"For so long publishing acted like it didn’t have space for this kind of writing, so I do so unapologetically." Minda Honey's Literary Life

The author of THE HEARTBREAK YEARS shares sound writing advice, her top book recommendations, and reveals a bit about future projects.

I’ve always been very curious about the life that brings a writer to the pen or keyboard. My hope is that in getting to know authors in a new light, we might find ourselves in the process. Today, we are featuring our third author, Minda Honey.

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Minda Honey’s (she/her) essays on politics and relationships have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads. Her work is featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger”, “A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South”, and “Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic.”Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A, October 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time.

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What inspired you to start writing?

I was someone who deeply loved books from a very young age and immediately set about telling my own stories. I can still remember the first story I typed up on our home PC about animals having a tea party in the jungle and demanding my dad print it off on the Dot Matrix printer that shook the entire table as it shuttered out my sentences.

Can you describe your first piece of published work and how it felt to get published?

I was on the school paper, my high school lit mag, that kind of thing. But the first time I was really published as an adult was an essay that Kiese Laymon selected while he was an editor at Gawker — I felt anointed. I’d recently made the decision to leave my career at 29 to get an MFA and pursue writing. Being published was confirmation that risk would be worth it.