Writing from Life: On Trauma, Sexual Assault, and Recovery

Writing from Life: On Trauma, Sexual Assault, and Recovery is a book for aspiring writers who wish to write about difficult subjects. Why, when and how do you do it?

Taking a variety of difficult situations — being trapped in a military invasion, coping with a “bleed in the brain” of a parent or the onset of memories of sexual assault —former New York University journalism professor and author Helen Epstein shows how to turn lived experience into compelling writing.

Epstein’s previous work includes three New York Times “Best books of the year.” Her Children of the Holocaust was the groundbreaking book on inter-generational trauma and families of Holocaust survivors. The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma, focuses on her recovery through psychotherapy from childhood sexual assault. Epstein has written ten books of non-fiction and her writing has been acclaimed as “clear-eyed, fearless, taboo-breaking.”