The smart, funny At Wit's End is a bible of modern cartooning, capturing the funny people of the New Yorker with pithy profiles, portrait photography and, of course, their own wonderful comics.
The smart, funny At Wit's End is a bible of modern cartooning, capturing the funny people of the New Yorker with pithy profiles, portrait photography and, of course, their own wonderful comics.
Kiera Wright-Ruiz explores a host of Latin American cultures in her richly imagined cookbook-memoir, My (Half) Latinx Kitchen.
Kiera Wright-Ruiz explores a host of Latin American cultures in her richly imagined cookbook-memoir, My (Half) Latinx Kitchen.
Rich Benjamin reckons with his family’s exile from Haiti in his vivid, novelistic memoir, Talk to Me.
Rich Benjamin reckons with his family’s exile from Haiti in his vivid, novelistic memoir, Talk to Me.
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When the Charles Manson Family murdered five people in August 1969, it was the shocking climax of America’s most chaotic decade. Now, after 20 years of meticulous research, Tom O’Neill reveals that everything we thought we knew about this tragedy is really just the tip of the iceberg.
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Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women, tells a story of female pleasure and pain—of three women’s search for sexual fulfillment and the different ways society punished them for achieving it. She spent nearly a decade with these women, embedding herself in their lives to paint an intimate, breathtakingly reported portrait of desire.

Lina is a homemaker and mother in suburban Indiana, languishing in a passionless marriage to a man who won’t even kiss her on the mouth. Starved for affection, she reconnects with an old high school boyfriend and embarks on a life-changing affair. In North Dakota, we meet Maggie, a 17-year-old high school student who begins a romantic relationship with her married English teacher. A few years afterward, with no degree, no career and no dreams to live for, she steps forward with her story—and is met with disbelief by her community and the jury that hears her case. Finally, we meet Sloane, a gorgeous, successful restaurant owner in the Northeast who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women. For years, Sloane has been asking herself where her husband’s desire ends and hers begins.

We asked Lisa Taddeo some questions about the reporting process for this provocative, unparalleled book.

 


 

In the book, you talk about how the process of selecting your three subjects was somewhat organic, with some subjects taking themselves out of the running or dropping off for various reasons. Among the three women whom you ultimately wrote about, there’s a fair cross-section represented of socio-economic status. Maggie comes from a working-class family, Lina seems solidly middle class, and Sloane comes from money and is upper class—and it obviously colors their experiences. Was this cross-section intentional?
To an extent, yes, the cross-section was intentional. One of my many hopes for the book was that it would be geographically and socioeconomically and racially variegated. I also wanted there to be a wide range of sexual orientations. I was also still looking for male subjects, in some capacity. One of the first drafts I turned in to my editor had a wide range of subjects, satisfying most, if not all, of that range. But it was these three women whose stories were the most infinitely relatable and also the longest of the segments, because they had given me the most, told me the most. They were the most trenchant and clear and raw. The ways their communities reacted to them were the most indicative of the way society treats the marginalized, the disenfranchised. While the other smaller segments were interesting, they were not anywhere near as powerful as these three final subjects. And it felt that including anything more would have watered down their narratives.

 

One of the best things about the book is that it’s narrative journalism that reads like fiction. There’s rich internal monologue supplied for each woman. Are these detailed, private thoughts things they explicitly spoke to you about? Or were they things you extrapolated from the intimacy of your time together and the things you did talk about?
The depth of the internal monologues came from my asking the same questions multiple times and spending a great deal of time with them. It also came from being open about myself, from rendering myself as vulnerable to them as they were with me.

 

Obviously some considerable intimacy was achieved between you and the women you profiled. Can you talk a little bit about that process of earning their trust?
It was slightly different for each. Maggie was difficult because she had felt so terribly misused by the press in her state. Sloane is a very private person in a small community and was concerned about her reputation and that her children might find out. Overall it was a matter of spending a lot of time with each of them; of making the commitment, in two of the cases, to move into their communities; to assure them of my goals and hopes, that I would not sensationalize their stories but speak their truths in the best way that I could. As I mentioned earlier, I also gave a good deal of myself, when appropriate. I told them my own stories, talked about my own pain and passion. I believe a two-way street is the only honorable way to interview someone about their innermost thoughts.

 

Do you remain in touch with any of the women?
Yes, with all three of them. I hope we will always remain in touch.

