memoir
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“Diva Boy”
At The Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus contributor Melissa Chadburn writes about her relationship with her older brother. “By then Ken’s life was no secret. He’d already fought all his battles. His last battle was against AIDS. I thought about it everyday…
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The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Lloyd
Rachel Lloyd talks about her book, Girls Like Us, founding Girls Education and Mentoring Service (GEMS), and why she was hesitant to write a memoir.
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Messing with Memoir
When my memoir went out of print, it was as if someone had thrown a stray puppy onto my doorstep. Dazed, mangy, with a tendency to pee on the rug, this orphaned book was something I couldn’t shoo away, or…
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A Different American Dream
In Sam Benjamin’s debut memoir, American Gangbang, we follow an aspiring porn director as he finds what he’s looking for–and what he’s not.
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A Private Life for the Memoirist
There are those writers that relinquish their private lives to the world, choosing to share the honesty of experience, which is often difficult for those family members and friends who were part of this experience. Changed names and confrontation come…
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jon-Jon Goulian
What is the chance of one of those books living up to its pre-release hype? Of earning back its advance?
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My Interview with Susie Bright, Sex-Positive Feminist
Susie Bright, sex-positive feminist, writer, revolutionary, and my first tongue-kiss with a woman recently released her memoir Big Sex Little Death.
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In Support of the Memoir
Dinty W. Moore’s rebuttal to Lorrie Moore’s essay in the New York Review of Books, in support of memoir-writing defends the genre and points out the absurdities in Moore’s adamant dismissal. Memoirs and their questionable reliability have been the source…
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The Heroic Lie: A Brief Inquiry into the Fake Memoir
When I was about ten years old, I hit my older brother in the mouth with a baseball bat. We were standing around in a field, hitting pebbles with the bat, and I got him on my backswing. There was…
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Reimagining The Memoir
“That it is being considered as book of criticism, rather than as memoir, seems the luck of the draw. Some of the essays in it were originally published in the guise of book reviews, but they always jump the rails…
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When Criticism Becomes Disrespect
At The Book Beast, Sean Manning wonders why The New York Times Book Review “would review his memoir about his mother’s terrible illness in such a snarky and dismissive way.”
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The Rumpus Unreview: Known and Unknown, by Donald Rumsfeld
An 800-page memoir from the former Secretary of Defense tells an old, familiar story—so familiar that our reviewer didn’t even have to read it.