memoir
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Grief Shatters Narratives
At Salon, Helen Macdonald talks about the unexpected success of her new memoir H is for Hawk, writing through grief, and her book’s unconventional mix of memoir, nature writing, and fiction: As the book progresses, all those different styles of…
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The Rumpus Interview with Susanne Paola Antonetta
Poet and memoirist Susanne Paola Antonetta discusses literary bias, feminism, and the origin of her nom de plume.
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The Rumpus Interview with Kenny Porpora
Kenny Porpora discusses his memoir The Autumn Balloon, addiction and alcoholism, writing truthfully about his mother, falling asleep at Burger King with his laptop while drafting, and how he finally found his personal writing style.
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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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Writing Happiness
Michelle Tea talks with Bustle about her new memoir How to Grow Up, motherhood, Botox, and what it’s like to write about things being good: It’s the first time I’ve ever worked on a piece of writing where I’m writing…
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There and Back Again
The Guardian profiles Alex Malarkey, co-author of the bestseller The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. After admitting that, among other things, he’s never actually been there, his publisher looks to backtrack, evangelists work at damage-control, and the Malarkeys try…
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The Rumpus Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz
Wendy C. Ortiz talks about her memoir, Excavation, about her teenage affair with her teacher, and how the moment you write down a memory you make it fallible.
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Sunday Links
What to do with the interesting or vexing stories from our lives, the people who fascinate us, the situations that obsesses us? Do we spin them into fictions or try to capture them in nonfiction, in memoirs, essays, or—in what…
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How to Survive Your Twenties
I survived mine by moving a thousand miles north to a forest with a great college and eventually finding an excellent therapist. Electric Literature interviewed Wendy C. Ortiz about her memoir, her upcoming book, and how she made it through…
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The Rumpus Interview with Miriam Toews
Miriam Toews talks about writing, mental illness, death with dignity laws, and the thin and sometimes troubling line between fiction and autobiography.
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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.