Ianthe Brautigan Interview

I was reading books that had writers who were willing to take on way beyond what I had suffered, like Primo Levi, Natalia Ginsburg. And I was going, "OK, so these people are willing to take these heady things on and they survived." Because I think that's the biggest element of memoir writing -- that if you're going to write about something incredibly intense, you better be able to survive it. That's the first thing I tell people -- they'll tell me a really sad story that happened and say, "I want to write a memoir." And the first question I ask is, "Do you think you can? Do you think you have the strength to do it?" Because this is not something you take lightly.
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