Brittany Ackerman on the closurelessness of experience

Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.

Do you need distance and perspective to write about an experience honestly, meaningfully? Does writing about an experience provide closure — some sense of finality to memories and ideas you’ve been wrestling with?

Many writers say yes. Brittany Ackerman says no. And her new memoir-in-essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, has that sometimes exhilaratingly freeing, sometimes out-of-control frightening sense of life continually...