Mistaken Self-Portraits: An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke

Photo: Sarah Shatz

Meghan O’Rourke is a poet, an essayist, the author of the acclaimed memoir The Long Goodbye, a teacher, and an editor; she served as the poetry editor of The Paris Review from 2005 to 2010. The Summer issue of the Review includes O’Rourke’s “Poem for My Stranger,” and her third collection, Sun in Days, was published last month. Sun in Days differs from her other books: it is less lyric, with longer poems that are almost essayistic, and it includes a series of “Mistaken Self-Portrait” poems, which find the poet taking on the voices of Demeter, Persephone, Meriwether Lewis, and—to borrow a phrase from O’Rourke—a mother of an unmade daughter. It’s a book about illness, moving past grief, wanting a child, and getting older. I spoke with O’Rourke when she had a few spare hours, while someone looked after her son.

INTERVIEWER

Your poetry collections all seem to be about different stages of your life. was a young person’s book, was in conversation with your memoir and shared its concerns about grief, with the loss of your mother, and this new book of yours, , feels not post-grief,