experiences. Probably, I pictured a man. What I did not consider were any of the historical examples of politicized personal writing (is there any other kind?) that were often part of a long-standing tradition of testimony, much of which I’d read, like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Diary of a Young Girl, Red Azalea, and Night. Not to

devoured. No, my resistance to and bias against memoir was not based in any lived experience as a writer or a reader. It was my own internalized sexism, calling from inside

The female characters in works of fiction by a writer who has violated women are often two-dimensional objects of obsession, possession, derision, or worship—all violable statuses. Or perhaps the men are all presented as inclined to violate. In other words, the author’s imagination frequently fails to transcend his own personal limitations. Once I

details than the published version. On the first go-around, I left nothing out. The most often-repeated advice that I’ve heard and given on the subject of writing about others is to write the book first. Write it before you consider how your mom might feel when she reads it. Write it before you start pruning details that will hurt the people you

For many years, I kept a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet tacked over my desk: “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”

Cruelty rarely makes for good writing. It can be pleasurable sometimes, both to write and to read, but it is a cheap pleasure. People often rely on cruelty for humor, but again, the prose and people I find funniest

My first book, Whip Smart, the memoir that I wrote after giving up my Very Important Novel, was, and I guess still is, a deeply unsexy book about sex and sex work. It’s also a feminist book about power and money and gender, and how, for a time in my early twenties, middle-aged, mostly married rich white men paid me to spit and urinate and slap and

means comprehensive even in this task. I have found that a fulfilling writing life is one in which the creative process merges with the other necessary processes of good living, which only the individual can define.

The history of trauma and its stories has always been politicized. Consider the case of hysteria, that mysterious illness that captivated male doctors from antiquity until the beginning of the twentieth century.