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.”
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The Origins of “Braiding Sweetgrass”
Tessa Hadley on What Decades of Failure Taught Her About Writing
Talking to Conservatives about Climate Change
The Novelist Esmeralda Santiago on Learning to Write After a Stroke
Will the End of Affirmative Action Lead to the End of Legacy Admissions?
James McBride on His New Novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store”
Emily Nussbaum on the Culture Wars in Country Music
A Trip to the Boundary Waters
Regina Spektor on “Home, Before and After”
Colson Whitehead on “Crook Manifesto”
Adapting Robert Oppenheimer’s Story to Film, Plus Greta Gerwig on Becoming a Director
Donovan Ramsey on “When Crack Was King”
A Mysterious Third Party Enters the Presidential Race
How to Buy Forgiveness from Medical Debt
The Conspiracies of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Beyoncé Takes the Stage
Russia’s No-Good, Very Failed Coup, and Jill Lepore on Amending the Constitution
Jonathan Mitchell, a Prominent Anti-Abortion Lawyer, on Restraining the Power of the Supreme Court
A Year of Change for a North Dakota Abortion Clinic, and the Composer John Williams
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