 

As I read the book, I found that there were some parts that troubled me. Like the women in the accounts you present, there were aspects of female desire that I hadn’t considered very deeply, and the ones that hewed too close to home left a sense of discomfort. Was that any part of your experience, as you explored this sometimes unexpected territory?
Certainly, at times. Though mostly I felt comforted that others had experienced the same difficulties and tragedies. I felt united by having felt the same sort of passion, of having sacrificed for it.

 

Were you present during any of the events you describe? Or did the bulk of your descriptions come from interviews after the fact?
I was present for a number of them. In the cases when I wasn’t, I would try my best to re-create the milieu of the experience. For example, with Lina, I would often drive to the spot by the river or the clearing where she had just come from seeing Aidan, and I would sit there and take in the smells and sounds of the surroundings. For Maggie’s part, after asking her multiple questions about not just the interlude with the teacher but about everything she saw and heard, I would visit the locations where she had described being with the teacher. I would look at the same things she had described looking at. I would sit in the parking lot where she told me she’d sat, waiting for him, outside the restaurant. I drove through the streets she named. I did the same thing with Sloane’s story.

 

How did you find each of the women who would ultimately make up the narrative of the book?
I was in Medora, North Dakota, checking out a lead about a group of women who were working as waitresses by day and then, at night, being trucked into the local oil fields to have sex with the men who worked there and lived in trailers. In a coffee shop, I read about Maggie’s trial. I called her mother’s house and introduced myself, and the next day I was driving to Fargo.

I found Lina after moving to Indiana, somewhat to be close to the Kinsey Institute but also to get out of New York City, where I felt I was too much inside my own world. Far from where Lina lived but close to where her doctor practiced, I started a women’s discussion group, of which Lina was a part. She was right in the middle of wanting to leave her husband and of embarking on this all-consuming affair with her high school boyfriend.

With the third woman, Sloane, I had already been talking to several other people who lived in her community and had fascinating stories. I began by speaking to those other people first, but then I heard about Sloane through the grapevine. Gossip, mostly.

 

Maggie’s family in particular was extremely traumatized by the events she went through and how much the fallout shook them. Was it difficult to speak to them about subjects that had resulted in so much pain?
Yes, very much so. That was one of the hardest parts.

 

Though one of the women had occasional female partners, the book overwhelmingly focuses on female desire in the male/female dyad. Was this intentional? Or was it simply because of the women who ended up being in the book?
Not at all. It was purely because the final subjects made up the largest and rawest and most revealing segments of the book. Plenty of other subjects (included in the first drafts) covered the wide range of sexual proclivities, genders, races. But ultimately these three were the most comfortable with my presence in their lives at length and across poignant moments. And as a triad woven together, they told the most arresting—individual and yet cohesive—narrative.

 

You began and ended the book with your mother. Tell us a little bit about her and why you made that particular choice.
I thought it was important to give of myself at least 1% of what the subjects in the book gave to me and to the world. I also found, through my research, and as I say in the prologue, that it is most often other women who impress upon each other the most—who can make us feel bad or good about ourselves. Moreover, I found that mothers are such a powerful and lasting force in our lives. Part of the societal-social lexicon has always been the notion of “daddy issues,” which I think is, in and of itself, a very male take on the way a woman walks through the world. With most of the women I spoke with, I found it was, rather, the influence of the mother that weighed the most heavily on their life decisions.

My own mother was very quiet about her past, as I think women have historically felt they needed to be. She was wise and omnipresent but also removed. Her removal—the way that I could never really grasp her beyond what she presented to me—was fascinating and horrifying to me. She had a life in her brain that wasn’t meant for anyone but her. I think women are more reticent to speak of that inner life, those inner fears and desires, and that was something I wanted to show.

 

Did you meet any resistance from the men who were involved in the women’s narratives? To what extent are they aware of their place in the narrative?
I did meet resistance. I tried speaking with most of them. In some cases, the women I was speaking to didn’t want me to speak to the men in their lives. They were worried. I knew that if I pushed on that, I wouldn’t be able to tell the stories of the women.

But that resistance also pushed me into a new clarity, which was that these women’s stories deserved to be heard without echo. I did confirm the facts and feelings of some ancillary subjects of the book, but ultimately I was very satisfied with telling the stories from these women’s perspectives, as though they were writing their own histories.

