Turning Human Beings into Characters, with Rax King and Lilly Dancyger

If you want to write a memoir or a personal essay, there are no two ways about it: you'll have to turn living, breathing people into characters on a page. But how do you do justice to your friends, your family, and even yourself without making every person seem like a caricature? Is it possible to capture what makes them human—even the people you see as villains? And what if your writing will anger the people who appear in it?

Rax King and Lilly Dancyger are both experienced in the craft of memoir and have made characters out of more people than they can count—especially themselves. This discussion will address the methods authors might use to write about real people without reducing them to cartoons of themselves, as well as the peculiarities of being characters in their own writing. There will be an audience Q&A at the end, so bring questions!

All attendees get 10% off everything at the store during the event

Rax King is the James Beard award–nominated author of the essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and Sloppy (forthcoming in 2025 from Vintage). She lives in Brooklyn with her toothless Pekingese.

Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship and Negative Space. She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Randolph College.

Host or Publisher Lofty Pigeon Books