Her first novel, Noah’s Wife, was published in 2016 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Her short prose has recently appeared in the New England Review, Ploughshares, the Bellevue Literary Review, The Cincinnati Review, and the Southern Review. Her academic articles have been published in Modern Fiction, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Adaptation.
Starck's newest novel is Monsters We Have Made.
At Electric Lit she tagged eight books that are concerned with:
What is real versus what is imagined? What is remembered and what is crafted? How do we know when to trust our perception, what do we do when our memories or our senses fail us, and what does “evidence” even mean in a world as slippery and shifting as we are?One title on Strack's list:
Consent: A Memoir by Jill CimentRead about another book on the list.
“Scenes in a memoir,” Jill Ciment writes in her new book, “are no more accurate than reenactments on Forensic Files.” This claim is both startling and suitable for a new memoir (Consent) that revises a previous memoir (Half a Life) that Ciment wrote twenty-five years ago. The older narrator of Consent analyzes her younger self’s “memories” in Half a Life to illuminate how those memories were deliberately—sometimes creatively—crafted. In her first book, Ciment framed her relationship with an art teacher thirty years her senior as a choice she willingly made. In the second, she wonders whether it was ever possible for her seventeen-year-old self to willingly choose a married, middle-aged father of two. In a recent interview, Ciment described the first memoir as the product of the “shared mythology” that defines a relationship, and suggested that she didn’t tell the whole truth (even to herself) because she wanted the story of her marriage to be one in which she was empowered, not victimized. Her observation that “a memoir is closer to historical fiction than it is to biography” reminds us that our own memories, too, are crafted: polished, cut, exaggerated, shined.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
