Monday, March 2 - Robin Romm, The Mercy Papers

My guest today at noon is Robin Romm, short story writer and now memoirist, whose The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks has attracted passionate and enthusiastic admirers for its deeply honest, brave and difficult accounting of a young woman’s loss of her mother to a long-enduring cancer. In a glowing review Leah Hager Cohen writes in the New York Times of Romm’s pursuit of the most difficult truth, and her unwillingness to give in to it: the honest and valorous and angry reluctance of a grown-up child to accept her mother’s death. And in her excellent LA Times “Discoveries” column Susan Salter Reynolds says “The memoir becomes an exercise in seeing things for what they are, in clearing the mind of wishful thoughts and romantic notions about this life.” Robin Romm is the author of the short story collections The Mother Garden and The Tilt. She is assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the College of Santa Fe.
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