{"id":14450,"date":"2025-10-31T16:26:02","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T20:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/?page_id=14450"},"modified":"2026-05-15T11:45:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T15:45:43","slug":"laura-esther-wolfson","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/laura-esther-wolfson\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Esther Wolfson"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo credit: Florence Montmare<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Just Writing This Is Killing Me<\/em> (forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, November 2027), encompasses nearly two decades of life with a terminal disease advancing with all deliberate speed, followed by the double lung transplant that sweeps away the grim diagnosis. It\u2019s a story about living, not dying, about history, both public and private, and about love – affection, obsession, elation, infatuation, filial, familial, erotic, platonic. It moves from the Colorado Rockies to the Republic of Georgia, from Montreal to Manhattan, from New Hampshire to Namibia, from the United Nations to the National Institutes of Health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Birds fall from the sky; innocents are slaughtered; an empire founders. Women are cuckolded\u2014although one of them perhaps only in the racy and unreliable memory of her nonagenarian husband; a pulmonologist grieves his inability to heal his own father\u2019s lung disease; in the Montreal suburbs, a doctor declares in French, \u201cI\u2019m no good with needles!\u201d on the assumption that the patient, who is from New York, won\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marbled with poetry, travelogue, and reflections on the necessity and the impossibility of translation, Just Writing This Is Killing Me<\/em> unfolds at the intersection of high-stakes geopolitics and intimate personal confession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it memoir, fiction, or essay?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. All of it is true, and some of it really happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same can be said of my debut, the unclassifiable For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors<\/em> (University of Iowa Press, 2018), which holds the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, and was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raised as an atheist, I worship at the altar of books, authors, languages and words. In a protracted but ultimately failed attempt to avoid becoming a writer, I worked as a newspaper reporter, dance and book reviewer, and also as an interpreter\/translator of Russian and French to English, including for fifteen years at the United Nations. My translation of Stalin\u2019s Secret Pogrom<\/em> (Yale University Press, 1998), about the Night of the Murdered Poets, won the National Jewish Book Award for Eastern European history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just Writing This Is Killing Me (forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, November 2027), encompasses nearly two decades of life with a terminal disease advancing with all deliberate speed, followed by the double lung transplant that sweeps away the grim diagnosis. It\u2019s a story about living, not dying, about history, both public and private, and about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-14450","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9DpGh-3L4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14450"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14832,"href":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14450\/revisions\/14832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regalhousepublishing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}