“Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story”
Vaguely reminiscent of our very own Letters in the Mail, Michael Kimball’s new book, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) reinvents memoir in a way that would have Montaigne going...
View Article“Who the Hell Cares About Anne Sexton’s Grandmother?”
When we read a piece of fiction, we don’t assume—or at least we know we’re not supposed to assume—it’s a faithful recreation of an event in the author’s life. But what about when we read a poem?For...
View ArticleTwain’s Longest Dictation
In the New Yorker, Ben Tarnoff reviews Volume II of the Autobiography of Mark Twain.Notorious for his ability to talk a blue streak, Twain dictated the entire three-volume tome of over 5000 typewritten...
View ArticleA 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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Interview with Debra Dean
In spring 2012, I flew to Miami to interview for a position on the creative writing faculty at Florida International University. Debra Dean was the fiction writer most recently hired by FIU. I loved...
View ArticleOne and The Same
Nosy readers often delight in sleuthing out the parallels between an author’s work and their life, as if an identifiable autobiographical source might change the meaning behind the words. So what...
View ArticleThe New Proust
I’m a Proustian in that sense, I believe in memories outside of consciousness, and this is just a way to find them. Writing is a way to get access to them. The thing you feel if you smell something, or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium: Marguerite Van Cook and James...
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Tuesday nights 7-9 p.m. EST in New York...
View ArticleInterest in Celebrities Wane
Readers have apparently grown tired of the celebrity memoir, with autobiographies and memoirs of famous people slowing in sales, reports the Guardian.Related Posts:A Memoirist’s Pact with the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Interview with Miriam Toews
All My Puny Sorrows, or “AMPS,” as Miriam Toews calls it when we speak via Skype, is a book that exists in an insular world—a good deal of its action takes place inside the walls of a hospital, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“And She Went on Her Way Rejoicing”
Who is Muriel Spark and why should we care about her? The provocative, slippery Spark might have asked us the same question. Muriel Spark has been cast as a spinner of comic, cold-blooded tales. On the...
View ArticleThere 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...
View ArticleBy Any Memes Necessary
The long-awaited release of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in ebook format is on track for May of this year, to commemorate what would have been the activist’s 90th birthday. The print edition has been...
View ArticleFamily Secrets
Memoirist, cartoonist, and creator of the famous Bechdel Test, Alison Bechdel talks to The Millions about the evolution of her art, winning a MacArthur “Genuis Grant,” and searching for answers in her...
View ArticleEarly Autobiography Gets a Boost
Margery Kempe, a 15th century mother-of-14 visited by religious visions whose autobiography is considered among the first in the English language, has just gained significant cred. For the first time,...
View ArticleMystery Maven Memoirs
In the wake of the destruction of precious cultural artifacts during the unrest in Iran and Syria, a quiet memoir from the queen of mystery, Agatha Christie, remembers the landscape and archeological...
View ArticleLive-Tweeting Grief
“The challenge of memorializing doesn’t favor professionals,” writes Sean Minogue over at Full Stop. So, how are autobiographical narratives of loss by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Joan Didion, or Paul Auster...
View ArticleLike Peeping Over the Edge of the World
“It’s like peeping over the edge of the world while remembering you’ve left your spectacles on the kitchen table,” she writes of her cruelly paradoxical situation: knowing that death is on its way...
View ArticleReality, Fiction, Everything in Between
In such a world, the trajectory of any one character, however prominent, never escapes being warped by the gravity of another. Even if, as in Preparation for the Next Life, these background figures are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Interview with Phoebe Gloeckner
Twelve years ago, I spent a day interviewing the artist Phoebe Gloeckner in her garage studio on Long Island. Her semi-autobiographical novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl had just been released. Based...
View Article