Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Virginia Holman is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Roslynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship, and a North Carolina Arts Council grant. Rescuing Patty Hearst won the 2003 Outstanding Literature Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she is at work on a novel.
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A piece of Rescuing Patty Hearst was originally published in
DoubleTake and won a Pushcart Prize. Can you describe how you came to expand the
essay into a full-length work?
I had probably been working on telling this story in everything I had written
since I began writing. I was engaged off and on for a number of years writing a
novel based on these experiences—but this story refused to work as fiction for
me, despite the fact that many first novels are near pure autobiography.
I am cursed with a perhaps unfortunate amount of earnestness. When I first
spoke with the woman who would later become my agent she asked if I had ever
considered writing this material as nonfiction and I said "Absolutely
not! I couldn’t do that. Especially to my family." I felt it would be
some sort of betrayal to tell some of our secrets. But soon after that
conversation I began writing short essays about my experiences and—with
great fear—showing them to my family.
I suppose deep down I thought that I'd be cast out, but instead they
were immensely kind and supportive of the endeavor. And that's why the book
exists. I could never have published this book—there’s so much pain and
exposure involved ...
Lucy Grealy (1963-2002) was born in Dublin, Ireland. She moved to Spring Valley, New York, with her family when she was four years old. When she was nine she was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma. Surgery to remove... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Rescuing Patty Hearst
Try:
Autobiography of a Face
by Lucy Grealy
Sarah Hannah received a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Parnassus, Agni, Rattapallax, Western Humanities Review, New Millennium ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Rescuing Patty Hearst
Try:
Inflorescence
by Sarah Hannah
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