This Is Running for Your Life Essays

Over the past fifteen years, technology and a will to connect at all costs has transformed the way we produce and consume art and redefined how relationships are built. In This Is Running for Your Life, Michelle Orange examines technology and culturefrom smartphones to social networksto figure out how the rapidly changing times inform our sense of self. This lyrical collection ranges from the critical to the journalistic to the deeply personal. Orange takes us from Hawaii for the American Psychiatric Association's annual conference to her grandmother's nursing home in Nova Scotia. She takes us to the movies, where she considers the evolution of the "dream girl" from bombshell to manic pixie, and the impact this has on women's relationships with themselves and with others. Orange combines moving personal accounts with incisive critical analysis to decode a world that is now mediated by images and interactivity. With the insight of Joan Didion and the empathy of Geoff Dyer, Orange unveils the paradigm shift in the culture, in our lives, and in the way our memories and identities are formed.

Michelle Orange is the author of The Sicily Papers and the editor of From the Notebook: The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her fiction, essays, criticism, and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Village Voice, The Globe and Mail, Movieline.com, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. She is a founding contributing editor of The Rumpus.