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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #1: Vivian Gornick
As a writer of first-person nonfiction, I have lately been paralyzed with fear, mostly about hurting other people through the stories I tell. Every time I publish a personal essay, someone close to me...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #4: Stephen Elliott
Even before a lending library copy of The Adderall Diaries arrived in my mailbox some time in the summer of 2009, I knew I’d be hooked. A colleague had recommended it, saying it was a gripping memoir...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #6: Jillian Lauren
For a brief second in my late twenties, I considered working topless. I knew a girl who did. She tried to persuade me to join her, saying it was easy and the money was great. I was having a...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #8: Heather Havrilesky
A lot of writers were upset by Neil Genzlinger’s anti-memoir screed in The New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago. Me, I became perfectly apoplectic, mouthing off about it wherever I could (and in...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #9: Elisa Albert
When I tell people my greatest fears around writing memoir – namely of upsetting family members by writing about them and/or revealing to them less “virtuous” aspects of myself – this suggestion almost...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #12: Emily Carter
I don’t know why this is first dawning on me about my own taste in books. But as I review the list of authors I’ve talked with for this series, I realize I’m especially drawn to memoirs, novels and...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #13: Cheryl Strayed
Before I read Cheryl Strayed’s New York Times Bestselling, Oprah-Book-Club-restarting memoir, Wild – before I read her novel Torch – I was taken with her brave, self-reflective writing. A longtime...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #14: Marco Roth
Sometimes I fantasize about expanding these conversations beyond the one-on-one – getting a few particular writers into a room together to discuss the risky business of writing the sort of memoir or...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #15: Melissa Febos
If you attended Stephen Elliott’s Let’s Make A Movie fundraiser for the Happy Baby movie in November, then you got to hear me interview Melissa Febos live, onstage, about writing her memoir, Whip...
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The Rumpus Interview with Sari Botton
Sari Botton is the sort of woman I’ve only ever found in New York: chic, driven, funny, black-clad, capable of juggling the work of ten people, simultaneously earnest and irreverent, confident and...
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #16: Rebecca Walker
Hello, after more than a year. It’s been my intention to keep this column going regularly, as it had been. But this year life has been nuts. I edited two anthologies, am doing another; I’m running...
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Conversations with Writers Braver than Me #18: Anne Roiphe
For some time I’ve wanted to interview author, journalist, and essayist Anne Roiphe for this column. I mean, who better to ask about the ramifications of writing about family than someone who has...
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me #19: Jason Diamond
A quick glance at the vibrant pink cover of Jason Diamond’s Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching ’80s Movies might give one the...
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Mike Albo
Every so often I receive an email from the New York Times reminding me of the Times’ Policy on Ethical Journalism, and my obligation as a (very) occasional freelancer to avoid conflicts of interest....
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Samantha Irby
If you want people leave you alone, try reading Meaty by Samantha Irby in public. I did that a few months ago on a plane to LA, and received the strangest looks as I vacillated between laughter and...
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jessica Berger Gross
From the minute a galley of Jessica Berger Gross’s excellent memoir, Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home, landed in my mailbox, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit. I couldn’t put the book down....
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