Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jessica Berger Gross
Jessica Berger Gross discusses her new memoir, Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home, walking away from her parents age of twenty-eight, and the importance of boundaries.
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Sari Botton
Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jason Diamond
Jason Diamond discusses his memoir Searching for John Hughes, confronting his childhood abuse, avoiding his parents, and writing about all of it.
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Conversations with Writers Braver than Me: Anne Roiphe
Anne Roiphe on respecting writers’ freedom to express the truth of their experiences, while also respecting their subjects’ prerogative to shun them for it.
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Samantha Irby
Sari Botton sits down with humorist Samantha Irby to talk sex, family conflicts, and the creative freedom of being an orphan.
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Rebecca Walker
Sari Botton and Rebecca Walker talk about the challenges of writing about parents, becoming estranged from them, and then moving together past estrangement, to eventually heal the rift.
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Melissa Febos
In Whip Smart, Melissa Febos unflinchingly chronicles five years in her early twenties when she was a dominatrix and heroin user. But the book is about so much more than those details.
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Confessions of a Good Girl
In my thirties, I have had two abortions, six years apart. I tell no one. I perpetuate the shame of every woman who has ever chosen to terminate an unwelcome pregnancy—with my silence.
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Marco Roth
Sometimes I fantasize about expanding these conversations beyond the one-on-one—getting a few particular writers into a room together to discuss the risky business of writing the sort of memoir or autobiographical fiction that might upset family, or others close to you. Actually, this column was born out of a burning desire to get Stephen Elliott […]
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The Sweet Smell of Excess
Al-Anon sucked. If I hadn’t been too broke for therapy, I’d never have taken a friend’s advice to attend those awful meetings. They were worse than the AA meetings I’d been to over the years in support of my string of alcoholic boyfriends—three, if you’re keeping count.
...moreConversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Cheryl Strayed
Sari Botton talks with Cheryl Strayed about how she keeps finding the courage to be honest in her work—about herself and others around her.
...moreHappy Audio Book Month
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 by other people, usually not the people who wrote the books.
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Ghosts Are Real, At Least In Publishing
“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.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Emily Carter
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.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Mike Albo
I’ve been living in NYC for years so I am cautiously optimistic about everything.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jon-Jon Goulian
What is the chance of one of those books living up to its pre-release hype? Of earning back its advance?
...moreConversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Elisa Albert
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.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Heather Havrilesky
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.
...moreConversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Nick Flynn
Flynn and I discussed his approach to writing the memoirs—as well as the advantages of having Protestant parents—over coffee in the West Village.
...moreConversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jillian Lauren
I wrote the book with a tremendous suspension of disbelief; I wrote it as if no one was ever going to read it. I know that sounds like a cliché.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Darin Strauss
More than anyone else, though, Strauss holds himself up to intense examination and scrutiny, revealing very human, and in some cases unflattering, reactions and defenses over the years.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Stephen Elliott
“We all think we’re retaliating,” Elliott writes. “We all think our actions are justified by someone else’s actions. But actually we’re responsible for what we do.”
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Emily Gould
I don’t know how much braver than you I’m feeling these days,” she wrote back when I first emailed her.
...moreConversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Shalom Auslander
As someone who was raised with reform Judaism, my negative experiences with religion pale next to Auslander’s.
...moreConversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Vivian Gornick
In an effort to embolden myself to move past this crippling fear and go on writing – or give up altogether – I’ve begun interviewing memoirists I admire.
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