Brontez Purnell is a Renaissance man. He’s a musician, a dancer, a filmmaker, and the author of a number of books. His latest is “Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt,” a departure from the traditional memoir form. It’s written in verse, downplays major life events like testing positive for H.I.V., explicitly depicts sex in a frank and unromanticized way, and playfully embellishes the truth throughout. “Memoir is fiction—I don’t care what anyone says,” Purnell tells The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Jeffrey Masters. “You [or] I could both write down our lives as true as we know it. But the second our mom reads it, or one of our siblings reads it, or anybody else peripherally in the book, they can easily say, ‘What are you talking about? That never happened like that.’ ” Purnell, who came of age in the underground punk scene in Oakland, California, during the early two-thousands, is no stranger to hard knocks, but that doesn’t mean he needs to divulge everything. “If you write about your life, you have to protect the wicked; namely, yourself,” he says. “So there is this game of pulling and punching.”
From “Talk Easy”: Sam Fragoso Interviews David Remnick
Ava DuVernay Wants Her Film “Origin” to Influence the 2024 Election
How the Journalist John Nichols Became Another January 6th Conspiracy-Theory Target
The Poet John Lee Clark’s “How to Communicate” Brings DeafBlind Experience to the Page
Dexter Filkins Reports on the Border Crisis
From Critics at Large: The Year of the Doll
Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving
Christmas in Tehran: Bringing the Holidays to Hostages
A Harrowing Detention in Gaza
Brandy Clark: Grammy-Nominated Album Is “Authentically Me”
Liz Cheney: Donald Trump Should Go to Jail if Convicted
How Did Our Democracy Get so Fragile?
Dolly Parton “Busted a Gut” Reaching for the High Notes on “Rockstar”
“Maestro” is the “Scariest Thing I’ve Ever Done”
Geoffrey Hinton: “It’s Far Too Late” to Stop Artificial Intelligence
A Rise in Antisemitism, at Home and Abroad
Emerald Fennell’s Anatomy of Desire
Will the Government Put the Reins on Amazon?
From “On the Media”: David Remnick Talks with Brooke Gladstone About Reporting in Israel
Is a “Win-Win” Still Possible in Policing?
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Should This Exist?
Without Fail
Hannibal Buress
Longform
Conversations