I came back from Vietnam with a chest full of medals and a head full of nightmares, a full-blown case of post-traumatic stress disorder, the dreaded PTSD. I can’t count the number of times I’ve woken up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and sat bolt upright in bed, dripping with sweat, my body tense, tingling all over, knowing I was about to die, reliving the worst moment in my life as if it were happening right now, instead of happening long ago in a place far, far away?

From the time we are young, we ask questions about the stories we are told. We want to know, sometimes even demand to know: Is this a true story? What really happened? And if presented with the ambiguous “based on a true story” explanation, we might find ourselves asking: Then which parts of it were real? But are these earnest questions foundational to the way we conceptualize stories, or is this impulse a pesky side effect of the way we are taught to think and categorize narratives?

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to Carmen Maria Machado about her new memoir, In the Dream House. The book explores domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship. Carmen is also the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Jaquira Diaz’s debut memoir Ordinary Girls is an intimate portrait of her life, from her beginnings in El Caserio, a government housing project of Puerto Rico, to her family’s migration to the streets of Miami. In four distinct sections, she provides visceral accounts of personal battles with identity, depression, and violence. But as much as the memoir is about Diaz, it is equally a story about her family—a schizophrenic mother, a drug dealer father, and a racist grandmother, who, Diaz writes, “was the first person to ever call me a nigger”—and an island marred by the legacy of colonialism. Moving swiftly from essay to essay, section to section, the stories that constitute Diaz’s real life read with the pulse of short fiction—each word, sentence, and scene is vital and vibrant, meticulous in its structure and devastating in its poignancy.

Storms pelted New York on Tuesday as Andrew Lewis sat down with Lis Harris at Book Culture on 112th to discuss his debut book, The Drowning of Money Island: A Forgotten Community’s Fight Against the Rising Seas Threatening Coastal America. The weather was appropriate given that his book centers on the aftermath of another storm, Hurricane Sandy, and its effects on the South Jersey Coast.

You will always exist in the universe in one form or another — Suzuki Roshi

While it’s been known for over a century that a mother’s cells can travel through her placenta into her unborn child, it wasn’t until 1979 that scientists discovered that the reverse is also true, finding Y-chromosome cells in a pregnant woman’s blood. In 1996 a geneticist found male fetal cells in a woman’s blood 27 years after she gave birth. These “microchimeric cells”—cells of one person that have embedded themselves into the bodies of another—are named after the monstrous fire-breathing she-creature Chimera from Greek mythology, whose sighting was an omen of disaster. The infamous 15th-century anti-witchcraft treatise Malleus Maleficarum cast women as the embodiment of Chimera, describing her as a “monster […] of three forms; its face was that of a radiant and noble lion, it had the filthy belly of a goat, and it was armed with the virulent tail of a viper.” In other words, the treatise explained, those who embody the Chimera are “beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep.”

1. Mise en scène: Sometimes in your bed, but mostly ours is a love in exteriors, in undesirable spaces where we overlay ourselves and make like nest-bodies for one another. Maybe, we would stay out more–if we felt more held.

I

Circa 1960

Alor Star, Malaysia

3pm. Mama’s frying peanuts for the party tonight. Plates of handmade spring rolls line up, waiting for the sizzling peanuts to be done. When Mama’s not looking, I dip my finger into the bright red rose syrup sitting in the pot to cool by the window. Delicious. Heady. Not that anyone’s going to notice the color on my finger in the dark when Papa turns down the lights and the dancing begins. Papa loves to dance.

My mother used to read to me when I was little, mostly at bedtime but sometimes in the afternoons on the couch. My favorite thing was climbing up into her lap with a book. Back then, she was always above me. She’d take the book I’d come with and hold it out in front of us. I remember the way the light came in from the balcony. With her arms around me, it felt as if I was wearing the warmth of her body, as if her beautiful face above me was mine.

In this interview, Alanna Duncan spoke to writer Cyrus Grace Dunham about queer bodies, naming, memory, and his new book, A Year Without A Name. The book, Dunham’s first – a memoir – is out from publishing company Little, Brown this month. A member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, he lives in Los Angeles.

In this interview, nonfiction MFA candidate Rachel Rueckert spoke to Terry Tempest Williams about her upcoming essay collection, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. In Erosion, Williams explores her connection to the American West, particularly her home state of Utah, as evolutionary process and how our undoing—of the self, self-centeredness, extractive capitalism, fear, tribalism—can also be our becoming, creating room for change and progress.

