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Elissa Altman

Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man’s Feast, and the upcoming hybrid memoir, Where You Used to Be: Meditations on Art-Making and Grief. A Pushcart Prize finalist, she writes the bestselling Substack newsletter Poor Man’s Feast, and contributes essays everywhere from The Bitter Southerner and Print Magazine to Orion, LitHub, The Guardian, and On Being.
  • Elissa Altman

    Seven Days in August

    There was grief everywhere: in my drinking water, in my toothbrush, in the whisk I used to beat egg whites for a meringue. Eating a pastrami sandwich could turn me inside out, because it was his favorite; listening to his…

  • Elissa Altman

    A Month Without a Map

    We plant gardens on the banks of trenches, tending muddy flowerbeds we may never see blossom. We load our babies into the car to drop them off at daycare on our way to work in a beach town, and never…

  • Elissa Altman

    What Is Freedom: Elissa Altman

    I had her in my life for eighteen years and ten months before I got the call on a snowy April morning in 1982 that she had died the night before, of a massive heart attack. We lived across the…

  • Elissa Altman

    Is It My Story or Yours?

    Our family stories mutate with every retelling across the generations like a game of telephone, until the thin, sharp line of fact becomes frayed and hazy.

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