memoir
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A Memoirist’s Pact with the Reader
At Salon, Dani Shapiro writes an open response to a reader who felt that Shapiro’s memoir Slow Motion wasn’t fully honest because it didn’t include all the details of her life. In it, she explains what memoir is and isn’t, and what honesty…
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Looking at Spent: A Memoir
Rumpus contributor Antonia Crane‘s forthcoming memoir, Spent, is getting some great reviews ahead of its early 2014 release. Check out what the Library Journal has to say: “VERDICT This is not an antiprostitution diatribe, but is instead one woman’s account of…
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Of Love and Loss
For Guernica, Boyer Rickel offers us raw reflections on love and disease after losing his partner in “Morgan: A Lyric.” You don’t realize how much nothing is until you have nothing, says a woman in Oklahoma whose house burned down. Love…
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Alone in the woods: A New Memoir
Rumpus contributor Micah Perks has a new eBook out on Shebooks called, Alone In The Woods: Cheryl Strayed, my daughter and me. Micah Perks’ candid short memoir takes an insightful look at women and the wild, the wildness she experienced…
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You Cannot Sleep
In 1994, Mikail Eldin was an arts journalist searching for a story. Five years later, he was a reporter who had survived firefights and brutal torture by Russian troops. He recounts his experiences in his memoir called The Sky Wept Fire. This…
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Women Speaking Up
For Slate, Amanda Hess reports on a boom in the publication of personal essays about women’s issues like rape, abortion, or an eye-poppingly grotesque parasite infection that we’d rather remain ignorant of: These stories are emotionally electric, politically relevant, and powerfully…
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“I am Malala” Book Banned
The LA Times reported this week that sixteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai’s memoir I Am Malala, has been banned from over 40,000 schools in her native country of Pakistan. The book (co-written with British journalist Christina Lamb) describes Malala’s transformation into a vocal…
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Melissa Petro on The Writing Cure
Melissa Petro, whose Rumpus essay “Not Safe For Work” contributed to getting her fired from a teaching job, writes in this month’s The New Inquiry about what she calls “The Writing Cure”—how writing about traumatic or damning life events offers…
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When are we done telling our story?
Most authors know that revealing intimate autobiographical secrets in our work can have a polarizing effect on our lives – old relationships are transformed or shattered, new ones born through the inevitable connections created. In OUT, Alysia Abbot describes how…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward, author of the memoir Men We Reaped, speaks candidly about handling grief, exploring place, and “the fragile balance of writing accurately without perpetuating stereotypes and archetypes.”
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Bough Down by Karen Green
Kyle Boelte reviews Karen Green’s BOUGH DOWN today in The Rumpus Book Review.
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“Every Narrative Voice Is a Fiction”
Some years ago I attended a [Margaret Atwood] reading….She introduced the story she read by saying that it was not autobiographical. Then she read her story about a woman who weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds. When she…