The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #88: Ariel Gore

"The book emerged from my need to have a place where I could ask the unspeakable questions, to document our experiences, and to add our queer perspective to the literature of illness and caregiving."

Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.

Here’s the 88th installment, featuring

Ariel Gore

, author most recently of Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer. -Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

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Ariel Gore. Photo by Alexandra Hertz.

Ariel Gore makes books, zines, coloring books, and tarot cards. She is the founding editor and publisher of the Alternative Press Award–winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of 13 books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Wayward Writer, Hexing the Patriarchy, We Were Witches, and The End of Eve. She teaches at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen. Literarykitchen.org

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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’m 54 and I’ve been writing since I was 9 or 10—writing for publication since I was 20.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer came out March 11, 2025 from The Feminist Press.

What number book is this for you?

Lucky 13.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

This is memoir braided with interview, feminist journalism, dreamscapes, and the occasional excellent recipe.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

In Rehearsals for Dying, I chronicle the four years my wife Deena spent living with metastatic breast cancer through a series of digressions and meanderings—because that's what cancer is, really. A series of digressions from death. This isn't your pink-washed cancer narrative of battling and surviving. It's about standing beside someone you love while they navigate a medical system that's equal parts capitalism and gaslighting, while still finding moments to eat lobster in Maine, gamble in Vegas, and get that first-kiss electricity all over again even when everything's going to shit. It's about how a diagnosis becomes part of your story but doesn't have to be your whole story.

I wanted to create a boo in the tradition of the raw, honest account of illness that Audre Lorde gave us decades ago, exploring how queerness intersects with cancer culture, and how we rehearse for endings that we're never quite ready for. It's about finding beauty and sustenance while meandering along a river that only flows one way.

This isn't your pink-washed cancer narrative of battling and surviving. It's about standing beside someone you love while they navigate a medical system that's equal parts capitalism and gaslighting, while still finding moments to eat lobster in Maine, gamble in Vegas, and get that first-kiss electricity all over again even when everything's going to shit. It's about how a diagnosis becomes part of your story but doesn't have to be your whole story.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

I’ve spent my life developing this writing practice that merges memoir, journalism, and magical thinking. In graduate school, my professors called my research approach "me-search"—diving deep into subjects close to my heart and experience, then stepping back to view them with some perspective.

When Deena was diagnosed with breast cancer, it was clear to both of us from the beginning that I would write about our experiences. I wanted to write Deena's autobiography just like Gertrude Stein wrote Alice B. Toklas's autobiography. And I wrote it in real time, as everything was happening.

The writing process itself was collaborative. I wrote in a shared file that Deena had access to, and though she didn't often bring it up, sometimes she would offer corrections or notes in the margins. Sometimes when conversations would get hard, I’d shift the purpose and say, “You know, this isn’t just me asking, it’s for the book! We have to tell people what this is really like.” She gave me a book called "The Story of Sushi" and said she wanted me to structure our book similarly, braiding specific individuals' experiences with broader history and context.

Italo Calvino said, "Digression is a strategy for putting off the ending," so this became both a literary strategy and a metaphor for how we were approaching cancer treatment—each new drug protocol, each bucket list trip, was a digression from the ending we knew was coming.

The book ultimately emerged from my need to have a place where I could ask the unspeakable questions, to document our experiences, and to add our queer perspective to the literature of illness and caregiving.

Order the book…

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

The hardest part was navigating the line between honesty and respect for Deena's privacy. I wrote it in a shared file that Deena had access to, but I also kept an "unspeakable-thoughts journal" that I hoped Deena wouldn't read. So there was this constant tension between documenting our reality and protecting her desire to also be a private person.

There's a moment in the book where Deena asks if I'm writing an article called "Cancer Butch" or reading it, and she's relieved to learn I'm just reading it—it’s by S. Lochlann Jain. Honesty part of the reason that Deena agreed to let me write this book while we were dealing with it all was that she did want to have some collaborative control and a lot of input. She wanted to produce a show called “Cancer: The Musical” and that was really the tone she was going for—something that would be funny, helpful, and not triggery or romanticized.

The most difficult aspect was probably that I was writing toward an ending I didn't want to reach. Each digression was an attempt to stave off the inevitable, but death ultimately finds us.

The publishing process was really supportive, though. Deena was still very much alive when I sold the book to Margot Atwell at the Feminist Press. I had published a previous book with The Feminist Press, so there was that trust, but I’d never worked with Margot before and I think it was a risk for her to take on a story that was still unfolding—she really understood my sense of urgency and the fact that I didn’t know what was going to happen, or when, or how terribly. We submitted a pretty complete draft in September 2023, just two months before Deena died in November. And then I finished it in the few months right after her death. The writing became a way to assert some control in a situation where I we were both increasingly powerless. It’s like Charles Bukowski says, "Nothing can save you except writing."

Discussing writing and death with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Photo by Alexandra Hertz.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

I generally used real names in the book—for Deena, myself, and our children, Max and Maia.

