Meghan O'Rourke
Guernica Magazine
New York, United States
Contact Meghan
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Past articles by Meghan:
Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke – Guernica
The memoirist talks about the limitations of “the traditional illness narrative” and what healing really means. → Read More
We Need to Grieve One Hundred Thousand Deaths
To mourn in a moment of collective trauma is to experience not one but multiple layers of loss. → Read More
The Shift Americans Must Make to Fight the Coronavirus
We are stubbornly hung up on a damaging idea of self-reliance. → Read More
The New York Review Erred in Publishing Jian Ghomeshi
By publishing Jian Ghomeshi, Ian Buruma revealed that he didn’t understand a major issue of our time. → Read More
A Conversation With the Founders of Slate’s Women’s Section, DoubleX, as We Bid It a Fond Farewell
Emily Bazelon, Hanna Rosin, and Meghan O’Rourke chat with Slate editor in chief, Julia Turner. → Read More
The Odyssey’s First Female Translator Draws Out the Poem’s Strangeness and Ambiguity
Listen to this episode using the audio player below: The January selection is Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. Join us! Visit our Au ... → Read More
Hillary Clinton’s Gutting Campaign Memoir Sure Feels Relevant This Week
Listen to this episode using the audio player below: The November selection is Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Join us! Visit our Audio Book Club arc ... → Read More
Words Paper Over the Irreducible in a Fascinatingly Chatty Debut Novel
Listen to this episode using the audio player below: The October selection is What Happened by Hillary Clinton. Join us! Visit our Audio Book Club arch ... → Read More
The Curious Friendship of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
How the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell became each other’s tragic muses → Read More
Is Ta-Nehisi Coates Too Fatalistic About the Arc of History?
To listen to the Audio Book Club discussion of Between the World and Me, click the arrow on the player below. Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab This month Slate critics Jamelle Bouie, Meghan O’Rourke, and Katy Waldman discuss Ta-Nehisi Coates’ searing book Between the World and Me. Does... → Read More
Should Harper Lee Have Published Go Set a Watchman? Should I Have Read It?
To listen to the Audio Book Club discussion of Go Set a Watchman, click the arrow on the player below. Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab This month Slate critics Dan Kois, Meghan O’Rourke, and Katy Waldman discuss Harper Lee’s controversial new novel, a seeming companion to To Kill... → Read More
Is H Is for Hawk a Memoir, a Ghost Story, a Nature Book, or Something Else Entirely?
To listen to the Audio Book Club discussion of H Is For Hawk, click the arrow on the player below. Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab This month, Slate critics Meghan O’Rourke, Julia Turner, and Katy Waldman discuss the slippery and bewitching new book by Helen MacDonald, H Is... → Read More
Listen to Slate’s Audio Book Club Discuss Fifty Shades of Grey
With the release of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie in theaters this week, wandering minds are drifting back towards the world of E.L. James’ blockbuster erotic novel. In this episode of the Audio Book Club, previously published around the height of Fifty Shades mania, Slate culture editor Dan Kois,... → Read More
What Can Phil Klay’s Stories Tell Us About the Modern Professional Army?
To listen to the Audio Book Club discussion of Redeployment, click the arrow on the player below. Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab This month, Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and Meghan O’Rourke discuss Phil Klay’s National Book Award–winning Redeployment, about the political and psychological impacts of the Iraq War. How do... → Read More
What’s Left When a Narrator “on Whom Nothing Is Lost” Loses Everything?
The narrator of Rachel Cusk’s intense, engrossing new novel, Outline, is curiously effaced—an outline of a person. Over the course of the book we learn little about her, beyond that she lives in London, is recently divorced, is a writer, and has two sons. Mainly, she records everything happening around... → Read More
Ice Dancing Is Not a Sport, But It Is Quite a Spectacle
This Olympics, I’ve been struck by how Balkanized the Winter Games seem. With the inclusion of snowboarding and freestyle skiing in their various high-flying forms, the games have a modern extreme-sports edge that wasn’t present when I was a kid. The traditional Alpine sports (skiing, speedskating) look more and more... → Read More
Are You Desperate for Someone to Talk About The Goldfinch With? We’ll Talk to You!
This month, Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and Meghan O’Rourke discuss Donna Tartt’s blockbuster of a novel about an orphan, an explosion, and a priceless stolen painting, The Goldfinch. Is Donna Tartt a literary writer or a potboiler writer? Is James Wood right when he complains that Tartt’s not writing the... → Read More
It Wasn’t All Stagecraft. Jacqueline Kennedy Let America See the Bloody, Messy Reality of Death.
Fifty years ago, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy found herself thrust into a role she had never planned for—she became the nation’s first mourner-in-chief. Over a short time in 1963, Jackie went from being the nation’s chic, stylish first lady, a title she despised (“it sounds like a saddle horse”) to an... → Read More
Mother's Day without Mom.
My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card. So we never observed it when I was growing up. She would much rather have had our company for the first Saturday... → Read More
What Katherine Heigl said about Knocked Up.
Back in June, this viewer laughed until she cried at Judd Apatow's goofy comedy Knocked Up, but she also left the theater feeling … disconcerted. An informal poll of female friends revealed the same: They went, they laughed, they felt squeamish. So it came as only a small surprise that... → Read More