Asking two memoir writers to have a conversation, as Ploughshares’ editor did when she suggested I write Nick Flynn’s profile, almost assures an interview without biography. Memoir writers are vague on matters of record. We’re interested in using fact and detail. We’re interested in the gorgeous influence of pain in all its mystery and nonsense….
By the end of her thirties, Patricia Hampl had published two poetry collections and a critically acclaimed memoir. When a radio interviewer asked her what was next, she replied airily, “I have it in mind to work on fiction from now on.” What happened in the following years just goes to show that writers are…
“When I went to a movie set for the first time, I felt that the person I was most like was the set designer,” Alice Hoffman tells me as we sit in a room whose centerpiece is a vivid bouquet of the same tea roses that bloom in the yard beyond the window behind her….
DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, grew up in an affluent suburban neighborhood of Philadelphia, with three older siblings—two brothers and one sister. His father, the owner of a candy factory, was a recovering alcoholic, a brooding, self-absorbed, volatile man. His mother was a self-sacrificing, long-suffering homemaker with artistic interests. Much of Henry’s writing has…
Colm Tóibín is a gentleman. A very witty, charming, lively, and sometimes deliciously louche gentleman, but a gentleman all the same, though one senses that he might not wish for that to be said too loudly. He has the beauty of a boxer—strong chest, light on his feet, precise in his movements and in his…
To begin with, Terrance Hayes is a compulsive storyteller, and prone to enthusiasm. He says, “What’s going on?” to start a conversation, “Sure, sure” in agreement, and “Later” for good-bye. He is always doing something artistic, be it sketching—he carries a tin with paper and pens, and drawings by him and his son, wherever he…
“Reading Jim Shepard,” says Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.” This is true, though there’s nothing (merely) national about it. In an oeuvre that now includes six novels (Flights, Paper Doll, Lights Out in the Reptile House, Kiss of the Wolf, Nosferatu, Project X), three story collections (Batting Against Castro, Love…
In a Washington Post article, Elizabeth Strout discusses how, as a girl, she played people-watching games with her mother. Together, they would imagine the lives of strangers they saw around town. "It seemed to me," Strout says, "from an early age, that nothing was ever as fun as that…The first ambition I remember having was…
A few weeks ago, Kathryn Harrison confessed to me that she "never considered writing nonfiction" when she began her literary career nearly twenty years ago. And had I not first seen her in 1997 at a party filled with book and magazine editors whispering about her then—forthcoming, mysterious memoir The Kiss, which would hit the…
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