- Title: Mortification Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame
- Editor: Robin Robertson
- Year Published: 2003 (Harper Perennial)
- Year Purchased: 2007/2008
- Source: This was a gift from my Mom.
- About: This volume offers up seventy first-hand, real-life stories of writers’ deeply humiliating encounters with the public. Names as luminous as Margaret Atwood, Edna O’Brien and Chuck Palahniuk grace the pages with their always-humorous tales of woe and embarrassment.
- Motivation: My Momma loves to indulge the writer in me (which, to be real, comprises a good chunk of who I am). She knows how to make her girl happy!
- Times Read: 1
- Random Excerpt/Page xi: “While there are occasional undercurrents of seriousness in these stories-a desire for something between expiation and exorcism, perhaps-their main intention it to make us laugh, while feeling a strong sense of ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’. It is greatly to the credit of all the contributors that they have embraced their mortification so warmly-returning to the scene of the crime and leading us, hot-faced, through their hell.”
- Happiness Scale: 8
A Year in Books/Day 81: Mortification Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame
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A Small Press Life: Books. Art. Writing. Life. Tea. 