memoir Archive
Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence, #5—The Objective Correlative
Caldwell’s memoir is a deep exploration into how human and human-animal connections can heal us from traumatic experiences.
In Bookstores Near You: Boy Erased by Garrard Conley
Depicting his time as a “patient” in the ex-gay therapy program known as Love in Action (LIA), Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased opens in a way that reminds me, eerily, of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Review: THE RETURN: FATHERS, SONS AND THE LAND IN BETWEEN by Hisham Matar
Through the detritus of the Qaddafi regime's collapse, Matar digs with a singular purpose: to return to his homeland and find any answers to the ultimate fate of his father.
Demented and Seductive
In the 12-episode series of her podcast You Must Remember This titled “Charles Manson’s Hollywood,” Karina Longworth takes listeners from Manson’s early delinquency, through his aspirational move to L.A. and subsequent occupation of abandoned movie set Spahn Ranch, to the details and aftermath of the murders for which he’s
The Poetics of Madness: Reading and Writing Mental Illness
In a sense, madness (to use an archaic but attractive term) is a problem of narrative. To put it plainly: mental illness makes it difficult to know just what the heck is going on, or to what extent one’s perceptions of events can be trusted.
Our Ladies of Perpetual Sorrow
There’s something happening with the personal in writing, and Jason Guriel’s highly circulated Walrus essay “I Don’t Care About Your Life” wants to warn us about it. “I Don’t Care About Your Life” isn’t as polemical as it sounds. For one, its title doesn’t so much reveal Guriel’s hand,
Review: DIMESTORE by Lee Smith
Hers is a voice that I will never tire of: encouraging, kind, and so forthright about the complexities inherent in life, specifically life lived as a writer, a woman, and a resident of a place that is experiencing the unpredictable transience of time, while also rooting itself in the
The Food Memoir: Harking Back to Childhood
One of the most profound depictions of memory in literature is immortalized in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The Madeleine Moment, as it is often called, exists in Proust’s seven-volume novel, where the narrator is swamped by memories when he dunks a madeleine, a sort of cake,
“Ghosts Usually Accompany Me through My Poems”: An Interview with Diane Seuss
Words just seem to have more possibilities in the poems of Diane Seuss. They become more flexible, more magnetic, attracting and accumulating meaning and music in a speedy rush to surprise, a hard-won clarity about what it’s like to be here, be human. Diane is the author of three
The Autobiography of the Imagination: Toward a Definition
The autobiography of the imagination writes itself, one could say. It writes every time we write, every time we dream or daydream. It is its own captain’s log, the transaction and receipt. It reveals the self to make the self into a stranger, twisting the I to wring out