Author Archive
“The writer’s toolbox is for everyone”: An Interview with T Kira Madden
T Kira Madden’s new memoir is ultimately redemptive—it is a book about growing back from brokenness and finding love after a childhood spent longing for it.
The Journey to Motherhood in The Art of Waiting and The Rules Do Not Apply
Where are all the books about miscarriage and assisted reproduction, about experiencing the loss of something you never had to begin with?
The Secret History’s Fates, Allusions, and Tragedies
By making her first novel’s characters classicists, Donna Tartt lets us in on the trick: that this book is, in essence, a modern day Greek tragedy.
Revisiting Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World
This memoir of nineteen-year-old Maynard’s relationship with fifty-three-year-old JD Salinger is a nuanced exploration of power dynamics in a relationship, and an important #MeToo read.
The Small Tragedies of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children
9/11 is the catalyst to launch the characters of Claire Messud’s 2006 novel from their delayed adolescence into the sobriety and cynicism of adulthood among New York’s intellectual elite.
The Narrative Messiness of Chronic Illness
Memoirs from Paul Kalanithi, Lucy Grealy, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Porochista Khakpour teach us about turning the story of an ailing body into a work of art.
Self-Education in Tara Westover’s Educated
The first time Westover heard about the Holocaust, she was seventeen years old and in her first semester of college. Sitting in a lecture, she sees the unfamiliar word under an image in her textbook. “I don’t know this word,” she tells her professor. “What does it mean?”
Meaghan O’Connell’s Lessons in Parenthood
I’ve always thought of stories of new parenthood as a cross between how-to manuals and cautionary tales. It wasn’t until I read Meaghan O’Connell’s memoir that I realized mothers don’t write their stories for the benefit of those without children—whether their stories scare me or encourage me is irrelevant.
Jesmyn Ward’s and William Faulkner’s Apocryphal Counties
Like Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward sets all her novels in a town loosely based on her own hometown in Mississippi, mapping a terrain that holds the various human experiences within its topographical confines.
Reading New York
In the New Yorks of Anne Roiphe’s and Vivian Gornick’s memoirs, isolation in an urban setting is a tired trope that neither Roiphe nor Gornick finds to fit her experiences.