 

As a woman writing for Esquire (a men’s magazine), did you find that those professional experiences colored the direction of the book?
In the beginning, to the extent that I had been on a male “beat” for a long while, yes. But that quickly changed.

 

With each woman, there were elements of their story left unresolved. How did you decide where to wrap up each thread?
With Maggie I was fairly set that her story would begin with the alleged relationship and stretch through the trial and beyond into the immediate aftermath. It was a clear beginning, middle and end. With Sloane, it was after she told me about certain events that transpired when she was a child, which brought her own realizations about herself to a sort of “conclusion.” Though of course life goes on for all of us, and for these women, I had to find an end for each of them. That said, I remain so very interested in all of their trajectories. I find the way Sloane navigates her life to be very strong and self-assured. Maggie’s trajectory, meanwhile, has changed the most; she is now an incredibly empathic and strong social worker. She has alchemized her pain into being a succor for others. With Lina, I think I could have gone on reporting forever, but I stopped myself because it had been nearly a decade.

 

What do you hope for male and female readers to take from this book?
I hope that all people realize we are all together in this—that hearing about someone’s heartache in depth is, unfortunately, very often the only way to stop condemning them. These three women have had moments of pure passion and of feeling exalted and utterly seen and lusted after and loved; they have, in turn, given up a lot for those moments. They have faced public and private scrutiny. They have been in agony at the hand of their choices but also at the hand of the experiences that were chosen for them, against their will. They were the heroes and the victims of their own stories, which often changed by the hour of the day.

Finally I hope that readers take away the truth that judgment is brutal, that nuance is vital to understanding one another, that we are all afraid, and we shouldn’t project our fears onto someone else’s choices.

 

What are you working on next?
I am thrilled to say that Avid Reader Press is publishing my first novel sometime next year and my collection of stories to follow.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Three Women.

Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women, tells a story of female pleasure and pain—of three women’s search for sexual fulfillment and the different ways society punished them for achieving it. She spent nearly a decade with these women, embedding herself in their lives to paint an intimate, breathtakingly reported portrait of desire.
Christian megachurches. Scammers. Barre classes. Hashtag activism. Difficult women. Literary heroines. Frats. Weddings. A 2004 reality show that dropped eight teenagers in Puerto Rico and filmed what happened. Jia Tolentino describes the essays in Trick Mirror as “nine terrible children.” It’s the first book for this Extremely Online (that is, extremely plugged into the internet) writer, who cut her teeth at women’s website The Hairpin before heading to Jezebel and finally The New Yorker.
Interview by

Haben Girma was born deafblind in California, to refugee parents forced to flee war-torn Eritrea. While her mother and father struggled to cope as immigrants, Girma simply yearned to belong—“a deafblind girl in a sighted, hearing world.”

Today Girma speaks from a global stage, advocating for improved access to education and services for disabled people. We asked her some questions about her new memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, and about making education accessible for all people.


As a child, you confronted a bull. As a teen, you helped build a schoolhouse in Mali. As an adult, you slid down an iceberg in Alaska. To what or whom do you attribute such fierceness when it comes to your risk-taking?
Seeing is knowing for most people. I can’t sit on the sidelines and watch the world. I could settle for not knowing, or I could choose to experience the world. My sense of curiosity urges me to approach a bull, sift sand for bricks, climb an iceberg and learn everything I can about our surprising world.

Your parents were refugees from the besieged country of Eritrea. You were born with disabilities that made you intensely aware of exclusion: Your diminishing hearing and vision often left you feeling isolated from your peers. How do you relate to your parents’ experience, and how has that helped your own advocacy work?
I grew up listening to the stories of my parents’ struggles during the war. They paved a path through injustice, finding their way through thousands of unknowns. Their stories inspired me to pave my own path as a deafblind woman in a sighted, hearing world.

“The biggest barrier [to inclusivity] is society’s underlying assumption that people with disabilities are incompetent and do not add value to society.”

You once saw your parents’ natural protective instincts as a hindrance to overcome. What advice would you give today, as an adult, to parents of a child who is disabled—and to the child?
Parents, please give your kids the freedom to explore their world, make mistakes and develop into confident adults. Whenever you feel yourself about to utter, “You can’t . . .” pause and give yourself time to research the question. Help your child find solutions.

Kids with disabilities, build friendships with other people with disabilities, including adults. You’ll learn new alternative techniques and advocacy strategies from each other.

