memoir
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The Rumpus Interview with Ashley Cardiff
Ashley Cardiff, author of the recently-published Night Terrors: Sex, Dating, Puberty and Other Alarming Things, talks to us about the challenges of the sexy memoir, privacy, style, and poses the question of whether or not Axl Rose counts as a…
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The Rumpus Interview with Justin St. Germain
When Justin was twenty, his mother was murdered by her fifth husband in their trailer, off the grid from Tombstone, Arizona. He spent the next decade trying not to be defined by his mother’s death, before deciding to face his…
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The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Newman
Balancing love and truth probably requires a very rigid, if not anal avoidance of glory and shame, when it comes to the portrayal of the people in the story—be they family members or characters.
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Fresh Air Fail: What Happens When Personal Writing Draws a Spotlight
Martha Bayne wrote a piece for The Rumpus about her unplanned pregnancy. Next thing she knew, she was being invited onto Fresh Air. That’s when things got sticky…
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The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
Both Yuknavitch and Scarboro, whose books echo each other in interesting ways, were willing to talk with me about this question of what to do with memoir, and much more.
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Notes for a Twenty-Something’s Memoir
You tell yourself to get as far from your mother and the suburbs as possible. You vow to embrace slutdom in college and not to wear underwear.
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Sounds of Leigh Newman’s “Still Points North”
“The story was there in the music, down to the epilogue.” Leigh Newman’s memoir, Still Points North: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-up World, One Long Journey Home, gets a unique treatment over at Largehearted boy‘s Booknotes, a column where authors are…
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The Ghost of Mary MacLane
An average American newspaper-reader in the first decade of the last century immediately understood, if he read that something was “of the Mary MacLane type,” that this name was shorthand for outsized self-absorption of a specifically feminine nature.
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The Rumpus Interview with Rosie Schaap
Rosie Schaap discusses Drinking with Men, her love of poetry, her intriguing family members, and what she would do with her life if she weren’t a writer.
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The Debate on Confessional Writing
There has been no shortage of criticism in response to Hamilton Nolan’s Gawker post “Journalism Is Not Narcissism.” Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott wrote a recent critique of Nolan’s essay, as did memoirist Jillian Lauren and Rumpus columnist Steve Almond. David Ulin recently…
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More on Memoir
Rumpus columnist Steve Almond weighs in on Stephen Elliott’s side of the is-memoir-an-acceptable-form-of-literature debate. “[Hamilton] Nolan is right to decry this kind of cynicism,” writes Almond. “But what he gets wrong in his piece is just as important as what…
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The Comics Journal
Kmart ShoesReviewed by Rob Clough Lance Ward describes his autobiographical comics in the subtitle of his book KMart Shoes as “a therapeutic exercise” and “a painful memoir.” It’s the psychological equivalent of ripping away a Band-Aid, as he churns out page…