Looking for suggestions for essays and memoirs. Any topic is okay, but as a frame of reference I'm looking for something similar in style to Anais Nin, Patti Smith, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Helene Cixous, Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson or Mary Oliver.
by wonky-girl
3 Comments
Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up and A Writer’s Notebook. Looks back over his career and his writing process.
Antonia Crane’s Spent and Lotte Latham’s Dear Mr. Andrews are honest memoirs by extremely lucid, socially conscious sex workers (lot of sensationalized shit out there, but as someone from that industry, these were grounding and refreshing to me.) And there’s always Hunger by Roxane Gay or Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon.
I highly recommend anything by Leslie Jameson, especially The Empathy Exams.
If you’re a Didion fan, you should try Eve Babitz. She was a kind of protégé of Didion, but she has a lust for life (and food and sex and music) that Didion just doesn’t. Her work is less polished but much more fun.