Your sense of humor infuses your book. You relate how you learned in childhood that laughter inspires warmth and makes communication easier all around. Have you always had this lightness of heart, or is it something you’ve developed?
Many of my family members express love through joking and teasing. When I started joking back, their laughter delighted me. Since then I’ve actively worked on developing my comedic skills, and recently I’ve been taking improv workshops, too.

You employ a cane, a Seeing Eye dog and electronic technology as assistive tools. What are your hopes for the future of adaptive aids, and how can access to them be broadened?
Some of the most crucial assistive technologies, like Braille computers and power wheelchairs, are not affordable to the people who need them. I’m hoping that future innovations will bring down the cost of assistive tech.

At Harvard Law School, assistive technology and the school’s enlightened approach (providing interpreters, for example) helped you to succeed. Do you think it has become any easier for disabled students today? How can schools do more?
Overall, students with disabilities have greater access now than in the past. Many barriers still exist, though. Schools continue to buy inaccessible learning tools, and teachers continue discouraging disabled students who express interest in math and science. We need all schools to remove barriers so that disabled and nondisabled students can contribute their ideas and learn from each other.

When you are out with people, you ask them to describe in detail the environment you are in, as if, as one friend says, they are setting the scene for a book or movie. In doing that, they become more aware of their surroundings as well. Do you think this is one way to build community between people who are sighted and hearing and people who are disabled?
Disabilities invite people to become more aware of their surroundings. You might tap into senses you rarely pay attention to, like smell and touch. You may notice barriers in the environment, such as garbage cans blocking sidewalk access for wheelchair users. Spending time with someone who experiences a life different from your own will increase understanding and pave the way for meaningful relationships.

“Spending time with someone who experiences a life different from your own will increase understanding and pave the way for meaningful relationships.”

Your ambivalence about acquiring and training a Seeing Eye dog is likely something a sighted person would not consider. What advice would you give to blind or deafblind people when making that decision for themselves?
Blind people need to develop strong travel skills before training with a guide dog. Without travel skills, the blind person and dog will both end up lost. The dogs depend on their human partners to feed them, offer water and provide directions on how to get home. I love traveling with a guide dog and have encouraged many friends to apply to guide dog school. One must master cane travel first, though.

In your “Brief Guide to Increasing Access for People with Disabilities,” you offer clear advice about how not to marginalize disabled people and how to, instead, work together for creative solutions that can benefit the entire community. How do you think children can be sensitized and educated at an early age to be the empathetic, informed adults needed for such cooperation?
We can help children grow into empathetic adults by introducing them to diverse stories at an early age. We can also encourage kids to identify when someone might feel left out and teach them how to reach out and build friendships with kids who may feel marginalized.

In 2015, you met President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden at the White House, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). You were honored for your own work. What would you say to leaders today, to help ensure the ADA remains viable?
The promise of the ADA depends on enforcement. Leaders need to insist on the removal of barriers that have denied access for people with disabilities for far too long. In cases where stubborn institutions refuse to create inclusion, then leaders can employ the ADA to remove barriers through the legal system.

In your epilogue, you say that today your mission is to “help increase opportunities for people with disabilities through education-based advocacy.” As a public speaker on a global stage, what are you hoping for specifically as the results of your own advocacy?
Through my advocacy I hope to shift the dominant narrative from one where businesses think of disability entirely in terms of charity, if at all, to a world where businesses recognize that choosing inclusion drives growth and innovation.

What do you think are the biggest obstacles today to the inclusivity you seek for disabled people?
The biggest barrier is society’s underlying assumption that people with disabilities are incompetent and do not add value to society.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.

 

Author photo credit: Sean Fenn

Haben Girma, the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, answers some questions about her new memoir and about making education accessible for all people.
Billy Jensen's new true crime book, Chase Darkness with Me, tells the gripping, twisted and heart-pounding story of his journey from journalist to cold-case investigator.
Interview by

“Kids, far more than adults, tend to ask questions about the body. And if I had to choose just one thing to learn about for the rest of my life, it would be the many adventures of the dead body. So kids are sort of interested in the same things that I’m interested in,” Caitlin Doughty says, laughing. We’re on the phone between Tennessee and Los Angeles on a sunny day—perhaps too sunny, given the content of our discussion—talking about her new book, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

An author, mortician and death activist, Doughty has filled her third book with answers to questions posed to her by children—who tend to ask, with characteristic bluntness, about the gruesome details that adults won’t. For example, why do we turn colors when we die? Can we give Grandma a Viking funeral? What would happen if you swallowed a bag of popcorn before you die and were cremated? (A cremation machine is three times hotter than the ideal temperature for popping corn, so the kernels would just burn.) 

