Articles by Hannah Gersen
May 14, 2013
An Education in Economics and Love: A. Igoni Barrett’s Love Is Power, Or Something Like That 0
Betrayals drive many of Barrett’s stories, but he takes pains to illuminate the love beneath them.
April 16, 2013
When Sylvia Was A Millie: An Interview With Elizabeth Winder 0
The whole Sylvia Plath life story has been approached in a reductionist way. I wanted to do something different. Because when I read her journals I see someone who’s so lively, so hungry for life, and really engaged in the world in a relatable way.
March 26, 2013
Staff Pick: Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds 1
When Terry Tempest Williams’s mother was dying, she told her daughter that she was leaving her journals to her, with one condition — that Williams wait until after her death to read them. Williams honored her mother’s wish and when she finally opened the journals she was shocked to find that every one of them was blank. When Women Were Birds is a memoir that explores this extraordinary gesture.
March 25, 2013
Liberating the Essay: A Conversation with Michelle Orange 0
When I realized that they were really going to let me do whatever I wanted to do, I was like, “Well, shit, let me rethink this…”
March 7, 2013
One Woman’s Place in Time: Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then 3
We use time-lapse photography to witness the things we can’t see in real time — the blooming of a flower or a tree coming into leaf. Kincaid uses the form of the novel to illustrate the things that Mrs. Sweet could not see in her own life, flipping through the ordinary moments that make up Mrs. Sweet’s mostly sweet existence to reveal the larger story: that of a disintegrating marriage.
February 26, 2013
Collision Courses and Castration Anxiety: Rereading John Irving 10
I wondered if I was just too old for John Irving. Or maybe I’d been getting my nineteenth-century novel fix from soapy serials like Mad Men and Downton Abbey. Or maybe John Irving’s books just weren’t as good as they used to be. I decided to find out.