2021 Clara Johnson Award from Jane's Stories Press Foundation2020 Gold Winner for Autobiography & Memoir in the Foreword INDIESMany are haunted and obsessed by their own eventual deaths, but perhaps no one as much as Sue William Silverman. This thematically linked collection of essays charts Silverman’s attempt to confront her fears of that ultimate unknown. Her dread was fomented in part by a sexual assault, hidden for years, that led to an awareness that death and sex are ...

Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the EssayThe essays in Selected Misdemeanors are unapologetic word grenades lobbed into an otherwise complacent forgetfulness. Throughout the collection, Sue William Silverman focuses on pivotal, often fleeting moments that defined the course of her life, such as a fraught family vacation; an evening watching the Chippendale dancers’ extravaganza; a Pac-Man-and-whisky-fueled rumination...

Everyone has a story to tell. Fearless Confessions is a guidebook for people who want to take possession of their lives by putting their experiences down on paper—or in a Web site or e-book. Enhanced with illustrative examples from many different writers as well as writing exercises, this guide helps writers navigate a range of issues from craft to ethics to marketing and will be useful to both beginners and more accomplished writers.The rise of interest in memoir recogniz...

Silver Medal for the 2024 IPPY AwardFinalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Award in ReferenceFinalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Award in Self-HelpAt times writers—from the unpublished to jaded lifers—need a fire lit under them to pursue the complex work of self-exploration. Acetylene Torch Songs provides that spark for memoirists and essayists seeking mentor-based instruction and inspiration.Drawing on twenty-five years of...

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You destroys our complacency about who among us can commit unspeakable atrocities, who is subjected to them, and who can stop them. From age four to eighteen, Sue William Silverman was repeatedly sexually abused by her father, an influential government official and successful banker. Through her eyes, we see an outwardly normal family built on a foundation of horrifying secrets that long went unreported, undetected, and unconfessed.

Now a Lifetime Television original movie airing April 2008 with Sally Pressman, star of Army Wives.In this powerful memoir, a woman learns to value herself—as a whole person rather than as a sexual object. Sue William Silverman tells of her roller-coaster life of sex and self-destructive behavior. Finally, addicted to danger itself, she seeks the help of a trusted therapist to discover what love really means.

'An honest and deeply chilling account of what it's like to suffer from a compulsion to look for love in what are most definitely the wrong places' ElleFor Sue Silverman, the wrong places to look for love include: At the end of a phone, when a stranger calls her college dorm late night and asks what she's wearing. On a blue leather couch, with a senator, while an intern on Capital Hill. In the back of a military truck, with a paratrooper, when hitching a r...

Gentile reader, and you, Jews, come too. Follow Sue William Silverman, a one-woman cultural mash-up, on her exploration of identity among the mishmash of American idols and ideals that confuse most of us—or should. Pat Boone is our first stop. Now a Tea Party darling, Boone once shone as a squeaky-clean pop music icon of normality, an antidote for Silverman’s own confusing and dangerous home, where being a Jew in a Christian school wasn’t easy, and being the daughter of the Anti-Boone was ...

You are The Girl, and The Girl is a Badass.From the opening lines, it's clear The Girl at the center of these poems is damaged—which is another way to say she's a survivor. If the Girl Never Learns moves from the personal to the mythic to the apocalyptic, because The Girl would do anything, even go to hell, to save her soul. So, she resists, takes action to overturn society's suffocating ideal of Good Girldom. The poems' sense of breathlessness reflects The Girl's absolute need to c...

unMothered, unTongued is a collection of lyric essays written from the liminal space of the in-between. These essays thread themselves around questions of language, landscape, and identity, weaving together intersectionalities and intertextualities. Author Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, a biracial LGBTQIA+ Nisei who was born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming, to a non-native-English-speaking Issei mother, considers not only the tensions in the rifts between intersectional identities (birac...

In the winter of 1984, Sharon Nicorvo was violently raped while delivering pizza to Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey. At the same time, her seven-year-old son Jay was being subjected to repeated and secret sexual abuse by his babysitter. Best Copy Available delves into these devastating events and their long aftermath. Thirty years later, Nicorvo receives a photocopy of the criminal investigation report documenting that brutal night. This report offers a primer to better unde...

Writer Pam Houston once summed it up: “Nice mother-daughter stories are a dime a dozen; pain-in-the-ass mother-daughter stories are the ones that grab us.” As Long as I Know You is a compelling read for any adult grappling with a living elder who might also be a pain in the ass, particularly, any reader who wants a tender take on the lethal combination of dementia and defiance.As Long as I Know You narrates Anne-Marie Oomen’s journey to finally knowing her mother ...