The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire 176: Michael Lowenthal
"The book recounts my journeys of dislocation and relocation, geographic as well as familial, artistic, sexual, and spiritual..."
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 176th installment, featuring Michael Lowenthal, author most recently of Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation. . - Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Michael Lowenthal is the author of a story collection, Sex with Strangers, and four novels: The Same Embrace, Avoidance, Charity Girl (a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007” pick), and The Paternity Test (an Indie Next selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist). His writing has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Guernica, The Southern Review, and many other publications. He has taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College, and as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University in Germany. For more than twenty years he was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. He lives in Boston and Pittsburgh.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’m 56. I’ve been writing since I was a teenager—I was the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, and in my first term at college, as a 17-year-old, I took “Reading and Writing the Short Story.” I knew I wanted to take writing seriously.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation. Published on February 9, 2026.
What number book is this for you?
My sixth book, but my first work of memoir—after four novels and a story collection.
Place Envy is a quest-in-essays that chronicles my search for orientation and belonging—as an agnostic Jewish grandson of Holocaust refugees, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth. The book recounts my journeys of dislocation and relocation, geographic as well as familial, artistic, sexual, and spiritual: yearning for a queer lineage, I obsess about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then find, in my grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy; I live with a Pennsylvania Amish family; I accompany blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; I play jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and I pursue a clarifying love affair in Brazil.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
I initially resisted the phrase “memoir-in-essays,” dismissing it as a marketing-department invention, not a genuine term of art. But I’ve come to embrace it (along with my own variation, “quest-in-essays”) as the truest reflection of my book’s craft and aspirations. Yes, Place Envy is a collection of essays—each with a distinct setting, cast of characters, and timeline—but they have been composed and arranged with the intention that they combine to tell an overarching story about my identity and emotional development. The book is very much designed to be experienced as a book, and I hope that’s how readers encounter it.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
Place Envy is a quest-in-essays that chronicles my search for orientation and belonging—as an agnostic Jewish grandson of Holocaust refugees, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth. The book recounts my journeys of dislocation and relocation, geographic as well as familial, artistic, sexual, and spiritual: yearning for a queer lineage, I obsess about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then find, in my grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy; I live with a Pennsylvania Amish family; I accompany blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; I play jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and I pursue a clarifying love affair in Brazil.
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?
Writing my first memoir-in-essays in my mid-50s, after five books of fiction, might seem like an unexpected turn, but it’s actually something of a circling back to my creative roots. When I started out as a writer in the early 1990s, it was the golden age of anthologies, especially in the LGBTQ community, and I had the great fortune of being mentored by the most prominent gay anthology editor, John Preston, who compiled a series of collections of true stories about queer lives. So, even though I was only in my 20s, I was sort of trained to reflect on my experiences and turn them into nonfiction narratives. When Preston died, I inherited some of his projects, and I was his co-editor for Friends and Lovers: Gay Men Write About the Families They Create. I wrote a piece for that book about gaining a gay “brother-out-law”—the brother of my boyfriend at the time—and how that felt like an antidote to my family’s diminishing lineage.
One of my other first published pieces was a short (five pages?) essay in Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men—a book that came out on my 26th birthday. The essay is about discovering, as a teenager, that I had a never-mentioned uncle who had died in the Holocaust.
Fast forward thirty years, and that very same story about my Uncle Peter is the spark that ignited Place Envy. This time, the version I tell is closer to a hundred pages long, split into the two long essays that frame the book (Parts 1 and 3). I had never planned on writing again about this material, but here’s what happened: my father took our family on a “roots trip” to Germany, to see where his side of the family came from, and I was absolutely determined not to write about the experience. A number of third-generation writers had already written books about going back to Europe to tell their family’s Holocaust stories (see: Daniel Mendelsohn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sarah Wildman), and I didn’t think I had anything to add.
But, and then I had to step back and wonder at my own obsession: Why was this story of long-gone cousins so meaningful to me? And I realized that in order to answer that question, I did in fact have to write not only about that trip to Germany and about my own life—my coming-of-age and coming out as gay man in a Jewish family—but also about my Holocaust-refugee grandparents and about the mystery of my secret Uncle Peter, who had become a kind of talismanic figure for me.
