Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Cheryl Strayed's award-winning stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Allure, Elle, and Nerve. Widely anthologized, her creative nonfiction has been selected twice for The Best American Essays, and Joyce Carol Oates singled her out for the opening piece in The Best New American Voices 2003. Raised in Minnesota, Strayed has worked as a political organizer for women's advocacy groups and was an outreach worker at a sexual violence center in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA from the Syracuse University Graduate Creative Writing Program. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Since 2010, Cheryl has also been responsible for The Rumpus (therumpus.net) "Dear Sugar" column.
Cheryl Strayed's website
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What can you tell us about the genesis of Torch?
I began to write the novel in its most rudimentary form more than ten
years ago, when I was in my early twenties, shortly after my mother
died — young and of cancer, like the character of Teresa in the novel.
My mother's death and my family's subsequent grief, which I
fictionalized in Torch, lent itself to the kind of deep
character excavation I was compelled to do as a writer. I've always
been most interested in exploring relationships and delving into what
motivates us, what complicates us, what crushes and saves us and,
quite naturally, I've drawn from my own life experiences to do that in
both my fiction and my nonfiction. The personal essays I've written
for magazines like Allure and Self and the New York
Times Magazine and The Sun all explore the same kinds of
themes I do in Torch. Having said that, real life is only the
raw material from which the story is spun and so the process of
writing is not cathartic, but instead creative. Certainly, there are
scenes in Torch that are close to my heart, but I didn't write
Torch in ...
Elizabeth Berg is the author of many bestselling novels, including Open House (an Oprah's Book Club selection), Talk Before Sleep, and The Year of Pleasures, as well as the short story collection The Day I Ate Whatever I... (more)
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Joan Didion (1934-2021) was born in Sacramento, CA, the daughter of an officer in the Army Air Corps. A shy, bookish child, Didion spent her teenage years typing out Ernest Hemingway stories to learn how sentences work. She ... (more)
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