JV: I didn’t want a sentence’s acoustics to interfere with its accuracy. At the same time, in the meta sections of book, you show yourself thinking, “This sentence sounds really pretty, but I don’t know if this is accurate.” I wanted the book that I wrote for my dad to be artful, where it wasn’t just about the story, but about how the story was told.ĭPA: At your Greenlight book launch, you mentioned the influence of poetry on your writing in terms of wanting the language to have a sonic quality and the “plot” to be able to make associative leaps. Kathryn had already written fiction, and the professor, who I still respect tremendously, told the class, “Why did it have to be nonfiction? Why didn’t she write it as fiction?” I think that’s when I internalized this idea of fiction and poetry being the higher, more literary forms. But I remember this one visiting professor criticizing The Kiss, a memoir about Kathryn Harrison’s incestuous relationship with her father. But I had great poetry and fiction professors whose writing I often return to: John Keene, Reg Gibbons, and Robyn Schiff, to name just a few of them. JV: Me too! Every time I go to the hospital and a doctor asks me, “On a scale of one to ten,” I want to bring up that essay. There wasn’t a nonfiction track, but now there is. The English department offered two tracks back then: poetry and fiction. To major in creative writing at Northwestern, you had to apply to the writing program your sophomore year. I thought I’d write a novel or a poetry collection someday. But the promise definitely made writing a book feel more pressing. I don’t know where the promise came from. I promised him, on his deathbed, that I’d write a book for him. Then, roughly a month after classes started, my dad died.
I was like, “Goddamnit, Tinkerbell has a book?” (laughs) Originally I went to college to study journalism. I remember seeing a memoir “by” Paris Hilton’s dog, Tinkerbell, at a Barnes and Noble when I was in undergrad. Jeannie Vanasco: For a long time, I thought of memoirs as something that people with bad childhoods wrote, or something that famous people wrote. Daphne Palasi Andreades: How did you decide on the memoir form? At your book launch at Greenlight, you mentioned that you’d trained as a journalist and also as a poet.
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