“Writing is a way to make sense of things that don’t make readily apparent sense.”

At age 29, Kathleen Rooney has already published two books, several books of poetry, co-created the independent Rose Metal Press, taught university writing classes, and worked as a Senate aide for 11 years. If that doesn’t seem enough, her memoir For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs came out last month from Counterpoint Press. The memoir is a collection of eleven essays that span Rooney’s journey from young adulthood to literary, slightly older young adulthood, and include references to both feminism and bikini waxes, tirades against plagiarism, third-person reflections on what it means to work for a prominent state Senator, love letters to Weldon Kees and John Berryman, and meditations on nuns and humility. Julia Halprin Jackson chatted with Rooney over the phone to get the skinny on what it means to be a young woman memoirist in 2010, and what risks writers of nonfiction take. Read more »

“These were pieces I had written along the way never thinking it would be collected in a book. If anything, I was like, ‘What am I gonna do with all these things? I’m a poet, after all.’”

I think Daniel Nester just insulted me. When I told him that I didn’t understand his chapter, “A.I. Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll All Night”—a 20-page-plus “interview” mocking a real interview between NPR’s Terry Gross and Gene Simmons circa 2002—and how it fit in his latest book, How To Be Inappropriate, the poet and college professor’s response was, uh, unexpected. Geez. I thought we had something special, only to be slammed 13 minutes later. Rough start. Of course, keep in mind, I could be projecting. After all, the dude just penned an entire book about being crass, gross and sometimes douchey. Read more »

“What you’re going to figure out, when you put it on the page, is that you’re forced to really think through something. I think people can understand more things about themselves once they’ve written it down.”

Eugene Rubin’s memoir Headlock: Chronicles of a Psychiatrist’s Son explores teenage angst in 1970s New York City as framed by the powerful hold of his celebrated psychiatrist/author father, Dr. Theodore “Ted” Isaac Rubin. Rubin explores the finer points of male adolescence while breaking down each anecdote in a way that only a psychiatrist can. Questions about sexuality and identity are framed in terms of infamous Times Square gyms, high school wrestling, late-night prank calls with friends, and his everpresent “Jewfro.” The college hunt starts early for Eugene, who enrolls in an all-boys college prep school and is persuaded by his parents to aim not only for a university degree, but also for a famously competitive six-year medical program. Where is that fine line between parental and personal expectation, and how can one live up to either? Read more »

“My intention in writing the book is to attempt to decrease the amount of suffering in the world, and one way I attempt to do that is to illuminate how one can get lost, or, more precisely, how I got lost.”

In 2004, Nick Flynn, who rocked the literary world with his gritty debut memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), started the year with a certain internal unrest. Then, when photos showing America’s treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib leaked to the public that May, those images stuck with him in an inescapable way and began to shape his next work. The book soon became an exposition of the innate darkness in all of us, and he wanted to shine a light. The book, The Ticking is the Bomb, is a memoir and exploration of the times in his life where he’d been “lost in the woods.” The stories are told through what he describes as an organic cluster of images–-both those of inhumane treatment and others from his own experience that he’d held onto for sometimes inexplicable reasons–-around a mysterious central sphere. He uses an entirely non-linear form of storytelling that allowed him to explore life’s most impactful moments without a rigid chronology. SMITH’s Lisa Qiu interviewed him by phone about just how his second memoir emerged from his fervent opposition to torture. Read more »

“Any writer likes to tell stories to begin with, and if the best stories you have are your own, how could you not tell the stories? I don’t feel particularly shy about sharing my stories. You know, if the worst thing I’m ever accused of is naïveté, especially in my twenties, I can live with that.”

For decades, Michael Antman looked back on his three uncanny months in Port Arthur, Texas in 1976 in puzzlement. A native of Chicago and in his early twenties at the time, he’d taken a job selling Bibles door to door and found himself in an entirely foreign, sometimes terrifying place. His concept of his own identity changed suddenly and shockingly with a single incident, when a young friend not unlike himself, Sydney, burst into a local bar with a sawed-off shotgun and threatened to kill himself and his wife, later driving his car full-speed into a tree that same night. I spoke with Michael at length about revisiting Port Arthur thirty years after his experiences there and how writing his memoir helped him understand why his fate was different from Sydney’s, despite their apparent connections. Read more »

“It isn’t often that a therapist or a spiritual healer will self-disclose. When you’re in a place of teaching, it seems that there is a tendency to leave out the personal story, and I am about having people learn it for themselves. I wanted to loan everybody my shoes.”

Dr. Laurie Ann Levin grew up with a mystical sense that she was meant to be God’s messenger. She later translated this spiritual energy into her passion for film. For more than 25 years, she worked as an agent in Hollywood, representing such talents as Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Michael Keaton. Her intuition always played an important role in choosing new projects and navigating complicated family relationships. After enduring a series of challenges, including the death of her mother, a divorce, and difficulties getting her first films off the ground, she rediscovered her passion for psychology and spirituality. Her memoir details her journey from Hollywood to Moonview Sanctuary, the spiritual healing institute in Santa Monica that she founded in 2004 with medical partner Dr. Terry Eagan, and former CEO-turned-fiancée Gerald Levin. Read more »

“When you’re going through memories like that, you detach yourself. You become a researcher of your own life. That’s basically what it was; I became a researcher of my own life.”

A survivor of a devastating, decades-long civil war in his native Sudan, Valentino Achak Deng now uses his voice to advocate for his people. He partnered with author Dave Eggers to create What is the What, an autobiography that details Valentino’s journey as one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, walking for weeks across dangerous open desert to escape the violence of war, as well as his resettlement in multiple refugee camps and later in the U.S. Read more »

“It’s unavoidable that the truth is subjective: a book might be true enough for you and not true enough for me.”

In his chronicle of the form, Memoir: a History, Ben Yagoda explains that the term memoir can be traced back to 1678. But the notion of being fascinated with our own and others’ lives actually goes back even further, to the development of glass mirrors at the end of the 15th century. We’ve been staring into that mirror ever since, a pastime that provides endless occupation for my two cats, millions of bloggers, and a handful of successful authors who pigpile the bestseller lists week after week. Read more »

“To read most of the graphic novels that have received widespread coverage in the mainstream media, you would think that all cartoonists lead dull lives: they stay home in their studios, masturbate a lot, and whine about not getting laid.”

The summer of 1984 was tough for political cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall. Within the course of a few months, he found himself dumped, expelled, fired, and evicted from his Columbia dorm with no one to turn to for help. With no particular plan in mind, Rall bought a slice of pizza, met a girl, and ended up spending the night with her. Read more »

“How did this shit happen to me? I didn’t ask for any of it. Not that I was complaining, but how many thirteen-year-olds had gotten drunk, smoked pot, and sniffed cocaine in the back of a police car?”

Sitting on Raul’s porch on Friday night, I could hear the town start to come alive. Conversations, arguments, the smell of food, and that fucking siren were all drifting through the air. I was reading a collection of short stories by Paul Bowles that centered around various tourists traveling to strange lands and finding themselves in the most unlikely situations. The story I was reading was about a guy who was in Morocco for his honeymoon. He left the hotel one day in a simple quest to buy some milk, and by the end, was wandering around the desert wearing a full body suit made out of the bottoms of tin cans, the sharp sides facing in. I could hear the police siren getting closer and was interrupted from the book by Raul skidding to a stop in front of the house. I looked up to wave hello and saw two other guys in the car with him. Read more »