Hello friends,
Welcome back to my newsletter where I share short, poorly edited notes about stuff I find interesting.
It’s been a little while, hasn’t it. I feel like a lot has changed since the last time I wrote you. Twitter has gone from being a little weird to total Musk-driven collapse. The Barbie Movie finally came out. The world is a different place.
The biggest change for me, and the reason I’m writing you now, is I’ve finished the second draft of the memoir I began just over a year ago. Clumsy: Memoir of a Girlhood at the end of the 20th Century, which last year was a rambling collection of scenes and observations, is now distinctly book-like. In fact, here it is, all 100,500 words, decorated with Sailor Jupiter, the sole remaining member of a set of figurines that show up about midway as key to an ill-fated early attempt at dating. The course of nerd love never did run smooth.
The book is now with a few trusted beta readers whose feedback will help me see the next steps. Maybe I’ll have another draft in me and then maybe start sending her out. Who knows? Publishing is a complicated business. In the meantime I’m getting a manicure and a haircut, watching some trash TV, and getting a little rest before I start planning classes for fall.
When I finished the first draft back in August of last year, I shared with you a few techniques that helped me get the work done. This time I’d like to share a few memoirs that inspired me and gave me high watermarks to aim for. There are those who might argue you should avoid reading the kinds of book you’re writing—I am absolutely not one of them.
All three books I first engaged with as audiobooks read by the author, which added to the intimacy in a thrilling way.
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
In this often funny, deeply honest story, McCurdy elevates the genre of celebrity memoir and challenges our cultural assumptions about both fame and motherhood. I wasn’t familiar with the show she’d starred in before I started reading, but that didn’t affect my enjoyment.
Though McCurdy is generally a charming narrator for her audiobook, I found her choices for voicing her some of her family members a bit goofy (as she admits in the book, her acting was never subtle). The most poignant moments were when her emotions broke through the performance, creating an arresting sense of intimacy.
Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones
Easy Beauty is one of those books I started listening to as an audiobook and immediately needed to read in text form. Cooper Jones writes about disability, art, travel and motherhood with such clarity and precision, I felt myself wanting to memorize sentences. It reminded me that memoir is a genre that contains multitudes, that it can be both vividly sensual (as in engaging the senses) and densely philosophical. When I found myself flailing around the last couple of chapters of my draft, I returned to this book to remind myself of what I was aiming for.
What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
All three of these books engage with trauma on some level, but Foo addresses it most directly. The book begins with a reflection on the horrific abuse she experienced as a child, then moves beyond to explore her attempts to find relief from the life-destroying symptoms of Complex PTSD that arose from those early experiences. She approaches the project like the journalist she is, investigating her trauma from every angle (historical, political, psychological etc) and eventually coming to a kind of grace though it remains complicated. In exploring this, Foo is vulnerable to a fault, going so far as to include recordings of therapy sessions in the audiobook, but she retains an incisiveness and welcoming of complexity that elevates the text beyond the self help genre.
What memoirs are you reading these days? I’m always on the look-out for new sources of inspiration. Share suggestions with me below (or on Twitter or Notes or Bluesky or Threads or whatever you’re using these days)! If you'd like to read more or subscribe, you can do so here.
~Erika