April 14, 2026 · Julia Fine

The New Chicago Renaissance Series: Julia Fine on Megan Stielstra's "The Wrong Way to Save Your Life"

Read Next Home and Away in “The Oyster Diaries” by Nancy Lemann In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Review of Books, The New Chicago Renaissance series revisits exemplary works of literature about Chicago from the last 10 years and explores their continued relevance. Join us all year long as 12 leading writers and artists explore books that they love and why they’re meaningful to our understanding of modern Chicago. “We walk through the world at its leisure. We’re here at its mercy and with its blessing. At some point, we have to ask ourselves how we want to live.” —Megan Stielstra, “Here is My Heart” Igrew up on the east coast, went away for school, and always thought I would return to live a life not necessarily of great monetary wealth but at least rich in coastal elitism. Enter Chicago, to derail my plans. More specifically, enter Megan Stielstra. In 2013, I was a graduate student at Columbia College, and given the opportunity to choose an elective alongside my required workshop courses. At the time, Stielstra was teaching a class on storytelling, essentially a primer for the Live Lit scene that had welled up in the bookstores and bars of the city during the Obama aughts. Reader, I did not take this class. How could I, cynical twenty-something that I was, bare my deepest thoughts in front of an audience? I could hardly bare my deepest thoughts in front of myself, hence the specialty in fiction writing1. Luckily, I had friends who were braver than me, and who dove into Stielstra’s praxis head-on, gushing about the class, their work, and the things she was teaching them over stale popcorn and pool at Wabash Tap. I was jealous. She sounded phenomenal. She sounded like she had her shit together. Most of all, she sounded unafraid. When I got the chance to see her perform, my awe grew tenfold. If reading Stielstra feels like taking part in a conversation she’s having directly with you, hearing her perform her work is a community-building experience. She didn’t only enchant my graduate school cohort—I’d challenge you to find anyone who has left a Megan Stielstra reading without tears in their eyes, and a newfound personal gumption. She’s a master of timing and inflection (see “The Walls Would Be Rubble” from Once I Was Cool), and a pillar of warmth. On the page, you get the sense that she’s genuinely curious—she wants to learn and discover and build beauty, and she’s shown up to listen to you (as nonsensical as that seems in the context of her own published essays). In person, Stielstra confirms this suspicion, building a bridge between herself and her audience, and then inviting everyone to cross together, a communal conversation that leaves you feeling part of something true. How could someone capable of such community-building and emotional honesty possibly be scared? She was a god to us grad students, the personal essayist sublimated in her ideal form. But writers are people, not gods, and those of us who read are better for it. In 2017, Stielstra published The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, a collection of mostly autobiographical essays. Structurally, the book is divided by the decades of her life, with vignettes of memory and experience marking each series of corresponding essays. These are filled with the humor, vulnerability and openness that defines all her work, but she adds to this a studied and deliberate excavation of fear. It seemed I was wrong, Stielstra was never fearless. The difference between us wasn’t conquered fear, but a willingness to look it in the eye.