memoir
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The Way We Were
Things in my own life that make me want to write about them are often things that are unresolved. And I use writing to figure them out. Memoirists Meredith Maran, Dani Shapiro, Ayelet Waldman, Kate Christensen, and Nick Flynn speak in…
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The Writing is the Ball
In an excerpt from Why We Write About Ourselves, National Book Award-winner James McBride writes about that question, among other things—the ethics of memoir writing, diversity in publishing, the necessity of struggle, writing in the age of Twitter—and shares some…
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In Defense of Memoir
If you don’t like memoir, don’t read it. And certainly don’t write about it. So you might be a critically acclaimed novelist, but if you don’t understand the genre, your critique is like Vin Scully smacking down golf, or Bob…
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Paul Lisicky
The Rumpus Book Club talks with Paul Lisicky about his new book The Narrow Door>/em>, how much of your story you own, and the importance of reading your own work aloud.
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The Rumpus Interview with Mira Ptacin
Author Mira Ptacin discusses her memoir Poor Your Soul, what inspires her to write, motherhood, and why she considers her beat “the uterus and the American Dream.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, talks about her new memoir, A House of My Own, living in a post-9/11 era, and the necessity of heartbreak.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: A Finished Brain
In her twenties, the author was criticized for showing too much emotion. Decades later, having learned to compartmentalize, she’s accused of not being able to feel. Is this depression, or contentment?
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The Rumpus Interview with Meline Toumani
Meline Toumani discusses her debut, There Was and There Was Not, the rewards and risks of writing a political memoir, and what it means to approach a divided past and future.
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #14: Memoirs about Hard Times and Beauty
I love memoirs about difficult times that don’t sugarcoat it, that don’t pretty it up. I love a memoir that finds the beauty—there is such an unbelievable amount of beauty in this world—without handing out a Hollywood ending, without dipping…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jenny Lawson
Jenny Lawson talks about her second memoir, Furiously Happy, mental illness, and growing up in small-town Texas.
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Saunders and Storytelling
Brevity’s nonfiction blog takes a look at a recent short film about writer George Saunders’s thoughts on storytelling, and applies his advice to essay and memoir: With nonfiction, looking underneath is often less interrogating our imagination and more out-there-with-a-recorder research.…
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The Rumpus Interview with Janice Erlbaum
Janice Erlbaum talks about her new novel, I, Liar, how writing memoir compares to writing fiction, homelessness in America, and Munchausen syndrome and Borderline Personality Disorder.