Fiction/Nonfiction: nonfiction

  • M.A.S.H by Sarah Gerard

    A memoir piece about being sexually pursued and harassed as a teenager, by an employee of her father’s. She describes the toxic masculinity of the advertising agency in the late 90s so well you can almost smell the place. At times it reminded me of Jill Ciment’s Consent: Is it scandalous or naïve to say…

  • Lost in Translation by Jennifer Pinto

    A half-dozen glimpses into the life of a kid growing up with a Deaf mom. This is funny, sweet and bursting with affection.

  • October by Kyla Hanington

    This knocked the wind out of me three times. Once when I finished reading it, again when I saw it categorized as ‘nonfiction’, and a third time when I read the author’s bio at the bottom.

  • An Open Letter to the Better Robin Becker by Robin Becker

    This is a fun one: a letter from the author to her more famous namesake. You teach at Penn State and I notice you’ve added your middle name to your online university bio. Does that mean you think about me? Want to distinguish yourself from me, the other Robin Becker?

  • The Stranger by Robin Becker

    I was halfway through reading the interview with when I realized that the original story is labelled Nonfiction. It’s a barnburner, and the tension keeps rising with every paragraph.

  • Modes of Transportation

    A stunning story of how music helped a journalist find her gender identity. Plus this line: I wondered what kind of person listened to R.E.M. The almost-literal truth is: nearly everyone born between the years of 1970 and 1985, at least for a little while.

  • The Invisible Man

    A firsthand account of homelessness in America. “Living as minimally as I know how, I’m not making it. I’m losing weight I don’t have to lose. I quit smoking and went on the patch to save money. Alcohol is the buffer a sensitive soul needs to withstand the crimes of a race—the human race—that has…

  • On the Nostalgia of Dried Apricots and Other Garbage

    This is a fierce piece of writing that hits like a sledgehammer: “The man I chose to wed is miles away in the next room weighing down the couch as he wrestles his way through another hangover, offering some caustic rebuke of my failures.” It reminds me of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, but the text…

  • Steal Smoked Fish

    A memoir about going home again after coming out, woven together with a Mountain Goats song and the story behind it.

  • A Father’s Legacy

    A story told as a flowchart in an image, about her family’s history in Portugal and Toronto. It’s harrowing, and worth the effort to zoom and scroll around to follow the various branches. Duarte should write a memoir, I’d buy it for sure.