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Elissa Altman

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American author
Elissa Altman
BornJune 29th, 1963
OccupationAuthor
Education 
* Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University
Years active1985-
Notable awardsJames Beard Foundation Award for Individual Food Blog, 2012]]

Boston University College of General Studies Distinguished Alumni Award, 2013 Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, finalist, 2016 Lambda Literary Award, Memoir, finalist, 2019

Maine Literary Award, Memoir, finalist, 2019
Website
www.elissaaltman.com

Elissa Altman (born 1963) is an American author, essayist, editor, and teacher. She is the author of the hybrid craft-memoir, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, and three memoirs: Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, and Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw Her narrative food blog, Poor Man's Feast, won a James Beard Foundation Award for Individual Food Blog in 2012; it became the basis for her bestselling Substack newsletter of the same name in 2022.

Early life and education

Altman was born in Manhattan to native New Yorkers Rita Elice, a former television singer and model, and Cy Altman, an advertising agency creative director. She was raised in Forest Hills, Queens and attended local public schools, graduating from Forest Hills High School in 1981. She frequently cites her close relationship with her maternal grandmother, Clara Gross Elice, as one of the most important and supportive of her life. Altman is a survivor of abuse, and writes openly about living and thriving with Complex PTSD, and being an eldercare-giver for her mother, who suffers from clinically-diagnosed Narcissistic Personality Disorder; Altman has written extensively about the moral complexities of being an eldercare-giver to an abusive parent. Although Altman grew up in a secular Jewish home, her father was a devoted Anglophile, and she describes herself as being an agnostic heavily drawn to the beauty of interfaith prayer and practice, citing Doris Grumbach as an influence.

She graduated with BA in English literature from Boston University in 1985 and in 2013 was the recipient of the Boston University College of General Studies Distinguished Alumni Award. She also attended Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University in 1983.

After graduating from Boston University, Altman attended the Institute of Culinary Education and worked for Dean & Deluca in the late 1980s, counting among her customers Edna Lewis, Judith Jones, Laurie Colwin, and Peter Hoffman. Altman has played acoustic fingerstyle guitar since she was four years old, studied with Eddie Simon at the Guitar Study Center in the 1970s, and has played semi-professionally over the years.

Career

Altman began a career in publishing as an editorial assistant at Ballantine Books in 1985, two weeks after her graduation from Boston University. She worked for Dean & Deluca in Manhattan from 1987 to 1990, as a book department manager. Altman left bookselling and worked as an editor at HarperCollins Publishers from 1992 until 2000, specializing in memoir. In 2010, Altman began writing essays for The Huffington Post and in 2008, Altman launched a narrative food blog, Poor Man's Feast, and it won a James Beard Foundation Award for Individual Food Blog in 2012. She is a contributor to publications ranging from The Bitter Southerner and Orion Magazine and Wall Street Journal to LitHub, Lion's Roar, On Being, O:The Oprah Magazine, and The Washington Post, where her column, Feeding My Mother, ran for a year from 2015 to 2016. She has reviewed books for Avenue Magazine, The Boston Globe, and O: The Oprah Magazine, and teaches memoir workshops at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Truro Center for the Arts, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Kripalu, and beyond. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; she was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Memoir, the Maine Literary Award, the Connecticut Book Award, and Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. In 2016, she presented a TEDx talk about the moral necessity of bringing elderly Americans into the national food discussion.

Altman's hybrid craft-memoir, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create will be published by Godine Books in 2025. It received advance praise from poet and memoirist Maggie Smith, Katherine May, Anne Lamott, Dani Shapiro, and Kate Christensen; Smith referred to it as "a profound and generous gift." Altman has spoken publicly about the inspiration for writing the book being the profound and personal loss she experienced when writing her first memoir and inadvertently revealing a century-old family secret that touched multiple generations. She describes writing Permission as a soul-healing exploration after the devastation of being excised from her family of origin, and calls it a necessary inquiry into the questions surrounding story ownership and family myth, which every writer at every level experiences.

Her first memoir Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking was published in 2013. The book is based on her blog, and described by Dawn Drzal in The New York Times as a "smart yet tender tale of her gastronomical and spiritual evolution" from New York City to rural Connecticut with her partner Susan Turner.

Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw was published in 2016 and is a prequel memoir of her Jewish household in 1960s and 1970s Queens, and her experience coming out as a lesbian and marrying a Catholic woman. According to Kirkus Reviews, "Altman not only reveals how she learned to interweave the contradictory threads of her life into a complex whole. She also gives eloquent voice to the universal human desire to belong." In a review for Lambda Literary, Gena Hymowech writes, "I appreciate it when an author can take a random thing, like food, and recognize the way it symbolizes something else, something even more important. And that is exactly what Elissa Altman does in Treyf – food stands in for love, faith, and rebelliousness."

Julie Wittes Schlack writes for WBUR, "The author, her conflicted father, her glamorous, self-starving mother, her friends who chant from the Torah on their bat mitzvahs, then celebrate with shrimp-in-lobster sauce at their post-shul luncheons at the Tung Shing House – they are all modern Americans alternately fleeing and embracing identities rooted in the ancient." According to Publishers Weekly, "Her decades-long struggle to regain the happiness and comfort she felt in her beloved maternal grandmother’s home is depicted lovingly, with many moments of heartbreak and disappointment but also joy and contentment."

Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing was published in 2019 and is a memoir that centers on her relationship with her mother. Kirkus Reviews writes, "Funny, raw, and tender, Altman’s book examines the inevitable role reversals that occur in parent-child relationships while laying bare a mother-daughter relationship that is both entertaining and excruciating." According to Publishers Weekly, "Throughout her life Altman struggles to balance devotion to her mother with a need to maintain boundaries for her own self-preservation, all of which comes to a moment of clarity when Altman decides to have children."

Personal Life

Altman lives in rural Connecticut with her wife of twenty-five years, Random House book designer Susan Turner.

Honors and awards

References

  1. ^ Botton, Sari (September 24, 2024). "The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #40". memoirland.substack.com. Sari Botton. Retrieved 24 September 2024.
  2. Altman, Elissa (September 8, 2020). Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing (2nd ed.). New York, New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0399181603.
  3. Altman, Elissa (January 2, 2024). Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking (Revised ed.). New York: Open Road Media. ISBN 978-1504093774.
  4. Altman, Elissa (January 2, 2024). Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw (Revised ed.). New York: Open Road Media. ISBN 978-1504093569.
  5. Altman, Elissa. "Poor Man's Feast | Elissa Altman". poormansfeast.substack.com. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  6. Bolton-Fasman, Judy (July 29, 2019). "Elissa Altman's Third Memoir Features Her Complicated Mother". Jewish Boston. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  7. Altman, Elissa (2022-06-24). "how wide the crack in heaven". Poor Man's Feast. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  8. Altman, Elissa (2019-08-05). "'Someday, She Will Become Your Job.' On Being My Mother's Sole Caregiver". Literary Hub. Retrieved 2025-01-10.
  9. "https://www.elissaaltman.com/notebook/1z7w3cno1rqmlcuxxrerjx4qmwcsh7". Elissa Altman. 2020-07-31. Retrieved 2025-01-09. {{cite web}}: External link in |title= (help)
  10. "https://www.elissaaltman.com/notebook/1z7w3cno1rqmlcuxxrerjx4qmwcsh7". Elissa Altman. 2020-07-31. Retrieved 2025-01-09. {{cite web}}: External link in |title= (help)
  11. Laskowski, Emmy (May 20, 2010). "On Eating". BU Today. Boston University. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  12. "Distinguished Alumni Award | General Studies". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  13. "2019, Elissa Altman". designmattersmedia. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  14. "Paul Simon and brother Ed". Let's Talk Guild. 2009-10-25. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  15. ^ "Bio". Elissa Altman. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  16. ^ Hines-Dochterman, Meredith (March 24, 2013). "Author didn't always realize that eating simply also meant eating well". The Gazette. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  17. "Forever Less of Beauty". The Bitter Southerner. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  18. "Orion Magazine - Inside the Waiting". Orion Magazine. 10 March 2022. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  19. "Sitting with the Unknowable: On Suicide and Loss". Literary Hub. 2018-06-12. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  20. "Elissa Altman's Articles on Lions Roar". Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  21. "Writing and the Permission to Succeed: The Intersection of Art and Shame". The On Being Project. 2016-05-28. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  22. "My Wife and I Are Quarantining with My High-Maintenance, Heterosexual Mom". Oprah Daily. 2020-05-21. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  23. Altman, Elissa (2015-05-05). "I need to feed my aging mother, but sometimes I think she'd rather starve". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  24. "32nd Lambda Literary Awards", Misplaced Pages, 2024-09-24, retrieved 2025-01-09
  25. "Author: Elissa Altman". Godine. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  26. TEDx Talks (2016-02-09). Healing the Epidemic of Isolation for Senior Citizens | Elissa Altman | TEDxUniversityofNevada. Retrieved 2025-01-10 – via YouTube.
  27. "Author: Elissa Altman". Godine. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  28. Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create a book by Elissa Altman. 2025-03-11. ISBN 978-1-56792-763-4.
  29. Kummer, Corby (18 December 2013). "The Best Food Books of 2013". The Atlantic Magazine. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  30. Drzal, Dawn (May 29, 2013). "Food Chronicle". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 November 2022.
  31. Ketchum, Sally D. "Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking". New York Journal of Books. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  32. ^ "Treyf". Kirkus Reviews. July 15, 2016. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  33. Hymowech, Gena (November 6, 2016). "'Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw' by Elissa Altman". Lambada Literary. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  34. "Treyf: My Quest for Identity in a Forbidden World". Publishers Weekly. July 25, 2016. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  35. Gilson, D. (August 19, 2019). "'Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing' by Elissa Altman". Lambda Literary. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  36. Tuttle, Kate (August 1, 2019). "Elissa Altman's moving dispatch from the heart of 'Motherland'". Boston Globe. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  37. "Motherland". Kirkus Reviews. July 1, 2019. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  38. "Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing". Publishers Weekly. March 20, 2019. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  39. Botton, Sari (2023-07-20). "This is 60: Author Elissa Altman Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire". Oldster Magazine. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  40. "Distinguished Alumni Award | General Studies". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2022-10-26.
  41. "Final list of Lambda Literary Awards 2020 announced". The Indian Express. March 11, 2020. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  42. "2020 Connecticut Book Awards Finalists". Connecticut Center for the Book. August 26, 2020. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  43. Keyes, Bob (May 7, 2020). "Finalists announced for Maine Literary Awards". Portland Press-Herald. Retrieved 2 November 2022.

External links

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