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Amy Goldmacher's Debut Memoir Terms & Conditions Arrives in October
by Writing Workshops Staff
6 hours ago
“Before taking the workshop, my writing life was full; but now it’s fuller.”
On October 6th, Stanchion Books publishes Terms & Conditions, Amy Goldmacher’s debut solo-authored book and one of the more formally daring memoirs you’ll encounter this year. It is a memoir built as a glossary. Entries alternate between remembered past, speculated past, and present tense; blackout erasures, diagrams, artifacts, and hermit-crab forms carry material about anxiety, inheritance, grief, and the particular vertigo of losing a father just as your own adulthood begins. The structure isn’t decoration. Putting a life into definitions creates exactly the analytical distance that lets the emotional freight land.
Early readers have noticed. Dinty W. Moore calls it a glossary both personal and universal.
Sheila Squillante describes the restraint in Goldmacher’s prose as the thing that keeps a reader alert.
Darien Hsu Gee frames the book as a map between inheritance and escape, moving from the clinical vocabulary of genetic mutation into the intimate vocabulary of family.
The glossary conceit makes more sense once you know Goldmacher trained as an anthropologist. She holds a Ph.D., co-authored Designing an Anthropology Career, and has spent a professional lifetime cataloging what people carry and why. Her creative work has appeared in The New York Times, Essay Daily, Monkeybicycle, and dozens of literary journals and anthologies, and she won the 2022 AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She writes from South Florida.
She has also, somewhere along the way, become one of the most persistent students in our Zoom rooms. Her first class with us was a submissions seminar in 2019. Since then she has turned up for autofiction and flash fiction, a one-on-one mentorship, seminars on list-making and quiet horror, artist residencies, and how to publicize your own work. Fourteen classes across six years. Asked why, she doesn’t reach for anything grand:
“Honestly, I’ve taken (and keep taking) classes because I love being exposed to new ideas and techniques. I love learning, and all the instructors have such valuable perspectives to share.”
The most recent one wrapped just this month. Asked which workshop moment still shapes her writing, she pointed at it: “From Rebecca van Laer’s Everyday Drama: varying sentence lengths does a lot of heavy lifting for the piece.” Which is a small, unglamorous, entirely correct observation, and a telling one for a writer working in compressed forms, where a book’s whole architecture rests on rhythm. Van Laer teaches memoir built from diaries, marginalia, and phone notes rather than from dramatic turning points, reading Jamaica Kincaid and Lydia Davis to show how juxtaposition and shifts in scale generate tension without a three-act scaffold. Goldmacher, assembling a life out of alphabetized fragments, was well positioned to hear it.
Her advice for other writers is similarly free of mystique. On getting through the hard stretches: “A ten minute free writing session cures all ills.” On what to do when you’re stuck: “If you want to break out of being stuck, a workshop is the way to do it!” Ten minutes, a deadline, other people in the room. That’s the toolkit.
And the next book? Goldmacher describes it with the same wry patience she brings to everything else: “My next book is still deciding what it wants to be. It has resisted me telling it what I think it should be for almost two years now.” Two years of a manuscript refusing instruction sounds like a problem. From a writer who just spent a decade turning definitions into a memoir, it sounds more like the beginning of something. We’ll be watching for it, and in October, we’ll be reading Terms & Conditions.
Every writing life is built one room at a time — a seminar here, a workshop there, a deadline that finally gets a draft moving. Our instructors are working writers and editors who teach small, generous classes in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and beyond, and our alumni go on to publish books, essays, and stories in the places they most wanted to land. If you’re stuck, or curious, or just ready for the next idea, there’s likely a room waiting for you.
