“It’s really a process of disrobing to find your own voice. Keep pulling off the layers of social expectation and all these things you put on yourself and get down to you. It’s a lot harder to figure out who you are, and therefore speak as yourself than you think.”

When Norah Vincent goes after a story, Norah Vincent doesn’t tiptoe around. She dives in, head first—sometimes forgetting to see just how deep the pool is. In her first bestselling book, Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man, Norah, or Ned, spent 18 months living as a man and doing many manly things: he/she joined a bowling league, dated the ladies, and hit up the occasional strip club. Although heaps of praise were bestowed on both the book and the author for her bold reporting, the work took an emotional toll. Pretending to be someone she was not and deceiving innocent characters in her book left Norah brutally depressed. At the urging of her psychiatrist, she checked into a mental institution. Read more »

“I spent four lost, interminable days in lockup that first time in the bin, getting worse, weeping at the sealed windows, yelping for rescue through the pay phone in the soul-destroying dayroom, wrapping into my roommate’s seamless paranoia, and, finally, out of sheer rage, altogether losing what was left of my tenuous grip.”

Norah Vincent is a no holds barred kind of journalist. In Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man, she gender swaps and hits strip clubs with the boys. In her new memoir, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin, she checks herself into three mental hospitals and walks the fine line between reporter and subject. In a Memoirville inteview, SMITH contributing editor Kathy Ritchie talked to Vincent about her experiences, her processes, and the increasing popularity of immersion journalism. Read an excerpt from the book below. Read more »

Suzanne Clores, a Chicago-based teacher, writer and author of Memoirs of a Spiritual Outsider, has posted an essay in our My Life So Far story project called Tradition: Make it Or Break It. Clores’ piece is the spiced ginger chocolate cookie of holiday stories: sweet and delicious, with a surprising bite.

Roger Ebert, who at some point one discovers is among our most amazing media and culture minds of our times, writes about how his writing has changed since he lost his ability to speak (verbally). Ebert writes: “Blind people develop a more acute sense of hearing. Deaf people can better notice events on the periphery, and comprehend the quick movements of lips and sign language. What about people who lose the ability to speak? We expand other ways of communicating.” His column, “I Think I’m Musing My Mind” is, in a word, mind-blowing. Read it, pass it on.

It’s true I’m not a big fan of chippy, but perhaps I’m drawn to this week’s pieces as an expression of my own sadness at a life grown too busy to continue on here at SMITH. I want to thank Larry and all the writers who have contributed and corresponded with me and made my life a better place these last months. Your struggles never fail to lighten my own.

“I imagined that jumping would feel like flying until I hit the ground at which point would come the release that I so desperately longed for,” writes Alyson Mayes in “Stopping for Lunch.” My favorite part of this is that it doesn’t offer up pablum for time-starved consumers seeking to wrest something useful out of time spent reading, as in, how would I pull myself out of a suicidal depression? The conceit is clear — of course the writer didn’t do it — and the fact that it comes without a sticky sweet ode is delicious.

Swinging in the opposite direction is Keith Adams’ “My Night as the Anti-Christ.” Adams writes, “I was beginning to believe I was capable of more than I ever imagined, and had developed an almost messianic view of my own destiny.”  The beefcake shot alone is worth the click, people.

Last but not least is “This is What Hoping for Someone Else to Save You Gets You.” My writing teacher, the divine Ms. Sue Shapiro says the problem with most confessional writing is that it’s not confessional enough. Darling Nikki doesn’t have that problem. She admits to fabricating a rape story for sympathy, loads of sleeping around and forecasts her own impending divorce. “But for now, I am here. I am with him, and if I don’t let myself feel disgust at the neediness of my being, I think I may feel happy.”

Bravo everyone.

Access your inner angst, sneak a cigarette in the boys’ bathroom, and then ready your clicking finger for two totally different peeks at the inner workings of the high school mind. On the NQWIWP blog, South Texas teens display the original artwork they created for their own Six-Word Memoir gallery. In Memoirville, indie publishing hero Kevin Sampsell gives us a little nibble of his forthcoming memoir. Expect Chevy Malibu cruisin’, pimples, braces, and a hooker or two.