It’s not that Doughty doesn’t want to answer questions about the afterlife—those aloof, philosophical questions that grown-ups tend to ask. “We just also need education that’s a little more frank and basic than that,” she says. “Sometimes it can feel like we don’t even have the vocabulary to have the more adult conversations about death.”

Doughty begins building that vocabulary—and issues an invitation to join her—in this straightforward but humorous meander through thanatology. A more traditional Q&A book, informed by the distance and politeness of adults, might pose questions like, “What happens during an embalming?” And Doughty, the mortician, would answer. But in our death–phobic society, Doughty believes we can all benefit from children’s deep curiosity about mortality—those “really specific, kind of gory, kind of just great questions about death.” (What would happen if you died on a plane? Do conjoined twins always die at the same time?)

Children won’t know the answers to the questions in Doughty’s book, of course—but most adults won’t either. After all, adults are simply kids “who have long since given up on getting the answers to questions like that.” Therefore, says Doughty, “I’m speaking not only to children but to the adults who never got to have this open conversation about death.”

Engaging in these conversations has been Doughty’s passion throughout much of her adult life. At the age of 22, with a newly minted medieval history degree concentrating on death and culture, she embarked on a bit of an independent personal research project by working at a San Francisco crematorium. The connection was instant.

Doughty went on to become a mortician with her own funeral home, as well as a high-profile death activist with a massive following on YouTube and Instagram. “It was pretty immediate. And this is kind of woo-woo, but as soon as I started, I just knew, ‘Oh, this is what I’m supposed to do. I am supposed to help people understand this and be an advocate for this,’ and that’s what I’ve done every day since then.”

Frustrated by exploitative practices in the commercial funeral industry and what she calls a “culture of silence” surrounding death, Doughty advocates for more transparency in the funeral industry and for practices that better lend themselves to death acceptance in American culture. She explains that our squeamishness about death “has a lot to do with the modernization of culture in general.” It wasn’t until the early 20th century that people started dying in hospitals instead of at home. Around the same time, funeral homes rather than family members started caring for the deceased. The rise of slaughterhouses took the killing of animals away from the home and into a private, secret area at the edge of town. “You used to have all of this death around you all of the time—people dying, dead bodies and wakes, killing animals for food—and all of a sudden, all of that disappeared. You know that’s going to have a profound effect on your culture.”

In Doughty’s first and second books, she pulled back the curtain on the American funeral industry and presented a window into the varied death practices in other countries. Equal parts intrigued by the questions she received from children at her events and bothered by the lack of honesty they had received about the final transition, Doughty set out to provide some facts. “Every time a parent brought a kid to the event and they asked a really good question, I was like, ‘Excellent, we’ll file that away.’”

Boasting answers to “100% ethically sourced (free range organic)” questions from real kids, Doughty covers questions from funeral practices to the biological ins and outs of decomposition with the grace, humor and candor that she feels all people (small ones included) deserve. Providing the younger generations with facts and a language for death gives Doughty hope for how we address death and dying moving forward.

“What I’ve found from working with adults, and I don’t think that kids are any different, is that you fear death less the more that you know,” she says. “So I don’t think that a kid who already has an open mind and already wants to know about decomposition and these harder things is going to think that’s terrifying. They’re going to think that’s cool and interesting.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

“Kids, far more than adults, tend to ask questions about the body. And if I had to choose just one thing to learn about for the rest of my life, it would be the many adventures of the dead body. So kids are sort of…

Dan Kois reveals what happens when two adults and their two daughters ditch their suburban Washington, DC, life and spend a year living in four spots around the world.

Careful observers will note that something is missing from the cover of Augusten Burroughs’ new memoir, Toil & Trouble, in which he reveals his biggest secret yet: He is a witch. 

What is on the cover: graceful, charcoal-gray ombre loops and swirls that wend their way behind and through acid green and stark white lettering. The undulating background and crisp type artfully combine into a visual that’s wholly intriguing, a bit unsettling and a touch electrifying, hinting at what readers will find inside.

