Craft and Creativity
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Literature, Nostalgia, and Making Sense of Our Lives
One of my favorite reads last year was My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff, a memoir which, apparently, also had a movie adaptation. Rakoff explores her first year out of grad school, in the mid-1990s, in which she worked as an assistant in a literary agency—the one that represented J. D. Salinger. And the memoir…
The Myth of Likeable Characters
For most of my fiction-writing life, I’ve written about complicated women. Women who lie, deflect, self-sabotage. Women who want too much or want the wrong things. Women who are soft in one scene and sharp-edged in the next. And throughout that life, I’ve also received more feedback than I can count on the subject of…
Autofiction as a Doorway Into Truth
Some of my favorite novels are not-so-secretly autobiographical. I’m thinking of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. None of these novels tell their authors’ stories with complete dedication to factual reality, but each of them are based on true, lived experiences, and they…