At multiple points in Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco says that the goal of her project — contacting the man who raped her after years of close friendship when they were both teenagers — is to “show what seemingly nice guys are capable of.” “Mark” (she gives the rapist a pseudonym) speaks with her openly about the assault which does, I suppose, seem like something a nice guy would do. His reflections on his own actions in their conversations reveal apparent remorse and indicate that the rape, 14 years in the past at that point, has had a major impact on his life. At the very least, he’s thoughtful about it. The text, however, does not actually function as the banality-of-evil accounting that her statement of intent promises. Instead, it’s an exploration of the messiness of confrontation and the possibility of forgiveness.

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to writer Leslie Jamison about her new book of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, the slow burn of revision, and how she writes her lyric endings. Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Rachel Lyon has done something many aspire to do: Made a career for herself as both a successful author and editor. Her debut novel, Self-Portrait With Boy, met with critical success, and is currently being developed as a feature film. Meanwhile, Lyon is the Editor-in-Chief at literary journal Epiphany. As part of our Ask the Editor series, Lyon spoke with MFA non-fiction candidate Elena Sheppard about her career path, what it really means to be an Editor-in-Chief, and what everyone who aspires to this kind of role really needs in their arsenal.

In Coventry, Rachel Cusk’s first collection of nonfiction writing, she has not reinvented the essay as she innovated the novel in her Outline trilogy—what she has done instead is showcase the pleasurable continuity of a mind at work on the same questions over time. We learn that she is less interested in writing about the self than in the often conflicting roles a self can inhabit—writer, mother, wife, daughter, in her case, or passive listener, teacher, and panelist in the case of Faye, the trilogy’s narrator. She

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care is a chronicle of the cancer Anne Boyer was diagnosed with right after her forty-first birthday. Woven throughout the deeply personal story of her battle with breast cancer—the physical body breaking down in ways that rebel against what society tells us breast cancer should look like—is a social and political critique of the breast cancer “industry.” She calls into question the language we use to describe illness: “A body in mysterious agony exposes itself to medicine hoping to meet a vocabulary with which to speak of suffering in return. If that suffering does not meet sufficient language, those who endure the suffering must come together to invent it.” And more broadly, she persistently scrutinizes the industry that gives us walks for a cure, doctors who decide courses of treatment, companies that create language for the side effects of chemotherapy.

The engulfing panic of losing someone indispensable to you stops time. Needs and emotions are put on hold: hunger, sleep, lust, and ambition are stifled by mourning. From this numbness, how do you kickstart your life? How do you begin to make sense out of death and absence? In Naja Marie Aidt’s new book When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back, Carl’s Book, the author gives us a survival manual. After her twenty-five-year-old son dies unexpectedly, her life is so profoundly affected that even language is obliterated.

Fifteen minutes until visiting hours. Time dragged. Damien was sitting on the floor, his back leaning against the wall, trying to keep it together, waiting. On the other side of the wall, out on the street, people were burning trash. The smoky smell seeped inside the detention center. Damien sat in the corner furthest away from the door, next to the metal bars separating the cell from the people coming and going along the hallway. He was hoping to hide his face by moving to the back, but he knew that it was a pointless effort. Anyone could see him through the bars.

Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites is a book about motive. Monroe notes that though men dominate the world of violent crime—most perpetrators and victims of violent crime are men, she writes, as are most detectives and investigators and criminal attorneys—women make up the bulk of true-crime consumers. Monroe wants to understand why so many women are obsessed with true crime but she is not content with explanations that rely on women’s presumed pragmatism (i.e., that women watch or read true crime in order to avoid becoming victims). Instead, she suspects women find real pleasure in these stories. She writes that “perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.” Note that first-person-plural. Monroe is writing from inside the obsession. She is someone who is prone to what she calls “crime funks,” someone who has always been “murder-minded.” I could include myself in that “we” as well. I’ve seen every episode of Law and Order: SVU, am incredibly susceptible to the inertia of an all-night Forensic Files marathon even as I recognize the familiar beats of these shows, the formless buzz of anxiety that hovers as I take in these stories of assault, murder, and violence. The book, then, sets out to be a personal interrogation as well as a cultural critique, and I suspect that, like me, many readers will come to the book with some first-hand investment in Monroe’s findings.

Sarah M. Broom’s debut book The Yellow House reads like a multifaceted map, not just of a place but an expanse of time, marking both relationships and absences. Part scrapbook and part oral history, it is an expertly curated museum exhibit of Broom’s family history. It is also a portrait of New Orleans East across the last 100 years.