For the medical professionals, I took a different approach. I rarely used their actual names, instead giving them nicknames that captured their essence—Dr. Ego, Dr. Vogue, Dr. Perfect, Dr. Buddha, Dr. Inappropriate, Dr. Mushroom. This protected their identities but at the same time, maybe more importantly to me, added to the surrealism of navigating a medical system that often felt disconnected from our humanness. I wanted to show these doctor archetypes trapped in the same dehumanizing system we were trapped in.

For the people with embodied experiences of cancer I interviewed, I used their real first names when they consented to that.

For our friends—I asked them if they wanted me to use their real names or if they wanted to give me an alter-ego character name, and for the most part they wanted me to use their real names.

I tried to be very transparent in the book at every turn, addressing it early in the narrative, like: “"In my writing worlds, there's always a lot of discussion and thought about whether something is one's own story to tell. There's often no good answer, because that existential question is the whole inquiry of experimental personal writing—the point of the practice: What can language do? What part of that doing is ethical? What part of experience is individual and idiosyncratic, and what part is relational and ultimately collective?"

I wanted to create a boo in the tradition of the raw, honest account of illness that Audre Lorde gave us decades ago, exploring how queerness intersects with cancer culture, and how we rehearse for endings that we're never quite ready for. It's about finding beauty and sustenance while meandering along a river that only flows one way.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, Barbara Ehrenreich's critique of pink ribbon culture in Brightsided, Gertrude Stein's experimental style, Kathy Acker’s limited writings on her experience with incurable breast cancer, the poetry of Lucille Cliffton, who also had embodied experience with breast caner, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, in which she doesn’t mention the little factoid that she was living with breast cancer as she wrote that book.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

You want to dig into the moments when you’re surprised by the way you feel. What part of the real and lived experience is nothing like what we’ve seen on TV? You want to ask the unspeakable questions and explore the unspeakable answers. Breast cancer is the most common cancer among adult in the world, but breast cancer, like AIDS, has long history of silence. It’s like Audre Lorde says, “Your silence will not protect you.”

The same is true about death. It’s so taboo in our culture to talk about death, but our awkwardness and silence doesn’t protect us from the reality of death as a life process.

It can be intimidating to write a whole, big, vulnerable book and put it out into the world if you don’t have much practice, so practice by making zines and publishing them—getting your writing out there in more underground, unbannable ways, but also ways that are smaller and more controlled until you feel ballsier.

What do you love about writing? 

What I love about writing is its power to make something beautiful out of chaos. When I was facing Deena's illness, I turned to books, I turned to "me-search," I turned to writing itself to help me navigate the unnavigable.

Writing lets me play with time in a way real life doesn't allow. I can digress, I can meander, I can circle back. I guess that's what I love—the ability to control narrative when I can't control life.

I'm drawn to experimental forms because they reflect how we actually experience life—not in a clean three-act structure, but in fragments, flashbacks, weird dreams, miscommunication.

In my toughest moments, when I'm rehearsing for my own dying or witnessing someone else's, writing gives me a place to put all that terror and beauty. It doesn't take away the fuckery, but it transforms it into something I can carry.

What frustrates you about writing?

Well, I wouldn’t mind a living wage.

What about writing surprises you?

I'm always surprised by the magic of the digression. What might feel like a tangent—a memory, a historical footnote, a recipe—often becomes the heart of what I'm trying to say.

And then in the publishing process I’m surprised people read my work! And connect with it. Part of trying to be vulnerable on the page is to pretend like no one is ever going to see this. And then they do. And it’s great when the feeling is connection and softening the pace between us instead of “Oh my god, I can’t believe I put that in the book.”

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times? 

Alas, no. I’ll get into little routines that last a few weeks or a few months. There have been times when I go up at 4 or 5am every morning to write, but I can’t sustain that. I really like my cozy bed. Sometimes I’ll get into the habit of writing late at night—I love getting into that zone of exhaustion. Sometimes I’ll give myself numeric deadlines—like I have to write 10 pages a week. But mostly my practice is a practice of resolution and failure, resolution and failure. I guess that creates a routine of its own.

I’ve spent my life developing this writing practice that merges memoir, journalism, and magical thinking. In graduate school, my professors called my research approach "me-search"—diving deep into subjects close to my heart and experience, then stepping back to view them with some perspective.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

I love to draw cartoons! I have no visual arts training and no investment in whether or not my drawings are “good,” so I can connect to the creative part of myself that must have existed before I can remember—before anyone told me I had to have “talent.”

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

I’m in that great in-between-books land where I just get to play and experiment. A few weeks after Deena died I went to a psychic behind a barber shop in Brooklyn and this guy told me I was possessed by ten demons and it would cost me $10k to exorcise them, and of course I didn’t have $10k, but it gave me the idea to write a novel about trying to exorcise my demons DIY, on the cheap. I‘ve been having fun with that.

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Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.