Bridging Narratives: Talking with Jenn Shapland
Jenn Shapland discusses her debut book, MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS.
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Posts Tagged: autobiography
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.
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Writing into the Void: Talking with Mary Jo Salter
Mary Jo Salter discusses her latest collection, The Surveyors, writing about the domestic as a feminist act, and how her title poem came from someone else’s dream.
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Chewing Rocks: A Conversation with David Biespiel
David Biespiel discusses his new book, The Education of a Young Poet, being comfortable in uncertainty, and extending moments in writing.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #88: Sarah Gerard
Sarah Gerard’s dazzling second book, Sunshine State, is a collection of essays interlacing narrative nonfiction and personal essay. The thirty-one year old Brooklynite teaches nonfiction and writes a monthly column for Hazlitt. She has received rave reviews from the New York Times, NPR, and The Millions. Using her home state of Florida as the medium to navigate […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Jerald Walker
Jerald Walker discusses his memoir, The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult, the story of his childhood in The Worldwide Church of God, and how the act of writing delivered him from bitterness.
...moreThe Truth of Brushstrokes or Brushstrokes of Truth?
Autofiction is in these days. Discussing her first novel Fantasian at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins blog, Larissa Pham unpacks her perspective on inserting autobiographical elements into fiction: I knew that no matter what I wrote in my novella, given my history of truth-telling, there would be an implication that it was true. That it had happened. […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Jane Alison
Jane Alison discusses her autobiographical novel, Nine Island, the value of truth in fiction, and unsubscribing from romantic love.
...moreThe Words We Use to Describe Life Stories
To an English-speaker, the difference between “autobiography” and “memoir” seems intuitive. But in German, there’s no equivalent of the word “memoir.” At Lit Hub, Tara Bray Smith muses on the distinction between the two genres, and what it tells us about German literature and history.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Janice N. Harrington
Janice N. Harrington on her new collection Primitive and critiquing the use of “primitive” to describe African American folk art.
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The Rumpus Interview with Nina Stibbe
Author Nina Stibbe discusses her new novel Paradise Lodge, our obsession with character likeability, and how she more than flirts with feminism.
...moreSoldiers-Turned-Authors on War Literature
For NPR Books, Quil Lawrence talks with a handful of soldiers-turned-authors about the genre of war literature that has been catalyzed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These authors want their audiences to know that war is not all Hollywood-scale battle scenes, and warn against the glamorization of war stories and hero-worshipping of veterans.
...moreEmpire State of Memoir
For Lit Hub, Edward White writes about Jay Z and Morrissey’s experimental memoirs, investigating how both artists indulge and subvert what readers want from a musician’s autobiography: Where Morrissey gives us a conventional autobiography in an unconventional way—no chapters, paragraphs that run for half-a-dozen pages, and seemingly no contribution from an editor—Jay-Z is more formally experimental, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Amy Rose Spiegel
Amy Rose Spiegel discusses her debut memoir, Action: A Book about Sex, carnal confidence, and the nuances of sex-positivity.
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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Blanchfield
Poet and writer Brian Blanchfield talks about his essay collection Proxies, touring in support of a prose collection versus a poetry collection, and frottage.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lynn Steger Strong
Lynn Steger Strong discusses her debut novel Hold Still, the influence of Virginia Woolf, unconditional love, and exit strategies.
...moreComics’ Relief
For Threadless.com’s new monthly Women & Comics interview series, Gina H. Prescott speaks to cartoonist/writer/historian Julia Wertz. Wertz discusses her autobiographical comics; her historical and cityscape comics for the New Yorker and Harper’s; and offers advice to young artists and writers on incorporating personal material into their work.
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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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Fresh Comics #7: Giving Up The Ghost
If you’ve never heard of Whit Taylor, then now is the perfect time to discover her. Ghost (2015) is her understated masterpiece, self-published just months ago. As I began reading the book, I thought I was in for a nice little story about a young woman who wanted to meet her idols—Charles Darwin, Joseph Campbell et. al. […]
...moreFinding Truth Between Fact and Fiction
For Lit Hub, novelist Lily Tuck writes on “auto-fiction,” or autobiographical fiction, and why blurring the boundaries between strictly factual autobiography and fiction helps writers shape a firmer story.
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The Rumpus Interview with Mary Karr
Mary Karr talks about her new book The Art of Memoir, the perception of memoir from a “trashy” form, the virtues of poetry, and the complexity of truth-telling.
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The Rumpus Three-Way Interview: An Incomplete Catharsis
Carmiel Banasky, Alexandra Kleeman, and Matthew Salesses on their new novels, writing from a place of tension, and how our writing changes as we do.
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The Rumpus Interview with Phoebe Gloeckner
Artist and author Phoebe Gloeckner talks about her semi-autobiographical novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl, just adapted into a film starring Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgard, and what she’s working on now.
...moreReality, Fiction, Everything in Between
In such a world, the trajectory of any one character, however prominent, never escapes being warped by the gravity of another. Even if, as in Preparation for the Next Life, these background figures are no longer alive. Just as marginalization cannot reduce them to zeroes, neither do destruction and disappearance…. At Full Stop, Maxwell Donnewald writes […]
...moreLike Peeping Over the Edge of the World
“It’s like peeping over the edge of the world while remembering you’ve left your spectacles on the kitchen table,” she writes of her cruelly paradoxical situation: knowing that death is on its way without knowing when exactly it will arrive. Jenny Diski has inoperable lung cancer—and the prolific British essayist has chosen to write through […]
...moreLive-Tweeting Grief
“The challenge of memorializing doesn’t favor professionals,” writes Sean Minogue over at Full Stop. So, how are autobiographical narratives of loss by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Joan Didion, or Paul Auster different from therapeutic journaling? Minogue takes a look at how these authors express the everyday details of living after a loss, and how new forms […]
...moreMystery Maven Memoirs
In the wake of the destruction of precious cultural artifacts during the unrest in Iran and Syria, a quiet memoir from the queen of mystery, Agatha Christie, remembers the landscape and archeological legacy. The autobiographical Come, Tell Me How You Live never technically went out of print, but HarperCollins will re-release the book in time […]
...moreEarly Autobiography Gets a Boost
Margery Kempe, a 15th century mother-of-14 visited by religious visions whose autobiography is considered among the first in the English language, has just gained significant cred. For the first time, historians have been able to verify significant parts of her account, by way of a newly discovered letter apparently written by her son. It has […]
...moreFamily Secrets
Memoirist, cartoonist, and creator of the famous Bechdel Test, Alison Bechdel talks to The Millions about the evolution of her art, winning a MacArthur “Genuis Grant,” and searching for answers in her past: I feel like in a way that’s just what my work is, it’s just these albums that I’m arranging and then rearranging, […]
...moreBy Any Memes Necessary
The long-awaited release of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in ebook format is on track for May of this year, to commemorate what would have been the activist’s 90th birthday. The print edition has been available from Ballantine, an imprint of Penguin Random House, for some time; the author’s estate is spearheading the digital publication in […]
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