Emily Gould reconsiders the likelihood of women’s first-person writing bringing about change.
memoir
Posted inNonfiction
“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom
“We were interested in dead girls, but so interested in them that we were trying to do the opposite of what had been done before.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Chaos at Condé Nast
Responding to Details editor Dan Peres’s new recovery memoir, Katherine Rosman casts a jaundiced eye upon the lax culture and unquestioned expense accounts at Conde Nast Publications that allowed Peres (and several of his colleagues, who also have tell-alls in the works) to get away with gross acts of self-indulgence and mistreatment of their employees.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quotes
Elizabeth Wurtzel Made it Okay to Write ‘Ouch’
Today’s memoirists and personal essay writers owe a debt of gratitude to the Prozac Nation author for rewriting an inhibiting rule.
Posted inNonfiction
‘I Was Trapped Forever In This Present Tense’: Carmen Maria Machado on Surviving Abuse
“She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of … the narrative that I possess.”
Posted inCurrent Events, Science & Nature, Story
A View of the Bay
A family’s losses after Hurricane Sandy didn’t come in the usual order or with the usual speed.
Posted inNonfiction
Carrying Histories of Protest
Jaquira Díaz witnesses her father’s rebellious fight for a better life, and her homeland’s fight for its place in the world.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Was Being Used in Slivers and Slices’: On Feminism at Odds With Evangelical Faith
“I wasn’t unified in my being. I wasn’t able to bring my whole self to the table,” says Cameron Dezen Hammon about her life as a worship leader for an evangelical megachurch.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Am I Writing About My Life, Or Selling Myself Out?
After people repeatedly recognize Shannon Keating and her girlfriend from a personal essay she published about a lesbian cruise, and in the midst of the furor over Natalie Beach’s essay about her friendship with Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway on The Cut, Keating wonders about the line between writer and influencer, and the ethics of writing […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
These Boys and Their Fathers
Trying to form some connection to the father who abandoned him, an outdoorsman surfs the California beach where his father grew up, while looking for answers in the autobiography his father left behind.