Joan Wickersham

Joan Wickersham is an American writer. Her 2008 memoir about her father's suicide, The Suicide Index, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction. She is an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe as well as an architecture writer, with a regular column featured in Architecture Boston magazine. Her fiction writing has appeared in the literary magazines Agni, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, and Ploughshares. After eight years of writing, she had completed a draft but was unable to sell it to any publishers. In 2003 Wickersham was granted an artist residency position at the MacDowell Program in New Hampshire. During the residency, she scrapped most of the draft, and approached the memoir from a novel perspective.

Her 2012 collection of short stories entitled The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story featured seven short stories about loving relationships formed between an eclectic mix of characters. This includes a paralyzed ballet dancer forming a bond with her caregiver as the dancer's choreographer husband is on tour with the dance troupe and having an affair with another dancer. Other stories include a separated married couple re-kindling their love as they spend time together at a summer engagement party, and middle-aged Rebecca forming a bond whilst serving as a caregiver for her disabled mother. The collection was featured as one of the best books of the year by NPR. Writing for The New York Times, Tom Barbash states Wickersham adroitly depicted the subtleties of love, affection and yearning as relationships form, blossom or dissolve. Barbash also stated: "Occasionally Wickersham overindulges her characters' desire to pick at small hurts — you may find yourself needing a break." Writing in The Los Angeles Times, in a mixed review, David Ulin noted that some of the stories seemed "contrived, a series of stunts that show their seams." However, Ulin noted that other stories in the collection were open, lyrically showing the many ways love can develop, change, or die over time, with the most heartwarming story according to Ulin being the paralyzed ballet dancer and her caregiver Malcolm.