Once I had this core of the book imagined—seeing that it was both an outward journey and an inward one—I had an insight about constructing a collection of essays that worked in similar ways.
Part of me is almost embarrassed to realize that the issues I am writing about now—my Uncle Peter, my feelings about queerness and lineage and inheritance, blood family versus chosen family, etc.—are the very same things I was writing about in my 20s, in those old anthologized essays. (And also in my first novel.) But I’ve decided I don’t need to apologize for my obsessions. Some of my favorite writers circle the same material again and again: Tim O’Brien and Vietnam, Alice Munro and Canadian women chafing against small-town mores, William Maxwell and the death of his mother.
I guess my subjects are just my subjects. And I actually found it exciting to revisit them again now, from the perspective of middle age, and measure how much my self-understanding has changed and deepened.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
My essays tend to be long, or at least longer than is acceptable for the Submittable portals of most literary journals. And I knew that the key pieces in this collection, if I wrote them the way I wanted to write them, could never be published unless and until they appeared in a book. So I had to let go of the hope of getting the kind of early validation that comes with publication in magazines. I did publish a few of the just-short-enough pieces—in Ploughshares, the Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction’s wonderful, now sadly defunct True Story—but the three longest sections, almost fifty pages each, were unsubmittable.
At the same time, these long pieces weren’t long enough to be full-length books on their own. And everyone says that essay collections are a tough sell, blah blah blah. So I worried that my essays might disappear into a kind of Bermuda Triangle of unpublishability. Eventually, I learned to trust that my essays were the right size for what they aimed to accomplish, and that I shouldn’t try to condense or expand them into more conventionally acceptable lengths.
I decided to represent myself for this book, on the assumption that it would be most likely to find a home at an indie or university press. I suppose I could have queried agents, and they could have pitched to bigger publishers, but I’ve been around the business long enough to know that that process could have taken a year or two or more, and I just didn’t feel like going through that. I think it was a middle-age thing, and/or a post-pandemic thing. My cost-benefit analysis had shifted, and I didn’t think the possible upside was worth the time and emotional turmoil. So I sent the manuscript, on my own, to the three indie publishers that were my top choices. I was thrilled when one of those three, Mad Creek Books (the trade imprint of Ohio State University Press), said yes! They have an amazing commitment to publishing creative nonfiction, with a focus on essays—in their Machete series, which Place Envy is part of, as well as in their 21st Century Essays series.
When we were in my grandmother’s small hometown in Baden-Württemberg, I stumbled onto a possible story in the old Jewish cemetery: the side-by-side gravestones, from 1862, of two young men—one of whom was my great-great-great uncle—who had died within a couple days of each other, and whose graves, it seemed, were inscribed with poems about their “friendship.” I became obsessed with researching this story of possible “queeritage” (queer heritage).
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?
My guiding principle was that in order to write honestly about other people, I had to write even more honestly about myself; i.e., I wanted readers to think that the person I was toughest on was me. (My friend Will Schwalbe, a wonderful memoirist who generously agreed to endorse my book, told me that he had toyed with saying in his blurb that “Lowenthal is the only travel writer I know who reserves his one-star ratings for himself.” Ha!)
For my family members, I used all real names. For some other characters, I changed names and blurred identifying characteristics—which was especially important to me when I was writing about a teenage summer camper who made inappropriate sexual overtures. A smart editor at True Story, where that piece was first published, helped me make the boy’s identity un-discoverable; we tried to unmask him based on the essay’s text, acting as would-be Google sleuths, and we were glad when we failed.
I did offer family members and a few other subjects the chance to read the sections about them, but I was careful to say only that I welcomed and would consider their reactions, not that I would change anything on their behalf. Happily, most folks seemed okay with how I portrayed them.
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.)
If I had to pick just one writer/book, it would probably be Bernard Cooper’s Truth Serum. This was a brilliant memoir-in-essays before that term had been coined. I read it when it came out in 1996, and have reread it and taught it multiple times. For depth of feeling, for self-honesty, for a perfect tightrope balance of humor and pain—all told in arrestingly fresh metaphorical language—this book is an absolute model.
