Thumb-Sucking Girl
An Interview
with author Sonja Livingston

We recently asked Sonja Livingston if sucking her thumb really ruined her front teeth.  “Yep,” she said.  “I have a gap in my front teeth, which on good days, I manage to convince myself is Hutten-esque.”

A strange thing to happen, which is a part of the reason why, Livingston says, memoir has become the obvious choice when comes to what form her writing will take.  “My experiences of growing up were not typical.  As a child, I was shamed by things like living in the slums, and not having a father or a flush toilet.  I hid the details of my life for years.  Writing became a way to make sense of and share my experiences.”

But for such an accomplished writer of creative nonfiction, Livingston says she didn’t even know there was a name or category for what she most liked to read and write until her late twenties, when she took a nonfiction workshop with Judith Kitchen.  Livingston says, “I certainly didn’t associate the word essay—which had been a sort of torture in high school and college—with the freedom of the form I came to love.”

Livingston’s writing is plain-spoken, immediate, and lyrical.  “Sometimes it can be wise,” she says, “and other times can be wise-ass.”  She says she wrote “Thumb-Sucking Girl” as a “means of showing an inside-out view of poverty.  In other words,” she says, “I could have painted a picture of how ragged or tired my family was as we moved from place to place, but I wanted readers to know something of the person (people) inhabiting such pictures.  I wanted a point of connection.”

To young writers, Livingston encourages you to “trust yourself.  It’s trite and way too easy to say, but true.  There’s a thrill in having someone go crazy over your work.  It can even become a sort of addiction.  But in the end, those words on the page are yours and yours alone.”

Livingston has just completed an essay collection based on her early childhood, of which this piece is a part. 

—Rob Markowski and Josh Lapekas