Sari Botton is a writer living in upstate New York. She is the editor of Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NY. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and more retrograde women’s magazines than she’d care to recall or admit to. She tweets at @saribotton.
Did you know that it’s Audio Book Month? I’m going to guess you didn’t. It’s hard for me to imagine too many Rumpus readers habitually listening to books read aloud…
When I saw the words “This week’s Letter In The Mail is from Sari Botton” at the bottom of Wednesday’s Daily Rumpus email from Stephen Elliott, my stomach dropped.
"Ghostwriter" is a problematic word. It gives people the idea that we have some kind of other worldly power; that we’re able to hover over clients somewhere in the ether and read their minds, then write their books using only our own words.
I realize I’m especially drawn to memoirs, novels and story collections in which the author or protagonist is at odds with one parent or both, and wrestles with feeling like a tremendous disappointment to them.
Albert, who is at work on her second novel, describes both books as “personal” as opposed to autobiographical, although they are rooted in her own experiences.
I wasn’t surprised to find that I enjoyed Havrilesky’s book and really related to it. There is so much overlap in our stories, I should probably hate her for beating me to the finish line by miles – thousands of them.