I also took inspiration from more recent memoirs that combine extremely vulnerable personal writing with more outward-facing attention to cultural, social, or historical issues. Books like Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger, and Kathryn Schultz’s Lost and Found.
Maybe because I’ve been mostly a fiction writer, I also returned again and again to works of fiction that deal inventively with questions of time, memory, and regret—like those of the obsessive writers I mentioned earlier: Alice Munro, Tim O’Brien, and William Maxell (I was thrilled when I got permission to use a quote from Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf as an epigraph for Part 1 of my 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?
Like many clichés, I think the following is true: You can’t control the outcome (publication, reviews, sales), you can only control the process of creation. So try to trust. Trust that you are telling the right story for you, at the right time, in the right form. The outcome will be what it will be.
Also, try not to worry overly much about how the folks in your life might respond. I recognize that everyone’s situation is different, and I am privileged to have some very loving and understanding friends and family, but I will say that my degree of fear about people’s reactions far outstripped the eventual reality. For example, I was literally shaking when I gave one essay to my ex-partner (and still best friend), because that piece delved into some pretty intimate stuff about our relationship and about an affair I’d had. After he read it, he said, “Why were you so freaked out? Everything you wrote was true.”
I worried a lot about how my mother would react to two or three of the essays. I was sure I didn’t want her to know certain details about my life, but I also didn’t want my fear of one person’s reaction to squelch the whole project. I was really struggling with this, when finally a lightbulb went off: Why didn’t I just ask her if she would agree to not read those specific essays? I asked, and she agreed.
What do you love about writing?
I love that writing allows me to seem smarter, funnier, and more insightful than I really am, because in the course of a bajillion drafts, over many months and years, I can eventually locate the emotional core of experiences that are inaccessible to me as they’re actually unfolding. I tend to be an overly deliberate, even obsessive person, and writing is one realm in which those traits can pay off instead of being a hindrance.
What frustrates you about writing?
Those aforementioned bajillion drafts. It drives me nuts that even after a dozen iterations, I often don’t understand what I’m most truly trying to get at in a given piece. And it frustrates me that this process repeats with everything I try to write. I’ve never gotten better at it, and I’m not sure getting better is even possible for me. The not-yet-knowing, as frustrating as it is, seems essential to the eventual knowing.
What about writing surprises you?
It still surprises me that I can condense my thoughts into these strange black squiggles on a page or a screen, and then other people (even in distant places and times) can not only understand those squiggles but can sometimes be moved by them. Honestly, it almost makes me believe in miracles.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
I used to be sort of precious about my routine (first thing in the morning, all devices unplugged, always in the privacy of my own home), but lately I’ve tried to become more flexible, and sometimes I write in the afternoons, in a coffee shop or sitting in my car parked on a quiet road—whatever feels right for the moment.
My guiding principle was that in order to write honestly about other people, I had to write even more honestly about myself; i.e., I wanted readers to think that the person I was toughest on was me. (My friend Will Schwalbe, a wonderful memoirist who generously agreed to endorse my book, told me that he had toyed with saying in his blurb that “Lowenthal is the only travel writer I know who reserves his one-star ratings for himself.” Ha!)
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
I used to play a lot of music (trumpet and banjo) but then stopped for a long time. In the past few years, I’ve started playing the banjo again, in fits and starts, and that’s felt good.
The other creative pursuit/activity essential to my process is friendship. I put a lot of energy into nurturing my friendships—mostly because I love my friends, but also because writing is inevitably isolating, and having a network of friends helps me endure the lonely stretches. Plus, the reason I write is to understand human relationships, and what better way to learn about them than to cultivate them?
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
For the moment, I’m mostly letting the well fill back up, and trying to be a decent friend, boyfriend, son, citizen. And I’ve been doing a lot of fulfilling work as a writing coach and developmental editor.
Such a great read! I especially appreciated ML's responses to the questions on writing about other people and how to frame conversations with them about your work.
Thanks so much for this!