Dear Sugar
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A Very Good Suggestion
Elisa Abatsis took our advice and wrote like a motherfucker—head over to McSweeney’s to see what the results have been.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Sarah Hepola
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.
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How to Fill Your Literary Prescription and Cure Your Existential Ailments
In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of…
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Books for Ladies
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 to assert is the breadth and depth of her own…
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Finding Dear Sugar’s Boot
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 a boot he believes is Witherspoon’s.
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Anatomy of a Motherfucker
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 twenty-something writer plagued by the same fear that she was…
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Hornby Keeps It Fresh
For the Atlantic, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviews Nick Hornby about his new book Funny Girl and his experience adapting Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for the big screen. While Hornby says he would not consider writing a screenplay based on his own books, adapting other authors’ work…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Gentrification, and analogies for it, are the focus of Mary Biddinger’s poetry collection A Sunny Place With Adequate Water, reviewed by Danielle Susi. The inhumanity of coin-operated machinery serves as a theme. Moments of “lucidity” make these poems “a little weird, a…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Chloe Caldwell
Chloe Caldwell talks about her new novella Women, gender nectar, break-up grief, and her impatience with analyzing the fiction/nonfiction divide.
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The Great American Novel(s)?
This idea — that one person, and only one person, in any given generation can possess the intellectual prowess, creative might, emotional intelligence and writing chops to produce a novel that speaks truth about the disparate American whole — is…
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The Language and Experience of Solitude
Many times music and literature can evoke pretty similar feelings. That was the case for Kyle Kramer with Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild and Grouper’s latest album Ruins, as Kramer writes in a must-read essay over at Noisey.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, what if your Christmas tree ornaments could tweet. Then, in the Saturday film review of Wild—the film adaptation of Dear Sugar columnist Cheryl Strayed’s eponymous novel—Kenny Ng praises Strayed’s “realness” and “punk aesthetic” while tempering expectations for the film.…