Sue William Silverman turns small moments into unforgettable stories. In Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader, she captures life’s quiet chaos through a series of brief, emotionally charged essays. Discover what inspired the collection, how she shaped its unique structure, and what these moments reveal about memory, truth, and being human.
Q. What makes your book a must-read?
In each essay you can “read” the world in five minutes. In other words, a flash essay, even with its small outer form, contains a vast interior of universal, metaphoric meaning.
Q. If you could give your book to one world leader, who would it be and why?
A certain well-known politician, who shall remain nameless, might learn about empathy by reading it.
Q. What was the hardest part of writing your book?
The hardest part was organizing these 71 brief essays into a unified whole. In order to do so, I arranged the essays into three sections or parts (“Strange Entanglements,” “How to and How Not,” and “Grieflets”) with “postcard” essays and photograph essays sprinkled throughout, to work as a form of through-thread. It’s important, in an essay collection, to offer a narrative arc, even one loosely structured. But it took me a year or so to envision this structure and to figure out which essay belonged in which part.
Q. What is the most enlightening/inspirational story you tell in your book?
With 71 essays in the collection, I can’t really say one is the most enlightening since they coalesce into a whole. Therefore, as a unit, they are meant to comprise fleeting moments of beauty, miniature forms of betrayal, microscopic snippets of loss. They are brief memories that (with luck) bloom into epiphanies. The form focuses on what we discover about the self—and its place in the world—by poring over the imagistic, metaphoric details in each small moment of time.
Q. One word that best describes you.
Obsessive.
Q. Any ritual like a specific scented candle, preferred writing place, or drink that you kept through writing?
I try to contain myself in pure silence.
Q. If there is a movie adaptation of your book, who do you think would be perfect for the lead roles?
My memoir Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction was made into a movie starring Sally Pressman. But I can’t quite envision a movie of Selected Misdemeanors, given that it’s a collection of flash pieces. However, I love Debra Winger, so why not?!
Q. What can this teach to a motivated and mission-driven population of writers?
That flash is a legitimate subgenre of creative nonfiction, and the beauty of the form is creating a metaphoric, universal narrative in a few pages. In this brief form, we can gain insight into our lives in short flashes of time, or quick shimmering epiphanies. Brief occurrences reveal their meaning through the writing process. Plus, writing a short piece is fun—immediate gratification!
Q. What do you mean by “misdemeanors”?
Let me hasten to say these are emotional misdemeanors—not crimes in the legal sense. I never served jail time! Rather, some essays, for example, are about relationships with inappropriate men. One is about an evening I spent alone, drinking, in a seedy bar in Galveston, and I, in a spur-of-a-(drunk) moment, decided to get divorced. In another essay, I snuck out of a so-called locked psych unit—but, honestly, I didn’t belong there in the first place. So the misdemeanors are my transgressions, miscalculations of love, and betrayals.
Rapid Fire
- Movie or TV Series? – Movie
- Long walk or long car ride? – Long car rides
- Comedy or Drama? – Traumedy (a book/movie that contains both)
- The city or the country? – City
- Baking or Cooking? – Carry-out
- Reading a book or watching a movie? – Book
- Holding a Puppy or Holding a Baby? – Puppy
- Invisibility cloak or sparkling skin? – Sparkling cloak
- Coffee or tea? – Water
- Dinosaurs or princesses? – Dinosaurs with tiaras