Fresh Air Fail: What Happens When Personal Writing Draws a Spotlight
Martha Bayne wrote a piece for The Rumpus about her unplanned pregnancy. Next thing she knew, she was being invited onto Fresh Air. That’s when things got sticky…
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Posts Tagged: memoir
The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
Both Yuknavitch and Scarboro, whose books echo each other in interesting ways, were willing to talk with me about this question of what to do with memoir, and much more.
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Notes For a Twenty-Something’s Memoir
Start with a hook.
Vomit splashed on my shoes. Another bullshit night on the suck party circuit. (Too Nick Flynnish?) Or:
...moreSounds of Leigh Newman’s “Still Points North”
“The story was there in the music, down to the epilogue.”
Leigh Newman’s memoir, Still Points North: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-up World, One Long Journey Home, gets a unique treatment over at Largehearted boy‘s Booknotes, a column where authors are asked to compile a sort of soundtrack to their process.
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The Ghost of Mary MacLane
An average American newspaper-reader in the first decade of the last century immediately understood, if he read that something was “of the Mary MacLane type,” that this name was shorthand for outsized self-absorption of a specifically feminine nature.
...moreThe Debate on Confessional Writing
There has been no shortage of criticism in response to Hamilton Nolan’s Gawker post “Journalism Is Not Narcissism.”
Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott wrote a recent critique of Nolan’s essay, as did memoirist Jillian Lauren and Rumpus columnist Steve Almond.
...moreMore on Memoir
Rumpus columnist Steve Almond weighs in on Stephen Elliott’s side of the is-memoir-an-acceptable-form-of-literature debate.
“[Hamilton] Nolan is right to decry this kind of cynicism,” writes Almond. “But what he gets wrong in his piece is just as important as what he gets right.
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The Problem with the Problem with Memoir
I got an email from a friend yesterday asking me if I’d seen this article on Gawker, Journalism Is Not Narcissism, by Hamilton Nolan. I hadn’t but I was aware of the argument. It’s an easy one to make, that memoir and personal essay are killing journalism.
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“Diva Boy”
At The Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus contributor Melissa Chadburn writes about her relationship with her older brother.
“By then Ken’s life was no secret. He’d already fought all his battles. His last battle was against AIDS. I thought about it everyday when I was dancing in the strip joints.
...moreMessing with Memoir
When my memoir went out of print, it was as if someone had thrown a stray puppy onto my doorstep. Dazed, mangy, with a tendency to pee on the rug, this orphaned book was something I couldn’t shoo away, or worse, put down, but also something I didn’t have any room for in my life.
A Different American Dream
In Sam Benjamin’s debut memoir, American Gangbang, we follow an aspiring porn director as he finds what he’s looking for–and what he’s not.
...moreA Private Life for the Memoirist
There are those writers that relinquish their private lives to the world, choosing to share the honesty of experience, which is often difficult for those family members and friends who were part of this experience.
Changed names and confrontation come up all the time for the memoirist, but what about protecting those family members that don’t exist yet?
...moreMy Interview with Susie Bright, Sex-Positive Feminist
Susie Bright, sex-positive feminist, writer, revolutionary, and my first tongue-kiss with a woman recently released her memoir Big Sex Little Death.
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In Support of the Memoir
Dinty W. Moore’s rebuttal to Lorrie Moore’s essay in the New York Review of Books, in support of memoir-writing defends the genre and points out the absurdities in Moore’s adamant dismissal.
Memoirs and their questionable reliability have been the source of some recent contention, but Dinty Moore makes a case for the memoir as an authentic art form.
...moreThe Heroic Lie: A Brief Inquiry into the Fake Memoir
When I was about ten years old, I hit my older brother in the mouth with a baseball bat. We were standing around in a field, hitting pebbles with the bat, and I got him on my backswing. There was a lot of blood.
Reimagining The Memoir
“That it is being considered as book of criticism, rather than as memoir, seems the luck of the draw. Some of the essays in it were originally published in the guise of book reviews, but they always jump the rails of literary journalism and go off on their own course — assessing not just the text but its place in the constellation of her own interests and personal history, which are (respectively) various and knotty.”
In light of all the back and forth about memoirs, I think this appraisal of Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Writings is pretty enlightening.
...moreThe Rumpus Unreview: Known and Unknown, by Donald Rumsfeld
An 800-page memoir from the former Secretary of Defense tells an old, familiar story—so familiar that our reviewer didn’t even have to read it.
Cendrars, The Extraordinary Daydreamer
Long before David Shields excoriated the strict boundaries between journalism and fiction, espousing, in its place, a loose and open-ended hybrid that is more in keeping with “reality”, a Swiss-born Frenchman with one arm, a Gauloises cigarette forever dangling from his grizzled lips and a swaggering nonchalance befitting only a soldier and a drifter, penned a series of “autobiographies” that blended history, memoir, fiction, poetry, gossip, news clippings and every kind of slipshod arcana into one boisterous melange.
...moreOn Your Wedding Day
This letter to an ex posted on her wedding day by CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen raises some interesting questions on public discourse, using your life in your writing, and intended readership.
His colleague Lizzie Skurnick calls him out. And the situation worsens.
...moreThe Resistance of Memory
Ander Monson attempts to move beyond “the singular authority of ‘I’ in nonfiction,” exploring new possibilities for the memoir form.
...moreThe Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
This week, Rumpus Books reviewed a comic novel and a book that “straddles the line between fiction and poetry.” We also published a Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Kara Candito.
I Swear It Happened Just Like This
“In the last chapter I quote a New York Times reporter named Raymond Walters who, in 1960, wrote what I think is the wisest statement about the memoir. He says that as a reader you have to stand there as if you’re just being introduced to the author and then ask yourself: do you believe this person?
...moreFables of the Reconstruction
With patience reminiscent of Tolstoy, Cornelia Nixon weaves a tapestry of events to explain how an ordinary girl in post-Civil War Maryland kills her lover and gets away with it.
...moreA Remembrance of Frank McCourt
“Sit back. I’m going to tell you a story,” Frank said in his brogue, looking into the distance like a Homerian epic-teller. “Don’t you ever dare steal it.”
...moreThe Rumpus Original Combo with Danzy Senna
“We are all students of memory. Each of us has our own truth to tell…”
FUBAR Nation
Chelsea Martin’s strange collection of miscellany evokes the loneliness of life lived through technology.
...moreRobin Romm On Writing A Memoir
From Smith Magazine: “I had to make a lot of decisions. That’s what writing memoir is—a series of decisions and a bundle of craft. There were times I wanted to hold back everything.” …read more