The 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…
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memoir
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The Other Half
By forcing blue-state liberal types to reckon with a demographic they had long dismissed as a punch line—low-income, uneducated whites in economically depleted regions—he [Donald Trump] awakened them to the fact…
Porn is Complicated
There’s been a lot of thoughtful criticism on porn, written by women, recently—notably, Katrina Forrester in the New Yorker and Natasha Lennard in The Nation. For Granta, Andrea Stuart choses a unique angle in her…
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Fairy Tales, Trauma, Writing into Dissociation
Our bodies are incredible and intelligent things.
Meaty on TV
Cable television channel FX has purchased Meaty, a comedy series based on Samantha Irby’s memoir of the same title. Developed by Irby, Jessi Klein (head writer for Inside Amy Schumer, author…
When Marketing Trumps Truth
This is how gay-male-identifying, biological women become straight chicks. Investigative journalism morphs into emotional memoir.
Navigating French
Over at The Millions, Hannah Gersen interviews Lauren Collins about her memoir, When in French; learning a foreign language; and writing about herself. As Collins recalls: I wanted to describe…
A Memoir of NYC Hardcore
Harley Flanagan, infamous bassist of the Cro-Mags, has written a memoir set to be released on September 27 via Feral House. Hard-Core: Life of My Own chronicles Flanagan’s life as a punk drummer from pre-pubescence…
Light/Dark
At the New Yorker, Ed Caesar interviews Anna Lyndsey, author of the memoir Girl in the Dark, about her mysterious light sensitivity that kept her in the dark for over a decade. Citing prominent…
The Rumpus Interview with Russell Banks
Russell Banks discusses his new book, Voyager: Travel Writings, why we are never free from our history, and how writing saved his life.
Kindness/Aggression
In a poignant essay for Electric Literature, memoirist Lori Jakiela (Belief is it’s Own Kind of Truth, Maybe) looks back on the time she spent working the church kitchen on…
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.