Dr. Carmen Bugan's Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police received rave reviews when it came out in 2012.

“A beautiful, vivid memoir of growing up in Ceausescu’s Romania … a childhood idyll gradually supplanted by a growing awareness of oppression," wrote Patrick Barkham in The Guardian.

“A superbly realised memoir of a childhood smudged out by political repression. … This is a smashing book,” raved John Sweeney in Literary Review.

“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie meets Anna Funder’s account of East German repression, Stasiland," claimed a writer (whose byline is locked behind a paywall) in The Sunday Times. "It is a stunningly powerful piece of writing, a modern classic.”

Now, that classic status isn't just one scribe's opinion; Burying the Typewriter was just reissued as part of the Picador Collection's "modern classics" series.

The acclaimed Bugan, who has both graduated from and taught at the University of Michigan, and who calls Chelsea home, is also a poet of wide renown. We've interviewed her for Pulp on four occasions, and she's also led writing workshops at the Ann Arbor District Library.

We've collected a series of Bugan's interviews about Burying the Typewriter, as well as her appearances in Pulp and at AADL.

But first, a synopsis of Bugan's haunting memoir:

Burying the Typewriter is the haunting true story of life behind the Iron Curtain, and one teenage girl’s flight from the Romanian secret police and the Ceausescu regime.

At 2 a.m. on 10 March 1983, Carmen Bugan’s father left the family home, alone. That afternoon, Carmen returned from school to find officers of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, in her living room. Her father had been detained for his protests against the Communist regime in Romania, and the family home was now laced with surveillance devices. Overnight, Carmen’s life became a living hell of paranoia and small-scale resistance, her schoolteachers and the friends and neighbours all around her transformed into potential informants.

Burying the Typewriter is the extraordinary story of Carmen’s coming of age in the twilight years of Ceausescu’s rule. Above all, it is a luminous, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest book about the price of courage, the pain of exile, and the power of memory.

Pulp interviews with Bugan:
➥ "Writing Into Clarity: Poet Carmen Bugan’s 'Tristia' collection engages with loss and pain" [Pulp, April 15, 2025]
➥ "Time is punctuated by motherhood, the pandemic, and a family rupture in poet Carmen Bugan’s new collection, 'Time Being'" [Pulp, April 26, 2022]
➥ "Carmen Bugan's essay collection articulates how poetry is an instrument of resistance" [Pulp, September 28, 2021]
➥ "Former U-M professor Carmen Bugan's new poetry collection, 'Lilies From America,' relates nature and the human experience" [Pulp, January 8, 2020]

Audio interviews with Bugan about Burying the Typewriter:
➥ "Living in Ceausescu’s Romania" [BBC Witness, June 20, 2023]
➥ "A Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police" [Cold War Conversations]
➥ "Carmen Bugan" [Midweek, BBC Radio 4, June 13, 2012]

Bugan's video interviews about Burying the Typewriter and her 2026 AADL poetry workshop: