Books

“During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome.”

^{_{So begins Michelle Orange’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy—in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother’s many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her mother’s midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called “the great unwritten story”: that of the mother-daughter bond.}}

^{_{The death of Orange’s maternal grandmother at nearly ninety-six and the fear that her mother’s more “successful” life will not be as long bring new urgency to her questions about the woman whose absence and anger helped shape her life. Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it. Told with warmth and rigor, Orange’s account of her mother’s life and their relationship is pressurized in critical and unexpected ways, resulting in an essential, revelatory meditation on becoming, selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother’s daughter now.}}

^{New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick}

Walrus magazine Best Book of 2021

^{“Rich and moving … Orange skirts the traps of the mother-daughter memoir by going beyond personal history. She interleaves memories of her mother and maternal grandmother with discussions of writing by Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag, among others. Their thoughts on motherhood and feminism don’t perfectly align, nor do they match the views of Orange’s own mother, who climbed the corporate ladder and agitated for equal pay but who never considered herself a feminist. This is a good thing: Different voices and perspectives are allowed to coexist, thus undercutting any universal truths about women and motherhood … After my first reading, certain scenes haunted me for a week … Pure Flame may be Orange’s legacy. It is already her gift.” —Maggie Doherty, The New York Times}

^{“Throughout the book, her mother’s voice emerges with striking clarity, proud and generous, ardently meritocratic, puzzled by her daughter, and sometimes hurt by the distance that has grown between them. It is Orange’s precisely rendered recollections that move and startle the most.”}^{—Michael Prior, The Walrus}

“Sometimes achingly sad, but often warm and evocative, this reckoning between mothers and daughters is a brilliant work of feminist critique.” –Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

“Michelle Orange goes there with a cool head and an open heart, and the result is a mesmerizingly compelling memoir and crucial contribution to untangling the most overly problematized relationship in human history.” –Flying Books, Toronto

“Powerful…a vision of two women…fighting to discover the small spaces where their ideas of womanhood might still be mutually intelligible. “ –Veronica Esposito, Lithub

“Orange embarked on this fiercely intelligent memoir–which doubles as a critique of feminism and maternal failure–to try to come to terms with her mother’s decisions and their decades-long estrangement.” –The Globe and Mail

“The prismatic effect of Orange’s multidimensional approach is brilliant, illuminative, and moving.” —Kirkus (starred review)

_{“In a weave of memoir, history, and reflection, Orange judiciously considers the lives of her mother and her mother’s mother within the larger context of women’s ongoing battles for equality and liberation … In gleaming prose of tensile strength, Orange considers the painful paradoxes of women’s lives and mother-daughter relationships, drawing on the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, and Adrienne Rich, while tracking her seemingly indomitable mother’s long-brewing lung disease and her ultimate battle between mind and body.” —Booklist}

In Pure Flame, Michelle Orange geniusly rewrites and reinvigorates what Adrienne Rich called “the great unwritten story.” In doing so, she recasts the notion of maternal legacy and fills it with pointed mystery and informed sincerity. Pure Flame is a tutorial in bending creative nonfiction. –Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

The best book I’ve read this year, Pure Flame is both a pleasure to read and a work of high seriousness. A meditation on mothers and daughters and an unsparing, stylishly written, and profoundly loving exploration of her own relationship with her mother, the book is as original as it is powerful. To be with Orange as she reckons with each stage of her mother’s life and with her own shifting assessments is to experience a joy that is at once intellectual and moral: this is a book that expands and breaks your heart, not with sentimentality but with its intelligence and compassion. –Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

There’s an irresistible question at the center of this book: In her attempt to avoid becoming her mother, did Michelle Orange lose herself, and her mother too? The book changes as it goes around corners: a mystery novel, an inquiry, a call-and-response poem–Pure Flame is a provocative, meditative, funny, feminist adventure about two women trying to tell each other the stories that matter while there’s still time.” –Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Opening Pure Flame is like stepping into a cathedral. Michelle Orange makes elaborate leaps of association and elegant sentences seem effortless to construct, but only a writer as skilled as Orange can make a reader feel like a collaborator, rather than a mere witness to the artistry. Pure Flame is as lyrical and idea-driven as it is propulsive and moving. I already can’t wait to reread it. –Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl

Available in the U.S. and Canada.

This Is Running For Your Life

Praise for This Is Running for Your Life

New Yorker Best Book of 2013

National Post Best Book of 2013

Flavorwire Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Largehearted Boy Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 Pick, Spring 2013

“With its stew of high and low cultural references and extremely confident voice, Orange’s essay collection This is Running for your Life displays a crackling brain choosing to turn its attention to an array of topics and ideas.” Meg Wolitzer, NPR.org

“Orange offers glimpses of the emotional root structure of her own associative tendencies, demonstrating how excavating analogies everywhere is a form of generosity but also a symptom of hunger: for sense, for connection, for accumulation…At the center of her book is a stubborn fascination with how imperfectly we know one another and our own collective past. But there is a deep tenderness in how she picks apart our imperfection—a beating heart delivering oxygen to her acrobatic intellect—and it’s this quality of intelligent tenderness that connects her voice most palpably to [that of Rebecca Solnit].” Leslie Jamison, The New Republic

“Michelle Orange has made a name for herself as a social and aesthetic observer who eschews bromides and empty sentiment. Droll, honest, and incisive, her writing glides effortlessly between artistic criticism and personal anecdote.” Harper’s

“A well-assembled essay book can be as charismatic as a new rock album, especially if it introduces you to a youngish author whose work you’d previously missed. This was the case, for me, with Michelle Orange’s first collection: an assembly of ten stylish, rangy, slightly weird essays that cover topics from the city of Beirut to digital photography. Orange’s style is at once narrowly personal and intellectually ambitious, and offered more surprises than I’d expected.” Nathan Heller, The New Yorker

“If Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace had a love child…Michelle Orange would be it. Backing up her opinions with research, enriching her research with bold, clever, tricked-out sentences, and written with serious range and aplomb, her essays — complex, critical, intimate — are tools against stupidity, apathy, and zombification.” Elissa Bassist, Los Angeles Review of Books

“While [Orange] deserves comparisons to DFW and John Jeremiah Sullivan, she has her own distinct voice. Orange’s prose is animated by her innate curiosity and her convincing meditations on culture and her own life.” Michele Filgate, The Paris Review

“A brave, new, and sometimes thrillingly difficult collection of essays…[This Is Running for Your Life] jolted me sideways with ideas that were both immediately accessible and weirdly deep…[It’s] it’s a joy to come across someone who has so much to say and who says it with such force and originality. From persistence of vision to persistence of image, Orange embraces such a wide range of concerns that while reading This is Running for Your Life I had the feeling I had when I was in university: that there is more to the world than I thought, and that it was worth the time to pause and consider it.” Michael Redhill, The National Post

“What a marvelous — really, a marvel — journalist and thinker Michelle Orange is. I am so engrossed in these culturally astute essays about everything from Canadian retirement homes to Manic Pixie Dream Girls.” Sloane Crosley, NPR.org

There’s a wonderful balance between high and low art in this book, and a terrific streak of irreverence… In [one] standout piece — “War and Well-Being, 21° 19’N., 157° 52’W.” — Orange recalls her time in Honolulu at the 2011 conference of the American Psychiatric Association - a hilarious and fascinating essay that approaches David Foster Wallace at his best…Orange tackles disparate elements with ease, and her essay collection is smart, funny and fiercely original.” Carmela Ciuraru, San Francisco Chronicle

“The book’s diverse subject matter is unified by [Orange’s] keen critical eye, acerbic sense of humor, and a writing style that crackles with wit and insight. Each piece braids multiple narrative and thematic threads to create almost an impressionistic interpretation of how we experience, negotiate and document the times in which we live.” Pasha Malla, The Believer

“Deft and pleasing…[Michelle Orange] writes generously and thoughtfully about the way mass culture molds the human heart … bighearted, unsentimental, and very smart.” Bookforum

“In the opening essay in this engrossing collection, a book that restores one’s hope for the future of intelligent life on earth, Orange introduces ‘the theory of receptivity,’ a phrase that neatly describes the source of her fathoming inquiries. In this extended thought piece, written, as is every selection, with an ensnaring mix of intense curiosity, personal disclosures, buoyant wit, and harpooning precision, Orange considers the ways technology has altered time and asks why nostalgia is ‘now such an integral part of American culture.’

Film is critic, journalist, and writer Orange’s great passion, and her inquiry into permutations of the cinematic ‘dream girl,’ from Marilyn Monroe to today’s ‘approachably edgy, adorably frantic,’ but damaged pixies, unveils crucial aspects of our ‘collective imagination.’ Incisive analysis of the impact of social media is matched by a poignant dispatch on her nervy 2008 sojourn in Beirut and a startlingly profound report on what was actually at stake at an American Psychiatric Association conference. Orange’s receptivity is acute, her mastery of language thrilling, and her interpretations of the forces transforming our lives invigorating.” Donna Seaman, Booklist

“It is not an exaggeration to say that Orange has perfected the art of the personal essay, seamlessly weaving her own history with our collective experience, and effortlessly referencing dramas both small and large to back up her points. In these 10 diverse pieces, she elegantly combines historical, pop-cultural, and personal elements, taking readers on well-researched, accessible journeys through feelings and facts.” Stacey May Fowles, Quill and Quire (starred review)

“As Orange brilliantly breaks down the state of modern life and how it stands in relation to technology and the commoditized image, she tells us much of what we already have intuited, but might have been afraid to admit to ourselves. […] This book is not only a comprehensive cultural portrait of our relationship with technology but also time itself, in the changing ways that we mediate it and consume it.” Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast

“Orange is primarily a film writer, and it would be difficult to name another cultural critic who brings such a high level of intellectual rigor to her subject. Her essays are funny, but not frivolous; sharp, but not brittle. “This Is Running for Your Life” is thoughtful, heartfelt, witty and deeply impressive. […] Each piece contains multitudes: snippets of memoir, paragraphs of exegesis, fragments of history, melancholy, joy.” SJ Culver, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“In this whip-smart, achingly funny collection, film critic Orange trains her lens on aging, self-image, and the ascendancy of the marketing demographic, among other puzzles of the Facebook generation … [this is] a collection whose voice feels at once fresh and inevitable.” Publisher’s Weekly

“The energy, variety and intellectuality of these expansive non-fiction pieces recall the pleasures of short stories. Disparate subjects (a solo vacation in Beirut, a visit to her grandmother’s retirement home, Melville Heights in Halifax) delight like restaurant sampler platters; the reader is served a curated mix of small delights, items one may not normally select, perhaps out of fear of disappointment or a lack of adventurousness. This pu pu platter approach informs the reader’s future choices, expanding the menu, as it were, to include bold new options…This is writing for your life. You won’t read a better collection of essays this year.” Megan Power, Halifax Chronicle Herald

“Orange’s insights share their probing, persuasive rhythms with those of Susan Sontag… [An] unfailingly X-ray-like inquiry into the peculiarities of our ultra-mediated world unites Orange’s 10 absorbing essays.” M. Allen Cunningham, Portland Oregonian

“Reading Michelle Orange is like having a moving, one-sided conversation with your best friend if your best friend was feeling particularly astute that day.” The Village Voice

“Orange dissects pop culture, family, and — if you’ll forgive our grand language — the state of humanity with a deft, incisive hand, cementing her place among the ranks of our city’s most important cultural commentators.” Emily Temple, Flavorwire

“This essay collection cuts through cultural preconceptions and offers insight into our changing world with clarity, intelligence, and a truly original voice.” Largehearted Boy

“Playful and erudite.” Time Out New York

“Michelle Orange’s mind and her work are splendid, original, absolutely thrilling.” –Kurt Andersen, author of True Believers

“Michelle Orange is a crystal clear thinker—funny, lucid, warm and enthusiastic. And This Is Running For Your Life is an important treasure trove of irresistible ideas, information and memories. I found it a delight.” –Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins

“Reading Michelle Orange is like getting swept up in a long, stimulating conversation. Orange is fearlessly brainy and forthcoming, and she unstitches cultural assumptions with dexterity and wit. This Is Running for Your Life is a collection of argument, observation, and personal revelation that left me thoughtful and entertained.” –Leanne Shapton, author of Swimming Studies

“Smart, sophisticated, and quirky, these essays showcase an original voice that uncannily captures the broodings and shadings of a generation.” –Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head

“A sprawling, maximalist journey into the existential and cultural dramas of late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century North American life. Michelle Orange gives us the contents of her very interesting mind along with a healthy dose of her very good soul.” –Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House

“With profound clarity and sly, pointed humor, Michelle Orange peels back the skin of our modern world. I love this damn book!” –Davy Rothbart, author of My Heart Is an Idiot

“I haven’t read anyone who writes more incisively and provocatively about the way we live now than Michelle Orange. She’s a master essayist and our very best modern critic.” Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries

interviews

This Is Running for Your Life

LA Review of Books interview with Elissa Bassist (Sep, 2013)

Wag’s Revue interview with Abby Koski (Summer, 2013)

Other People Podcast with Brad Listi (April, 2013)

The Paris Review interview with Michele Filgate (April, 2013)

The Millions interview with Hannah Gersen (March, 2013)

Believer interview with Pasha Malla (Feb, 2013)

Village Voice interview (Feb, 2013)

Harper’s “Six Questions” interview (Feb, 2013)

Flavorwire interview with Tobias Carroll (Feb, 2013)

Rumpus interview with Stephen Elliott (Feb, 2013)

Q & A with Publisher’s Weekly (Dec, 2012)

Other Interviews

Interview with the Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer, 2009)

Interviewed by The Danforth Review (Feb, 2009)

Interviewed about The Sicily Papers for “The Living Writers Show” (Nov, 2006)

Zulkey.com interview (Oct, 2006)

Rumpus

Habeas Whitney (Feb, 2012)

Interview with Every Man in this Village is a Liar author Megan Stack (Nov, 2010)

The Theory of Relatability and Rethinking Justin Long’s Face (Oct, 2010)

Re-commencement: Notes on an English Professor’s Retirement (Sept, 2009)

“Do I Know You?” And Other Impossible Questions (June, 2009)

The Theory of Receptivity and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke’s Face (May, 2009)

Fade to Orange: Famous on Famous/Film Links Forever (Feb, 2009)

Fade to Orange: “He Is So Totally That Into Me” Edition (Feb, 2009)

Fade to Orange: International Film Link Incident (Jan, 2009)

Fade to Orange: Film Link Implosion (Dec, 2008)

Bio

Michelle Orange was born and raised in London, Ontario. After graduating from the University of Toronto (double major in English and film) she worked as a producer in the education and children’s divisions of TVOntario.

In 2003, she moved to New York City to join the graduate film studies program at New York University. Michelle’s writing has since appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Nation, Bookforum, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Slate, Tin House, 4 Columns, Frieze, the Village Voice, and other publications. She is a contributing editor at the Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is also a columnist. She is VQR’s 2019 winner of the Staige D. Blackford Prize for nonfiction.

She is the editor of From the Notebook: The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a collection published in issue 22 of McSweeney’s featuring stories by Sigrid Nunez, Miriam Toews, Lydia Millet, and many more. Her work appears in several anthologies, including Best Sex Writing 2006 and Should I Go to Grad School? (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Best Canadian Essays 2020.

She teaches in the graduate writing programs at Goucher College and Columbia University, and has been an invited guest and speaker at various institutions, including Yale University, New York University, Goucher College, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of San Francisco.

This Is Running for Your Life: Essays, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2013, was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, the National Post, Flavorwire, and other publications.

Pure Flame, her second book of nonfiction, was published by FSG in June, 2021.

She lives in Brooklyn.

Manda Bala

On Manhattan, then and now (March, 2017)

Cameraperson feature (Sep, 2016)

Derek Jarman’s Will You Dance With Me? (Aug, 2016)

On Spike Lee’s BAM retrospective (June, 2014)

Nymphomaniac Volume II (April, 2014)

Into Great Silence

Into Great Silence (March, 2007)

The Prisoner

The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (March, 2007)