Brittany Perham: Memoirs Can Be a Tough Sell

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. New work in poetry and prose may be found or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Prairie Schooner and Tupelo Quarterly. Her memoir, Executrix, won the AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction and will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2026. For more information, please visit BrittanyPerham.com, and follow her on Facebook.

In this interview, Brittany discusses the personal loss that led to writing her new memoir, Executrix, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Brittany Perham
Book title: Executrix
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Release date: September 15, 2026
Genre/category: Memoir
Previous titles: Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press), The Night Could Go in Either Direction, with Kim Addonizio (SHP).
Elevator pitch: Executrix tells the story of the author’s estrangement from her alcoholic father and her experience serving as the executor of his indebted estate after his death. With humor, tenderness, and daring formal inventiveness, Executrix launches a critical investigation into family stories and secrets, and the genre of memoir itself.

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I started writing the book after my father’s death from liver failure caused by alcoholic cirrhosis. I didn’t think I was writing a book; I was just writing. The first essay I wrote takes place entirely in the ICU of Mass General Hospital. My brother and I witnessed my father die, something that was both terrifying and intimate. More intimate than I’d been with my father for many years, maybe ever. After that, I wrote another essay, and another, as I went through the yearslong process of trying to sort out his estate and discharge his debts—a labyrinthine process that made me totally miserable. As I was writing, I was trying to figure out who my father was because I hadn’t really known him after my childhood. We’d been estranged because of his alcoholism and the lasting emotional and financial effects that had on my family. And once you’re estranged, reconciliation feels almost impossible.   

I started writing Executrix in 2014. It didn’t begin with an idea. It began with an impulse. I had some sentences, and those sentences started to accrue. There were so many big changes in the manuscript along the way. I’ll tell you about one of them: Two “Dead Dad” characters showed up on the page. They’re two imagined versions of my father, a scary one and a not-scary one. The narrator calls them “the angel and devil in Saturday morning cartoons.”They act like a chorus; sometimes they speak with the narrator and sometimes they speak for her. But when they first appeared, I didn’t know what they were doing. I just had to let them be there, let them speak—the same thing you do when you’re writing fiction. But they interested me, so I kept going. Later, I realized the Dead Dads revealed an essential truth: Relationships don’t end with death. When a person dies, we’re still in relationship to them, only now it’s one-sided—or, said another way, now we control both sides of the conversation. Anyone who’s lost someone already knows this. I had to find a way to make that visible. Also, the Dead Dads often provide the (dark) comic relief that I hope is entertaining for the reader—I certainly needed it when I was writing. Finally, Executrix is a book aboutthe writing of memoir, so the Dead Dads allowed me to enact, in a concrete way, the philosophical ideas about writing and memory that underpin the project. I can talk to you about this now but, of course, I couldn’t see these things until the book was in its final stages. Executrix will be published in 2026—so that’s 12 years from when I began—which I hope will make anyone who is in a long relationship with their own book feel in good company. 

Memoirs, especially when they aren’t traditional narratives, can be a tough sell. I was told Executrix was “experimental” many times as it was being rejected—which happened for years—even though I don’t experience the book as particularly experimental. So, I had to learn (all over again, because this is true for every book) to keep the faith that Executrix would find its way. And, in the end, it did. Executrix is a reality because of AWP and Cheryl Strayed and all the dedicated people at the University of Georgia Press. With each book, I remember again how much of a collaborative process publishing is, which is always a happy surprise because, as writers, we spend so much time alone before we emerge into any kind of community. 

Everything in the writing process is a surprise because every new project is a surprise. You don’t know what you’re doing until, through trial and error, you begin to figure it out. I once heard Deborah Eisenberg, one of the greats, say something like, “Writers are busy solving writers’ problems.” I wrote it down at the time because I loved that. Each project teaches us to solve new problems, and those problems are always surprising. In Executrix, I was learning what a sentence can do. I was learning to think in new ways about my father and my family. I was learning to make a book-length philosophical argument, to write nonfiction, and to put together a book of prose. I’d never done any of that before. As writers, we get to be perpetual students. It’s really the only reason to be a writer. It’s hard and it’s also a pleasure. For my book, I would add an additional idea to Eisenberg’s, which is to say: Writers are busy asking writers’ questions. Executrix was built around a series of questions I didn’t know how to form. Figuring out the sentences taught me how to ask the questions.

Executrix follows a narrator who’s asking questions about her father and their relationship, the probate process, and what it means to write memoir. I wanted to know, why did I act as I did? Why, for example, was I estranged from my father for so many years? Why did I feel what I felt when I was a child…and what did I feel anyway? In the book, you see the narrator trying to figure these things out. I think one of the beautiful things a memoir can do is bring us into a writer’s brain (as far as that’s possible) as they think through something they don’t understand. We accompany the writer on this personal quest in real time. So, the memoir, when it’s finished, is a record of the writer thinking, not having thought. That’s nonfiction. I hope Executrix gives readers a way to do this for themselves, to frame their own questions about their own lives. I like to think of a book as a kind of play space—a protected place where readers can ask things about their own experience that they couldn’t ask in any other situation.

I got two great pieces of advice when I was writing Executrix, both from writer friends. Both pieces of advice appear in Executrix because they helped me so much. The first is about what to do when, in the middle of a writing project, you feel you’re in Dante’s dark wood and can’t see your way through. The second is about what to do when you don’t believe you can finish your book. Here they are: (1) If you’re in the dark wood, stay there. (2) If a story has a beginning, it also has an end.