Her memoir Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction was made into Lifetime television movie. Sue William Silverman is the author of numerous books, essays, and works on craft, and she is a profound influence in the lives of her students (see the recent NC Childhood essay by Kim Aubrey as an example). Now Sue has contributed a call to the barricades, an inspirational rationale for memoir-writing which, yes, includes a small excursus into her own acts of memoir (and delightful photographs which are a memoir in themselves). (In the nature of things, he probably did the interview long before he wrote the memoir, but the two came out in ironic proximity.) Suzanne Farrell Smith wrote a measured summary of the whole story (“ Hemon, Silverman, and What Makes Good Writing“) on her blog and pointed out that just months after casting aspersions on the genre in the Chronicle, Hemon published a memoir of his daughter’s illness in The New Yorker. Sue William Silverman, my friend and colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a famous practitioner of the art of memoir-writing, wrote a retort which appeared as a letter to the editor and was also reprinted under the title “ In Defense of Memoir” on Dinty Moore’s Brevity. In the March/April issue of the AWP Writers’ Chronicle, Aleksander Hemon, in an interview with Jeanie Chung, contrasted fiction and memoir and found the latter wanting in some way, even cowardly. It probably doesn’t bear reminding, but I will remind you anyway.

Love Sick by Sue William Silverman