Rolling Stone Archives - E.B. Bartels

Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Lilly Dancyger

E.B. Bartels — Thu, 13 May 2021 12:15:28 +0000

For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Published on May 13, 2021.

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Lilly Dancyger is the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press, and the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. She is the founder and host of Memoir Monday, a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series co-curated by Narratively, The Rumpus, Guernica, Granta, Literary Hub, and Catapult, featuring the best memoir writers of today. Her writing has been published by Longreads, The Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on Twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger).

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Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Morgan Jerkins

E.B. Bartels — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 15:21:52 +0000

For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Published on August 13, 2018.

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Morgan Jerkins is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing. She graduated from Princeton University with an AB in Comparative Literature, specializing in nineteenth-century Russian literature and postwar modern Japanese literature, and she has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, ELLE, Lenny Letter, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and BuzzFeed, among many others. Her next two projects, Why We Get Out and Caul Baby are forthcoming from Harper Books. Jerkins is based in New York City.

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Some Very Brief Thoughts on Philip Seymour Hoffman

E.B. Bartels — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 04:52:30 +0000

I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when I decided I wanted to write. It was an idea regularly reinforced throughout my childhood, adolescence, and adult life: reading Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech for the first time, writing a letter to and receiving a postcard reply from David Sedaris, visiting Louisa May Alcott’s house in Concord, crying over Nabokov. One such moment was watching Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous. I wanted William Miller’s Rolling Stone assignment. I wanted to be a journalist, a nonfiction writer, one who traveled, who fully immersed herself into her stories.

But, more than William Miller, I wanted to be Lester Bangs. I wanted the seniority, the status, the experience, the authority. If possible, I would skip the William Miller phase and go right to Lester Bangs. This is a real writer, I remember thinking. But, at the time that I first saw Almost Famous as an ignorant teenager, I did not know who Lester Bangs was outside of the context of the movie. In short: I wanted to be Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs.

Almost Famous was just the beginning for me. Capote, Doubt, Synecdoche, New York… I cheered in the theatre when he appeared in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. But while we mourn the loss of such an incredibly talented actor for such a tragic reason, don’t ever forget those words spoken by Mr. Hoffman in that first role that won me over:

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.”

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