Fiction/Nonfiction: nonfiction

  • ‘I came out as autistic. Everyone said: That explains a lot’ By Laurie Penny

    I don’t know if this counts as creative nonfiction, but I loved this read. Penny’s story is really something — it starts out as something almost lighthearted but there’s a lot of surprising turns here. We chatted about how Instagram was always trying to sell her the oddest things. “I know,” I chuckled, “Facebook thinks…

  • An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who Thinks My Daughter is a Tragedy by Anaïs Godard

    McSweeney’s? The humour magazine? I’m used to reading brilliant writing there, but nothing like this. There’s nothing funny here and it’s one of the best things they’ve ever published: When another child’s upset—before the adults notice, before the child even cries—she takes their hand. She leans her forehead against theirs, gently, like she’s checking for…

  • Chipmunk by Cindy House

    This memoir by Cindy House is short and has an ending I’ll never forget: …I called my husband’s cell phone, I said something like, Come home now, I am recovering from childbirth and holding our infant and do not have a spare limb or extra energy to chase a chipmunk out of the house,

  • Displacement is an Extra Limb That I Carry by Shaimaa Abulebda

    One of the most stunning pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Abuelbda is a gifted writer who tells the story of her displacements in unforgeettable language: Every moment throughout the last eighteen months of this genocidal war has been hell. But receiving ‘evacuation orders’ and being forcibly displaced from our home, along with all…

  • A Lucky One by Susan D. Ross

    There are all sorts of upsetting things in this story, so if things like self harm and abortion are upsetting for you, skip this one. Ross’s memoir is a harrowing and haunting story of an unexpected pregnancy at age 15. Just terrifying stuff: I sat up naked on the couch listening to his feet slapping,…

  • Contra by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo

    This is kind of a story about deer contraception, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Gelfman-Randazzo uses a weird bit of local lore to tell a much more personal story. A deer stares into the camera. An ear-sized tag dangles from her lobe, like the world’s biggest cartilage piercing. It’s dusk.…

  • This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

    This is a long read, but I could not put it down once I started. It’s funny, tearjerking, and lovely. In my most bitter moments, in times when I realize how much of my foundational education was given over to the war and how little was given over to, say, gym or art or the…

  • Purgatory in Two Parts by Elizabeth Jannuzzi

    This is about suicide, so if that’s something you avoid, skip this. Jannuzzi’s sister took her own life, and Jannuzzi writes about it. It has haunted me for days. I started going to church again after my sister Julia attempted suicide and failed. If my parents were surprised by my sudden reappearance in the back…

  • The Way Seahorses Hang On by Anne Panning

    From the first sentence this feels like an instant classic piece of writing, and the writing is just filled with visual language and thought-provoking metaphor. This story has come back to me almost daily for a week. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch…

  • The Mirror Operator by Sarah Mullens

    This is Mullens’ memoir of the rocky relationship with her right-wing-conspiracy-theorist mother using logical proofs as a narrative device. It’s written in a way that reminded me of the Ted Chiang story I recently reread for my Personal Anthology. In bed, lights off in the middle of the day, laptop balanced on my knees, I…