Articles by Jessica Freeman-Slade
April 30, 2013
Ivy League from the Outside: Andre Aciman’s Harvard Square 1
It’s interesting that so few narratives about Harvard have ever been told from the non-elite, unassimilated experience. Such a void is, finally and wonderfully, filled by Andre Aciman’s brilliant new novel.
April 12, 2013
Alienation for Two: Fiona Maazel’s Woke Up Lonely 0
As I lost myself in Maazel’s gorgeous, dryly comic prose, it made me wonder about all the great love songs of the past: do we not write songs about the ones that come easy? Or do we hope that in capturing loneliness, as Maazel does so very well, we can better understand it, face it, and appreciate its possibilities?
March 7, 2013
Like a Woman Scorned: On James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have 33
In order to paint Nasreen as a mad woman with a powerful grudge, Lasdun takes an unnecessarily dry and impersonal tone, using supplementary texts on the nature of obsession to further his case. As he goes into his analysis, painting Nasreen as a stalker and himself as a heroic naïf, the more he starts to sound like Humbert Humbert, more complicit than innocent, more culpable than defensible.
December 26, 2012
In A Far Off Land: Emma Donoghue’s Astray 1
Donoghue throws the windows of the world open in fourteen stories of wanderlust, exploration, and possibilities promised by new and unknown lands.
November 26, 2012
The Mad Girls Next Door: Mary Stewart Atwell’s Wild Girls 0
It’s hard to resist a story of girls gone bad.
September 13, 2012
At Sea in the Deserts of Letdown: On Davy Rothbart’s My Heart is an Idiot 2
But the laziness with which Rothbart’s hookups and hangouts are depicted, highlighting major moments of failure without meditating on their significance, indicates a troubling trend in young memoirs. It takes more than experience to make a narrative voice, and not every failure or triumph should be destined for memoirization.