I really do have that feeling.”
...more
The Delusion of Objectivity: Talking with Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison discusses The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, understanding that every text is incomplete, and whether motherhood has changed her writing.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #130: Kaveh Akbar
“I took a six or seven year break from sending out my own poems, just waiting for my abilities to catch up a bit with my ambitions.”
...more
House Rules: Lessons in Autofiction
You try to pass yourself off as a rock and the water just laughs. You try anyway.
...more
The Intersection of Hope and Despair: Talking with Julien Baker
Julien Baker discusses her latest album, Turn Out the Lights, the ways in which she approaches writing about difficult subjects, and the redemptive power in being open about sadness.
...more
Tarnished, Shiny Exteriors: Kate Braverman’s A Good Day for Seppuku
With A Good Day for Seppuku, Braverman has written a collection of intense images and exacting language
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: “Passing as Privileged”
I don’t feel ashamed of my history, I feel ashamed of letting it be erased.
...more
Voices on Addiction: What We Forget, What We Remember
I don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #123: Erica Garza
“[T]here was something really empowering about being honest and open about this part of myself. Somehow, writing helped lessen the shame.”
...more
Voices on Addiction: Dead Eyes and Bob Barker Crocs
Broken people are drawn to other broken people. Comparing scars. Laying belly to belly. Two similar pieces of different puzzles.
...more
After the Telling
We want to protect our children from everything, even sometimes ourselves.
...more
Finding Freedom
We never want something more than when it has been taken away from us. The opposite of freedom is confinement.
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: Three Excerpts from AFTERWORDS
Three exclusive excerpts from …AFTERWORDS, a new series of distinctive commentaries on great works of contemporary literature from our friends at Fiction Advocate!
...more
Voices on Addiction: The Taste Inside My Mouth
It’s never the words I remember. It’s their taste: bitter, dense, like biting into a radish. It’s how my body feels: sore.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Self-Portrait
Mother should have told me that booze made a kind of heaven in my body, I thought the first time I felt it.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: Prescriptions
I wore sobriety like a shirt that was too tight in the shoulders, and everyone around me knew it.
...more
The Peep King’s Legacy: A Family Portrait
The day after Hugh Hefner died, I received a text from my sister that our grandfather was starring alongside James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal in HBO’s new series, The Deuce.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Travels with My Daughter
I imagine the box of obsidian flakes and chunks at home—gathered from explorations in the desert. Their edges cut through skin, draw blood.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar discusses his new collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, finding community in poetry, books on craft, and mining the supernatural for poems.
...more