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Writing memoir is a messy business, and no one knows this better than Helen Fremont ’78.

Fremont’s book The Escape Artist serves as a sequel of sorts to her memoir After Long Silence, published in 1999. After Long Silence grapples with the secret Fremont’s parents kept from her and her sister for most of their lives: that they were Jewish Holocaust survivors. Though Fremont and her sister knew their parents had survived World War II, fleeing their Polish hometown, the daughters were raised Catholic. This false religious identity was one their parents assumed to flee Europe, and, to protect those who helped them, it was an identity they kept up until Fremont and her sister were in their 30s. Upon discovery of the truth, Fremont wrote After Long Silence, revealing the secret her parents had kept for over 50 years. “I’d lived my whole life in my parents’ fiction, governed by lies and secrets and half-truths,” writes Fremont in The Escape Artist, about After Long Silence. “I needed to write something that was my own truth.” Truth exposed; case closed.

Keep reading in Wellesley Magazine.

The post Review of The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Miranda K. Pennington is the author of A Girl Walks into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me about Life, Love, and Women’s Work (Seal Press, 2017). Her work has appeared on The Toast, The American Scholar online, The Ploughshares blog, and The Catapult Podcast. Pennington received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University, where she also was a University Writing Instructor. In addition, she has taught academic writing at Touro College, SUNY Empire State, and the LEDA Institute, and she has led creative writing workshops for the AmpLit festival and Uptown Stories. This fall, Pennington will join the writing faculty of American University in Washington, D.C.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Miranda K. Pennington appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee the other night. This was not unusual. I like to drink tea before bed, and I usually wake up at least once in the night to relieve myself. What was unusual was that before falling asleep, I read a story by Daisy Johnson. I dreamt of deep pools thick with eels, of lips dripping with human blood, of an albatross standing on the kitchen table. This time, when I got up to use the bathroom, I was not fully awake, so heavy pressed the dreams. My shadow seemed to move on its own; the walls of my apartment appeared to be breathing. And when I heard a rustling on the other side of the bedroom door, never did it occur to me that it was just my boyfriend, puttering around the apartment after a late bartending shift. I stared at the door certain that a pack of violent foxes was clawing at the other side. I gasped and screamed and, finally, woke myself from the dreams.

The post Review of Fen by Daisy Johnson appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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I used a prayer card from a wake as my bookmark while reading So Sad Today by Melissa Broder. It happened accidentally—I went to a memorial service for someone I cared about, and, in wanting to keep her close, slid her prayer card into the book I was carrying with me at the time, which happened to be So Sad Today. But it feels fitting.

2016 has been a bad year for people dying. A lot of people whom I love and admire have left this planet, and we are only one-third into the year. It makes me sad, and it makes my heart beat too fast at night as I think about who will go next. I try deep yoga breathing, I try counting backwards from a hundred, I try taking a swig of NyQuil, and, when none of that works, I get up and read So Sad Today. Reading about Broder’s own anxiety and depression makes me feel better and less alone. I’m writing this review in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking too much about death. That also feels fitting.

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A friend posted a picture of me from her wedding, and all I can see is my stomach. I’m with friends, wearing goofy hats for the photo booth, having fun, but I don’t care. Something about the way my body is contorted, or how that slinky polyester is the most unforgiving, or how the waistband of my nylons cut across my middle, but there it is: the bright blue fabric rippling like thick waves over the uneven surface of my bulging gut––an oozing, distorted potato.

Wow, I think. You’re fat.

Mona Awad’s fiction debut 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a novel in thirteen vignettes about the experience of being a woman dealing with body image issues or simply put: The experience of being a woman. At the time I saw that wedding photo of myself, there were probably thousands of women online at the same time, also looking at photos of themselves, also thinking the same thing––no matter what those women actually weigh.

The post Review of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Save three stray years, I have lived in Massachusetts my entire life. It’s a small state, and running into people I know is rarely a surprise. Sitting on the train in Boston, I’ll hear my name, and a former high school classmate will be four seats down. Walking through Harvard Square, I’ll pass one of my best friends on her way to dinner. Any time I meet someone from Massachusetts, I play that old game: Where did you grow up? Oh, do you know so-and-so? She’s from there too. Where did you go to high school? Oh, what about…

This phenomenon isn’t restricted to New England. Every place has its networks, no matter the size. A place can’t get much larger than Russia, and yet the world that Lyudmila Ulitskaya creates in her novel The Big Green Tent feels as intimate as Cambridge. The characters run in their own circles––the Russian intelligentsia, Moscow artists and musicians and poets, Soviet dissidents, producers of the self-published literature or samizdat, Russian ex-pats living abroad. Everyone is somehow connected, whether they know it or not.

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I began to seriously question whether or not I want to have kids one Wednesday at 9 p.m. while having my hair checked for lice. I was sitting in a black swivel chair, wearing a leopard-print hairdresser cape, as an older woman meticulously worked through my scalp with mint-scented conditioner, baking soda, and a fine-tooth comb.

