Cris Mazza wrote an intricate memoir about anorgasmia called Something Wrong with Her (Jaded Ibis), and I interviewed her about it for The Brooklyn Rail. My intro is as follows:
The daring experimental feminist author Cris Mazza is not easily reduced to a collection of numbers, but here are some key stats: she is 57 years old, she is the author of 17 books, and she, like an estimated 15 percent of all women, is anorgasmic. In her just-released memoir, the stunningly honest and formally audacious Something Wrong with Her (Jaded Ibis Productions, 2013), Mazza explores this prevalent but still ill-understood sexual condition. Employing a pastiche of her previous selves—jpegs of her college journals, old notes, sets of letters, and other ephemera—she brings an unsparing eye to the details of her own life and the lives of those who’ve played important parts therein. In perhaps the book’s boldest move, she invites Mark, a long-lost-but-now-re-found lover—to engage, in real-time, in the memoir’s composition via his personal emails, some of which reply directly to drafts of the book as it was taking shape. Mazza’s decision to let a “character” that other memoirists would have had remain silent actually speak indicates what a vital expansion Something Wrong with Her is for the field of memoir. So too does it show that Mazza, one of the co-editors of the original chick-lit anthology, Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction (Fiction Collective 2, 1995)—which first used that term but for a vastly different kind of fiction than most people think of when they hear the phrase today—is much, much more than an “urban girl looking for love.”
You can read the whole thing here.
And Joshua Marie Wilkinson put together a special issue of Evening Will Come, the poetics section of review site The Volta, dedicated to the art of poetry criticism in which he asked a lot of excellent reviewers–Virginia Konchan, John Deming, Elisa Gabbert, and many, many more–to answer some questions about their approaches. You can read my responses here, and all the rest here. It’s a great issue, and I’m grateful to have been included.