Laura Esther Wolfson’s debut, the unclassifiable For Single Mothers Working As Train Conductors, (University of Iowa Press, 2018), holds the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, and was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. Raised as an atheist, Wolfson worships at the altar of books, authors, languages and words. In a protracted but ultimately failed attempt to avoid becoming a writer, she worked as a newspaper reporter, dance and book reviewer, and interpreter/translator of Russian and French to English, which latter included fifteen years at the United Nations. Her translation of Stalin’s Secret Pogrom (Yale University Press, 1998), about the Night of Murdered Poets, won the National Jewish Book Award for Eastern European history.
Just Writing This Is Killing Me (to be published by Regal House in the fall of 2027), which describes nearly two decades of life with a terminal illness, and the double lung transplant that followed, is not your run-of-the-mill illness memoir. It portrays illness embedded in a life, with the many different forms of love that occur in a life—filial, sibling, schoolgirl crush, romance, friendship—and takes up poetry, storytelling, travel, work, and cultural difference as well. And as for “memoir”—well, as with all creative work, all of it is true, and some of it really happened.
