R.M.
Almeida
Writer. Obsessive. Unreliable narrator of my own life.
I have been writing since before I knew what writing was for. As a child it was a way to make sense of things that didn't make sense. As an adult it is still that — just with better sentences and a higher tolerance for ambiguity.
I write literary fiction and essays at the intersection of memory, myth, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. My work tends toward the dark, the layered, and the unresolved — not because I think resolution is dishonest, but because I think most of the interesting things happen in the space before it.
I live in the American West. I have worked in institutions, against institutions, and occasionally as an institution. All of it ends up in the work.
What I believe about the work
Fiction is the only place where you can tell the truth about something that never happened.
The best sentences are the ones that feel inevitable — like they couldn't have been written any other way, even though a thousand other ways existed.
I am not interested in stories that explain themselves. I am interested in stories that trust the reader to do some of the work.
Where the work comes from
My first book, 1600 Broadway, grew out of a decade of thinking about a real place — The University Center, a treatment facility for troubled adolescents that closed in 1974. I became obsessed with what it meant to build an institution around the idea of healing, and what it costs when that institution fails.
The Last Magic came from a different obsession: the persistence of myth. I have always been drawn to the stories that cultures tell about their own endings — Atlantis, Eden, the age of magic — and what it means that we keep inventing them. The unicorn arrived later, as the right vessel for that question.
Both books are ongoing. I write slowly and revise obsessively. I believe in the long project.