Memoir-related links I liked this week

by Virginia Lloyd | Jul 22, 2011 | Blog, Memoir | 1 comment

My memoir-related internet meanderings from the week ending Friday 22 July:

From the Paris Review blog, Paradise Lost – a wonderful example of the personal essay in just under 1,500 sculpted words from Vanessa Blakeslee, about her relationship with a man 20 years her senior, who had spent time in prison 20 years earlier on a fraud charge
In ‘Le Mot Juste’, Elif Batuman clarifies her use of the word ‘douchebag’ in her Dante essay (see last week’s list), and ponders the ‘mysteries of arse’
Executive Editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, asks why anyone would want to write a book today
and for Australian writers dreaming of living as a writer, this financial portrait of the Australian artist as … a not-so-young person who makes their primary living in a field related to their work.

This weekend I’ll be finishing Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, one of the two non-fiction books that have inspired me most with my own work-in-progress this year (the other being the above-mentioned Batuman’s The Possessed). I’m looking forward to opening my autographed copy of Mr Peanut author Adam Ross’s new story collection, Ladies and Gentlemen, from which he read so persuasively this week at Brooklyn’s Book Court. Having interviewed him for the Courier-Mail earlier this year, it was a pleasure to meet him in person. If the reviews are anything to go by, I’m in for a treat.

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