But the cover doesn’t inform in the ways you might expect. There’s no “#1 New York Times bestselling author” banner, nor a mention of Burroughs’ best-known book (later adapted into a film), 2002’s Running With Scissors

Rather, the author told BookPage in a call to his Connecticut home, “My only direction was, on the cover, just take off ‘#1 bestselling,’ take off every book I’ve ever written.” (Toil & Trouble is his 10th.)

He explains, “This is not a book for people who have read and loved my previous books—although it is! But really, this is for people who feel like they’re the only ones [who are witches], because I literally feel like the only one. I’ve felt like a freak my whole life because I’m a witch, a thing that doesn’t exist that absolutely exists.” 

He adds, “I know from experience that if I feel this way, and I’m one, there are others that feel the same way who will hopefully find themselves in this book.”

What does Burroughs mean by witch, exactly? Well, he’s not the black hat-wearing, broomstick-riding, cauldron-stirring cackler the word so often conjures up. Think less Halloween, more Hogwarts—except, instead of having loads of similarly gifted classmates and teachers with whom to practice the craft, Burroughs discussed his abilities only with his mother and select relatives who were witches themselves. 

Burroughs first learned of his witch-hood when he was 9 years old, he explains in Toil & Trouble. One day his school bus ride home was filled with anxiety and distress; he was certain something terrible had happened to his grandmother. It turned out she’d been in a car accident, which he had sensed because, his mother said, he was the latest in a long family line of witches.

This revelation was, he wrote, “simultaneously the most confusing and the most comforting thing anyone had ever said to me.”

Burroughs’ mother taught him to understand his unusual abilities and to keep them hidden. When she became overwhelmed by mental illness and sent him to live with another family (a stage of his life he chronicled in Running With Scissors), he no longer had anyone to talk to about this aspect of himself. 

It became a secret he kept from everyone, including his husband, until he wrote Toil & Trouble, an experience that was itself more of a bursting forth than a planned endeavor. 

He recalls, “Our Great Dane had horrible invasive surgery, and the vet said he couldn’t move [during his recovery], so we had to bring a foam mattress into the living room . . . and make a giant playpen.” The dog, Otis, stayed still if Burroughs was there watching him, so the author hunkered down with his laptop—and the words started pouring out.

“I destroyed my laptop, I broke the keyboard, it just exploded out of me—like it or not, there it was!” he says. He adds that his husband, Christopher, who is also Burroughs’ longtime agent, “didn’t have any idea what I was doing. As far as he knew, I was writing a thriller. I gave it to him, and he was like, wow.”

Wow, indeed. Not only was Burroughs’ typing ferocious enough to destroy his laptop, it also gave him tendinitis in his shoulder for about six months afterward. But with the damage, and with the freedom of declaring this is all of me, came relief. He acknowledges that this might seem surprising to those who’ve read his previous work.

I’ve felt like a freak my whole life because I’m a witch, a thing that doesn’t exist that absolutely exists.

“After writing so many memoirs, journalists would ask me if there’s anything in my life I haven’t written about, since I’ve written about stuff people would be embarrassed by, like sexual abuse, alcoholism, addiction,” Burroughs says. “But I always felt like, no, there’s nothing about myself I wouldn’t write about—except, obviously, the one thing I’m never going to write about! It was so off the table, I didn’t even realize I wasn’t replying accurately.”

Not least because, he says, “I get it, I really do. . . . ‘Oh my god, now he’s a witch!’ I wouldn’t believe it either, except I do.” However, those early years under his mother’s tutelage weren’t characterized by dissonance. He knew what he experienced, so it wasn’t strange to him that his mother or aunt practiced witchcraft in addition to their scholarly pursuits.

“My mother’s approach to witchcraft was not about spells, cloaks and herbs so much as, look, we possess neuroanatomy people haven’t found yet,” he says. “We have the ability to influence matter in ways that seem impossible and that would be called laughable and not taken seriously.”

There is the occasional spell in Toil & Trouble, particularly during Burroughs’ efforts to get Christopher to see the upsides of moving from New York City to the Connecticut country-side. These finely crafted snippets of poetry do help his goals come to fruition, but the author says spells aren’t a necessity. 

“Magic is about specificity, about needing to know exactly what needs to happen, and writing can be a way to shape that,” he says. 

But this shouldn’t be confused with mere wishing: “You do want to achieve an outcome, but you don’t achieve it through wanting. You achieve it through an incredibly disciplined and crafted and powerful focus in the mind.”

