We live our lives and then relive them on the page in a relentless search for some nugget of discovery, some further comprehension of what it all means.
None of us has telepathy, and even the most empathetic of us can’t really experience the world as another person experiences it. So we read essays and memoirs.
There’s never been a better time to join The Rumpus Book Club, either by the month or by the year. If you join now, we’ll throw in a bonus: your choice…
What is more American than the road trip? Steven Melendez has created an astonishingly detailed interactive map of the beloved institution as documented in twelve works of American literature. The books…
The author of The Way We Weren’t talks about why she decided to write about being a single mother, the effect it's had on her daughter, and the adjunct crisis.
Editor and writer Sarah Hepola talks about her new memoir Blackout, how gender affects alcoholism, writing about female friendships, and the writers who've influenced her.
Sean Wilsey discusses his latest book of essays, More Curious, being David Foster Wallace’s neighbor, the healing power of the American road trip, and the difference between writing fiction and memoir.
Author Kara Richardson Whitely discusses her new memoir, Gorge: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds, surviving food addiction and the trauma of being molested, and what comes next.
When an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having…
During the opening scene of the adaptation of Cheryl Strayed‘s memoir, Wild, Reese Witherspoon throws her boot off a cliff. Now, a hiker along the Pacific Crest Trail has located…
Maria Popova collects the advice of Cheryl Strayed and uses Strayed’s words to deconstruct motherfuckery. Invoking the time right before she wrote her first book, when she too was a…