Also: menopause, aging, Covid-19-all kinds of things have had an impact, and the world is now a very different place. I’ve been writing short stories and essays, and so some part of me forgot my process, because it has been a while. I have not written something of this magnitude in several years.

Now it’s looking like February or March of 2024. My memoir was supposed to come out this year, but clearly that’s not happening. Like, did it not come out the way you wanted it to come out? Did you learn things as you were writing that made you rethink the structure and the meaning you were making of your experiences? And when can we expect to see this memoir out in the world? I know I just threw a lot of questions at you.īM: I’ll answer the last one first. SB: I saw you recently post on Instagram about how, after finishing the latest draft of that memoir, you are now ripping the whole thing apart-deconstructing it, in a way. And you were working on yours, and kind of also freaking out. I was a couple of months away from the publication of mine, and I was freaking out. Sari Botton: Bernice, when we met up in New Orleans last March, one of the things we talked about was memoir writing. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Monday, and Adventures in Journalism. She teaches creative nonfiction at Bay Path University and Kingston Writers' Studio, and is the Writer in Residence at SUNY New Paltz for Spring, 2023. She is the former Essays Editor for Longreads, and edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NewYork and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. SARI BOTTON is the author of the memoir in essays, And You May Find Yourself.Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University. She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the BCALA. MCFADDEN is the author of The Book of Harlan ( winner of the 2017 American Book Award and the 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work) in addition to eight other critically acclaimed novels including Sugar, Loving Donovan, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), and Glorious, which was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award.

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