The men and their dogs ultimately did move to Connecticut, where they encountered neighbors whom Burroughs describes with a mix of acerbic wit and genuine warmth, from a foul-mouthed and highly skilled contractor to an aggressively odd opera singer. There’s also a realtor named Maura who takes Burroughs on some truly astonishing house tours (keep an eye out for the phrase “cake abattoir”) and is a witch, too. 

Majestic old trees loom over the couple’s new house in a way that sets Burroughs’ senses tingling, even as they prompt a deeper look at the eternal push-pull between humans and nature. The author also muses on things ranging from illness and addiction to gardening and tattoos, as well as the 1960s TV show “Bewitched.”

Woven throughout these topics—sometimes densely, sometimes more loosely—are Burroughs’ reflections on what being a witch has meant to him, from the teachings passed down via his ancestors to how he lives his life as a witch every day. 

Of course, it remains to be seen what life will be like for Burroughs, now that he’s put Toil & Trouble out into the world and his being a witch is no longer hidden. “My husband says witchcraft needs a new name and a new PR agent. People immediately think of bat wings being boiled,” he says. Then he clarifies, “All those words . . . like ‘eye of newt,’ are just words for different herbs.”

He adds, “The thing we call ‘witchcraft’ is really a sense and an ability that probably a lot of people have, who would never say they believe in witchcraft—yet, through the sheer power of focus, they have achieved things that would seemingly be impossible. . . . It’s time to come out of the closet and be legitimized, because it’s not some fringe weirdo thing. It’s not actually supernatural, it’s hypernatural . . . the fundamental nature of the universe.”

Ultimately, though, Burroughs knows readers will come to their own conclusions. “Either I’m completely lying, or life is a little bit more complicated than we think it is.”

 

Author photo credit: AXB

Beloved memoirist Augusten Burroughs writes about the one thing he thought he’d never confess: He’s a witch.
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Authors who turn themselves inside out for their stories, who are the most vulnerable and giving in their writing, often matter to us the most. In Saeed Jones’ memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives, he relates his experiences growing up black and gay in the American South, offering a level of vulnerability that, one might assume, is a signifier that his heart is meant to be shared.

How does such a vulnerable writer enter into the public space of a book event? Jones shares a look into his book tour, which includes a visit to Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books.


Your book discusses the difficulty you’ve had being vulnerable with others throughout your life. What’s the difference between being vulnerable with people in real life and being vulnerable on the page?
Something you see in the book is my tendency to self-bully. It started when I was a gay black kid growing up in the suburbs. I wasn’t bullied by individuals; kids weren’t shoving me into lockers or calling me slurs to my face. Shame—electrified by racism and homophobia—was enforced by the broader culture though, and in response, I started bullying myself. I started saying cruel things about myself to myself. While I’ve generally grown out of self-hate, an ease with being tough and candid about myself to myself is an integral aspect of my writing. People often tell me that I’m so “brave,” but I don’t know how else to be.

It’s easy for me to be incredibly vulnerable on the page, because the blank page is just an iteration of my ongoing internal discourse. In real life though, while I’m all about telling the truth, I struggle with the cost of vulnerability. If I’m upset about something, I’ll confide in my best friend, Isaac, and often say something like, “I’m going to tell you about something that’s upsetting me, but please don’t hug me because I will lose it.” It upsets me when I realize that my vulnerability has made someone I care about emotional. Anyway, I’m sure this book tour will be super chill.

You visited Nashville last year with Isaac Fitzgerald. Was there anything you didn’t get to see or experience then that you’re looking forward to this time?
Oh, goodness. We had such a great time. Hell, we had breakfast with Ann Patchett! How do you top that? I am excited about all of the food. As someone raised in Texas and Tennessee, Southern food is one of my great joys.

If you could sit in the audience for an event with any author, living or dead, who would you like to see read from and discuss their book?
People keep asking me different iterations of this question, and my answer is always the same: I’d want to go to an after-party with James Baldwin. We’ve got archival footage; in the end, a reading is a reading. Why listen to James Baldwin read, when you can dance with him?