The post Sixteen Writers on the State of My Uterus appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Good nonfiction needs not just the THEN but also the NOW. When a writer tells a story from her past, if the story is really weird or funny or excellent, it is tempting to tell the story and leave it at that. But to make nonfiction really thoughtful and powerful, a writer needs to reflect on the story from her past as her present self and write about, “Why does this story matter? Why am I writing about this now? Why am I still thinking about this all these years later? Why do I think anyone except for me would care about this story?” I am aware of the importance of this because this was the number one criticism I would receive about my work in my MFA nonfiction writing workshops: “E.B., this is funny, but what’s the point? What does current E.B. make of all this?”

Lena Dunham, in her book Not That Kind of Girl, has got all of the THEN but very little of the NOW. Dunham likes to tell a story, but then let it hang. That works sometimes, to let the reader draw her own conclusions, or when the context and commentary around the story as it is being told makes the meaning of the story so obvious that by the time you reach the end, the reader knows exactly its point. But the letting-it-hang happened so often in Dunham’s book that sometimes it felt Dunham was dropping stories for shock value and nothing more. I found myself often thinking, “And….?” while turning the page and seeing that was it. The story was over. Figure out what it means yourself. But instead of this being deep and thought-provoking, which sometimes can happen when a writer lets a story stand for itself, because this happened with almost every story in the book, it made everything feel sort of flat and superficial. Funny, but surface level. Dunham isn’t afraid to tell all her most embarrassing and humiliating stories, but, at the same time, I felt that she seemed afraid to get into the messy darkness of what the stories mean and the purpose they serve.

My favorite moments were when Dunham would actually stop and look at herself, like when she realized that her distraught reaction to her sister’s coming-out was her own self-involved grief over not knowing her sister as well as she thought she did. Additionally, I thought her essay about the confusing stress and anxiety one feels as a rape victim was the most powerful piece in the book. But that essay felt like an anomaly. Moments of self-reflection and analysis were rare, which is too bad, because self-analysis would also help Dunham look less like a privileged child of the New York art world. For example, she drops casually that she hosted a dinner party at age seventeen that was featured in the New York Times style section, with no commentary on how rare and absolutely nuts it is that a TEENAGER’S DINNER PARTY would be featured in the NEW YORK TIMES STYLE SECTION.

I also think including more self-reflection and self-analysis in the book would help especially in situation where the world interprets one of your stories as you molesting your sister. In order to prevent that, throw in some commentary on that right in the heart of the essay (“Looking back on this now, this seems extremely inappropriate…”) instead of just letting the story stand by itself. Cut off the critics before they have a chance to say anything, by writing, right in the piece itself, “I know, this was so fucked up, right?” (Also, if you didn’t want to be compared to a sexual predator, maybe don’t make that comparison yourself? How did that simile get by her agent/editors/readers?)

I think this book had the potential to be much better than it was – just like, in general, I feel Dunham has the potential to be a much better feminist and activist than she is. I enjoy Girls. I find it entertaining. I can relate to a lot of the feelings of being a twentysomething-white-woman-living-in-New-York. But it’s not groundbreaking for me, it’s not a show I need to watch again and again because I connect to it on such a deep, personal, emotional level. It’s surface level funny in a lot of ways, which is exactly how Not That Kind Of Girl felt to me. Same shit, different medium. Which is a bummer, because I was hoping for something more. I also think that the book fell short because a lot of it felt rushed, like the publisher was trying to get it out ASAP because Dunham is relevant right now, and many of the chapters felt like filler (the lists, the annotated emails — I felt they could have been funnier or more in-depth and mostly they just seemed like the editor said, “Shit we need another essay but don’t have time, throw in some lists to make the book longer!”) I also think the rushed feeling made for some sloppy decisions, such as the sexual predator metaphor (see above).

Well, at least the cover design is cool?

I had to take a break from reading the book which is why it took over a month to get through, and, in the end, I only finished it to learn what NOT to do and say as a white feminist.

As a white feminist myself, I would like to avoid being of the problematic variety.

The post Brief Thoughts on Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind Of Girl and Then Let’s All Move On With Our Lives appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Nonfiction is hard to pin down. When I tell people I write nonfiction, I assume they imagine 800-page biographies of dead presidents, or misery memoirs about years of drug addiction while parents are dying of cancer, or scathing book reviews in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Nonfiction is too many things to be given one simple name, so it’s easier to define it by what it’s not. And the one thing it’s not is fiction.

“Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to pose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists,” writes Rebecca Solnit in the introduction of her new book. “This territory to which I am, officially, consigned couldn’t be more spacious, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be free to roam in its expanses.” In The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, Solnit showcases all that nonfiction can do. “As nonfiction – that leftover term apotheosizing fiction – gets defined down as only memoir and essay, I’ve wanted to open it back up again, to claim it as virtually everything else,” writes Solnit in the introduction. “Calling this anthology an encyclopedia was a way to call attention to that range.”

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Good news, feminists! Not all hope is lost! Pick up a copy of this slim book and carry it with you to be reminded that yes, really, yes, things might get better one day!

Just look! A book by a woman whose cover shows nothing but a bold white typeface on a blue background – no soft-focus photograph of laundry on a clothesline in a field of wildflowers, no black high heels, no pink font, no cursive, none of that shit. Not even a picture of Solnit with her long, lovely hair and some sexy, smoldering look in her eye. We’ve come so far!

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