Janice Erlbaum Quotes

When you think of yourself as lucky, you notice all the good things in your life. You see all the connections between what you do and what happens next. You watch the amazing, mysterious, coincidental ways the world works, and you will be awestruck" -Aunt Jenny

I remain an active volunteer in the field of at-risk youth, so I'm pretty familiar with the landscape as it stands now, but I don't have any qualifications or an exhaustive body of research to back up my observations.

Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph.

Kyria Abrahams, former teen bride of a doomsday cult and seeker of salvation in slam poetry, tells the terribly funny story of her improbable life with candor, wit, and an unsparing eye for the perfect detail. Brilliant.

You read so much about the healing power of memoir, but you don't read about the wounding power it has first. The recollection of past events is not, in and of itself, therapeutic.

Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.

I feel a lot of sympathy for the young women I've written about, including Younger Janice. I think that all of them (me in Girlbomb, Samantha in Have You Found Her, and Elizabeth in I, Liar) had some early family trauma that contributed to their dysfunctional methods of dealing with the world, but I wouldn't call them/myself victims - survivors, maybe, but not victims. Nor do I think of them/myself as con artists.