Has a reader ever asked a question or made a comment at an event that made you see your work in a new light?
After doing an event for the memoir recently, a woman said that she was so deeply moved by hearing me talk about grief and losing my mother that she “just wanted to adopt me.” I arched my eyebrows in surprise, and she repeated herself. I smiled the nervous-polite smile that I summon in these kinds of moments, thanked her and walked away. That moment helped me understand that, in opening myself up to readers, they’re going to open themselves up, too, and often, that’s messy. Sometimes they’re going to try to comfort me in awkward ways, and I have to be prepared for that. I know she meant well, but also, folks: I had a mother; her name was Carol Sweet-Jones. She was wonderful. I am not looking for replacements.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How We Fight for Our Lives.

Author photo by Jon Premosch

Authors who turn themselves inside out for their stories, who are the most vulnerable and giving in their writing, often matter to us the most. Saeed Jones discusses the nature of vulnerability while on a book tour.
Jazz-Age America promises all the drama you could ever hope for: bootleggers and flappers, parties and criminals and crooked government agents. All this and more come alive in Karen Abbott’s compulsively readable The Ghosts of Eden Park.
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Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman’s memoir, Sounds Like Titanic, has one of the best narrative setups of the year—or maybe ever. It’s about the nearly four years Hindman spent as a violinist in an ensemble led by a man whom she refers to only as the Composer. Hindman and the other musicians performed shows across America as part of a bizarre deception: The musicians didn't make the music, but it instead comes from a hidden CD player hooked up to the speakers. 

Hindman has swapped her orchestral touring for book touring, and we reached out to find out how it’s been going.


What have you most enjoyed about interacting with your readership of Sounds Like Titanic?
Am I allowed to say receiving lavish praise from strangers? Because that is very enjoyable! On a more serious note, I would say that the most meaningful interactions I’ve had have been with women who are 20 to 30 years older than I am. I wrote the book for fellow millennials, but I’ve had a lot of response from baby boomers about their own struggles with body image. This has surprised me and led to some really emotional, important conversations.

When visiting a city for a book event, do you have any rituals, either for yourself or to get to know the city?
It’s funny—Sounds Like Titanic chronicles my time touring the country as a fake violinist in 2004. I haven’t traveled like that, from city to city, until now, on book tour. Many of the travel rituals of a fake violinist are the same as a real author: going for walks in the new city, going out to eat at a local restaurant, soaking it all in while also conserving energy for the actual “performance” or event.

What is the mark of a really great book event?
Reading and writing are solitary activities, whereas a book event is social. A good book event gets readers and writers interacting with each other in a way that is still comfortable for introverts.

If you could sit in the audience for an event with any author, living or dead, who would you like to see read from and discuss their book?
There is no way I can pick a single author or book for this – can I put together a dream conference instead?

  • Panel #1: Good Wives: Louisa May Alcott in conversation with Jane Austen, moderated by Maxine Hong Kingston.
     
  • Panel #2: Mockingbirds and Caged Birds: Maya Angelou in conversation with Harper Lee.
     
  • Panel #3 is just Mark Twain getting grilled with difficult and uncomfortable questions from Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.
     
  • Panel #4: Hey—That’s My Book!: Writers overlooked by history point out that they actually wrote the book that someone else took credit for.
     
  • Panel #5: How to Be Brave and Good: A panel discussion with Frederick Douglass, George Orwell and Nawal El Saadawi, moderated by Barbara Ehrenreich.
     

Has a reader ever asked a question or made a comment at an event that made you see your work in a new light?
Yes, at my book launch, one of my work colleagues asked whether a female composer could get away with faking concerts like the Composer in my book, who is male. I hadn’t thought about it in exactly those terms before. And I realized that no, the Composer was able to fool audiences precisely because he fit what our society thinks a composer looks like: white, male, lots of hair, somewhat tortured-looking.

What is most challenging to discuss with readers about your book or the writing process?
The most challenging thing to discuss about my book is all of the things that I deliberately left out of the book. I worked really hard to make Sounds Like Titanic as honest and true as I could make it. It is a crafted narrative with a focused goal: to give readers the experience of one small slice of my life. But real life is much bigger than any one book, and there are many things I deliberately left out because I felt they were too personal or private to reveal about myself or the other characters, who are all real people with real feelings. Memoir is always an act of choosing what to reveal and, just as crucially, what not to.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman for Sounds Like Titanic.

Author photo by Vanessa Borer

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman has swapped her performances in a fake orchestra for book touring.
After a lifetime as her family’s secret keeper, Adrienne Brodeur faces the truth, finds compassion for her mother and breaks a generations-long pattern of dysfunction.

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