Joan Didion
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The Rumpus Interview with Christopher Bollen
Author Christopher Bollen talks about his sophomore novel, Orient, secrets and privacy, sexual orientation in fiction, and the lost art of the whodunit mystery.
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The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty
Tara Merrigan reviews The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty today in Rumpus Books.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Way We Weren’t by Jill Talbot
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.
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Joan Didion: Conservative to Liberal
How exactly did Joan Didion go from writing for conservative weekly the National Review to serving as a leading voice for the left? The New Yorker offers an answer: What changed was her understanding of where dropouts come from, of why people turn…
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Narrative Dependencies
People contain multitudes, and by multitudes, I mean libraries. For the Atlantic, Julie Beck presents us with a thrilling article on narrative psychology, providing some scientific basis for that brilliant statement by Joan Didion: we tell ourselves stories in order…
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Book Recs from a River-Rafting Joan Didion
To go with her contribution, Didion had to provide a few sentences about herself. Excavated from the Mademoiselle archives, what she wrote shows a still somewhat green, aspiring writer with a sentimental attachment to home: “Joan spends vacations river-rafting and…
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Joan Says Goodbye, Taylor Says Hello
Andrew Bomback steps into the conversation between Eula Biss and Joan Didion about “Goodbye to All That” and the myth of New York City, bringing along Taylor Swift as his guest. In its author’s privilege and its message of youthful…
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Live-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…
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The Rumpus Interview with Sarah Tomlinson
Author Sarah Tomlinson talks about ghostwriting, her father and childhood, the tradition of confessional writing, and her new memoir, Good Girl.
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The Rumpus Interview with George Hodgman
Editor and author George Hodgman talks about his new memoir, Bettyville, what makes for a good memoir, and returning to his hometown of Paris, Missouri from New York to take care of his aging mother.
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This Week in Short Fiction
The novella-in-flash: What does it mean? How is it even possible? Kathleen Rooney and Abby Beckel, editors at Rose Metal Press, which specializes in hybrid forms, have recently set about defining this lesser-known form. This week, they spoke about My…
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Joan Didion on White People
Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even…