Mixing reality and invention in fiction and nonfiction might just allow you to say something even more “true.” We discuss how you can you deepen your prose by understanding your character’s interior world, how that interior world makes itself known in exterior details, while also offering vulnerability and honesty to your reader. Authors Alysia Abbott and Lise Haines join us.
For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.
Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice an ALA Stonewall Award winner, and winner of the Madame Figaro Prix Heroine in France. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Triquarterly, Solstice, NPR, and elsewhere. Last year, she was awarded an artist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Earlier this year the film version of her memoir Fairyland premiered at Sundance and later this month will be showing at the Sarasota Film Festival. She currently teaches at Emerson college and leads the Memoir Incubator program at GrubStreet.
Lise Haines’s fifth novel, Book of Knives, was out by Sourcebooks in 2022. Her four earlier books are When We Disappear (Unbridled Books); Girl in the Arena (Bloomsbury USA), a 2011 South Carolina Book Award Nominee, optioned by HBO; Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (Unbridled Books), named a Book Sense Pick in 2006 and one of ten “Best Book Picks for 2006” by San Diego’s NPR station; and In My Sister’s Country (Penguin/Putnam), which The Rocky Mountain News selected as one of twelve “Stellar Debuts” for 2002.
Check out our Bookshop page for my fave craft books and recent releases by our guests.
Day 17: Reality & Invention in Fiction & Nonfiction with Alysia Abbott & Lise Haines