Kevin Sampsell is one of those guys so in line with SMITH’s ideals, we want to put him in our collective pocket and take him home. He’s runs a small press, works at an independent bookstore, and writes intensely personal true stories. Thus far, we’ve had to settle for sharing root beers with him in Portland, but today we get to proudly present him to all of you. The piece below is from Kevin’s upcoming memoir The Suitcase, due out in Fall 2009. Enjoy this special sneak preview now, and look forward to an extensive interview when the book hits stores.

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I wouldn’t say I had a prostitute obsession, but when I was sixteen—just old enough to drive my Chevy Malibu—my friend Matthew and I would cruise around east Pasco, looking at any cheap hooker the streets had to offer. We did so in silence, an unspoken pull toward what our small town had deemed “the ghetto.” The first few times we trolled this area, we just looked around, our imaginations coloring in details about every abandoned building and the discarded pieces of torn clothing that littered the cracked sidewalks in front of them. We eventually got comfortable enough to wonder aloud about how much the women charged for their services. We’d pull over and ask them sometimes, careful to strike some sort of balance between business-like firmness and non-threatening friendliness. The girls humored us, talking dirty and sometimes letting us touch their breasts. We must have looked out of place on those streets, two puberty-wracked white boys—me with my pimples and braces, Matthew with his red hair and freckles. We were virgins.
Read more »

And/or that you can hide the fat.

Remember having to face a whole new class of kids? Mean kids?

In case you’ve forgotten, or had a remarkably unremarkable childhood, check out Sarah Hyman’s piece, Numbers. “I know I will just end up hiding until I become the brunt of cruel jokes and scorn,” she writes, reminding us just how dreadful back-to-school season could be.

Or perhaps your angst was more  generalized. Or more serious.

Alyson Mayes captures well the emotional roller coaster of the teen years and begins to take us on a journey in  Stopping for Lunch . “I wondered why they had chosen mauve, if they thought it had some therapeutic benefits or if it was just the cheapest or the one they thought looked the best.”

It’s a great moment to catch our collective breath. Be grateful for beautiful weather. And remember that creationism has no place in a public school. Where do these people who are so afraid of terrorists think the terrorists came from? Oh yeah. That’s RIGHT. It was the mullahs in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan that actually birthed terrorism, that crazy combination of — keep breathing — religion leading education.

 
Wow, must be something in the air. Or water. This week’s featured submissions were locked and loaded long before the Republican debacles, but I love the fact that we’re all vibing as one.

In Deska Brown’s Worried Days we get up close and personal with one mother’s experience with her child’s chronic illnesses. “I make the appointment with the Dr. and the countdown begins,” she says, letting us understand at once that this isn’t new, but that doesn’t make it any less dreadful.

But it’s not just about the kids. Not exactly.

Andi Fasimpaur gives us an honest glimpse of the loneliness that can accompany parenthood. “Efforts to get your kids on the same soccer teams don’t really count as enduring friendship,” she writes in Stalker Mom. Interestingly, her profile lists The Story of O as her favorite book. Andi, I’m thinking you have more stories for us.

Meanwhile, I’m making do with you know who.

Oh, how we would love to get a story from the convention. So long as it was truthful, like the delegate who responded to a Daily Show question about the president with a blank stare.

From an early age we learn not to expect much these last days in August. Between the heat and the general anxiety that fall is ABOUT TO START, we don’t get much done. This makes it all the more impressive the standout submissions we’ve recently received here at SMITH.

Family is turf we never tire of mining, and The Stalker Mom is no exception to the rule that it’s a great subject. “Efforts to get your kids on the same soccer teams don’t really count as enduring friendship,” writes Andi Fasimapaur, describing the desperation and loneliness that can accompany parenthood.

Another family dynamic is explored in Rooting for the Underdog, a personal account of how the Olympics in China reminded Svetlana Reznik of immigrating to Cleveland in the 1980s. “Seeing Tibetans secretly pass banned images of the Dalai Lama reminds me of my grandfather Leonid who hid his yarmulke,” Reznik muses.