{"id":2361,"date":"2012-09-05T20:35:42","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T00:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=2361"},"modified":"2014-01-26T20:21:56","modified_gmt":"2014-01-27T00:21:56","slug":"life-stories-14-anthony-swofford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2012\/09\/05\/life-stories-14-anthony-swofford\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Stories #14: Anthony Swofford"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Life<\/a>
\nChrista Parravani<\/font><\/p>\n

In this episode of Life Stories<\/i>, a series of podcast interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m talking with Anthony Swofford about Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails<\/i><\/a>, a multi-faceted memoir that reveals the downward spiral he went through after the success of his first memoir, Jarhead<\/i>, and digs into his efforts to repair his relationship with his father—and to say that process doesn’t go smoothly would be a severe understatment.<\/p>\n

I was particularly drawn to talking with Swofford because he and I were born less than a month apart, both the sons of Vietnam veterans—and, because my own father died when I was a freshman in college, I feel like Swofford’s accounts of his arguments with his<\/em> father are like a glimpse into an funhouse version of an alternate universe where I would have been able, in my thirties, to have those conversations, to deal with certain issues differently than I’ve done. (I mean, I feel<\/em> reasonably well-adjusted; I’m just saying it would’ve been something to be able to have certain conversations somewhere other than inside my head.)<\/p>\n

We also discussed what it was like, right after his first book came out, when Swofford experienced the pressure to be “that Jarhead<\/i> guy,” and his decision not<\/em> to go back to the Gulf to cover the second war in Iraq. And quite a few other topics besides!<\/p>\n

Listen to Life Stories<\/i> #14: Anthony Swofford<\/a> (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails is a multi-faceted memoir that reveals the downward spiral Anthony Swofford went through after the success of his first memoir, Jarhead, digging into his efforts to repair his relationship with his father — and to say that process doesn’t go smoothly would be a severe understatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[272],"tags":[445,448,447,446,132,305],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2361"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3309,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions\/3309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}