Let’s Talk Memoir

Jacque Gorelick joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up missing a mother, surviving a fractured family and worrying you’re broken in unfixable ways, how her husband's medical crisis upended her life as a new mother, letting our inner selves be cared for, protecting a space where a mother should be, owning our story, gathering all the pieces for structure, weaving in backstory t...

Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about contextualizing a memoir in a post-Roe world, what it means to make a choice as mothers, ending a pregnancy, knowing you will write about an experience while it is happening, writing about childhood sexual abuse, returning to a manuscript with your skirt on fire, writing to a point of discovery, putting down our self-defense and  havi...

Mimi Nichter joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being hijacked on a plane when she was twenty years old in the first incident of international terrorism, how we can be socialized into silence about our stories, processing old trauma on the page, building immediacy in our narratives through contained time frames and present tense, what happens when we “other” people, wanting to get th...

Rachel Tzvia Back joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about living with depression, losing a sister, when a mother is emotionally and psychologically absent, how myths can be cloaks, listening to our language and what it offers, thinking in image, when stories don’t match, giving our children the space to tell their version of stories about us, incorporating four recurring elements in a hyb...

Julie Scolnick joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about falling madly in love with a married Frenchman when she was 20 years old and living in Paris studying music, working our way back from aching first love, searching for answers, cutting everything that doesn’t serve the story, finding a universal truth in your memoir, restructuring a manuscript to include letters at the start of each c...

Stephanie Weaver MPH joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about family estrangement, gaslighting, her recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, chronic illness, not wanting a book to be about revenge, reframing a memoir around a larger cultural moment to resonate with more people, stepping away from our memoir projects to take care of ourselves, avoiding traumatizing the reader, knowing...

Nikkya Hargrove joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the effects of incarceration on the family system, growing up lost and unsure who her family was, accepting the responsibility of becoming her brother’s mother, the spark that got her writing her memoir, gaining the lens to understand our story is worthy of being told, acknowledging the divisions within ourselves, incorporating backs...

Amanda McCracken joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about what happens when you’re hopelessly, stubbornly in love with longing, fear of intimacy, the idea of falling in love vs. being in love, person addiction, choices around sex, longing for avoidant men, recognizing the illusion of control, applying to speak at Tedx talks, going to social media to find publishers, becoming an expert on a...

Wendy C. Ortiz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the English teacher who preyed on her when she was thirteen, writing about the person we are now when writing about our past, placing the reader in the physical and psychological experience of character-you, how important the opening pages are in setting the stakes, feeling fear and shame, taking care of yourself when writing about tr...

Mallary Tenore Tarpley joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the middle place between acute sickness and full recovery, living with the imprints of a disorder, resisting thinking in black and white, the memoir plus genre, making memoir reportage and research seamless, showing our imperfections on the page, exploring hard truths along with hope, leaning into the most authentic version of...

Karen Palmer joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about changing her identity to escape a dangerous ex-husband, being stalked, the consequences of deciding to disappear, coming to grips with the experience of domestic abuse, mistaking grief for maturity, telling a story as truthfully as possible, relinquishing a child, the long-term effect of PTSD, not ever completely knowing ourselves or ot...

Dorothy Roberts joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her father’s interviews beginning in the 1930s with over 500 back-white couples who crossed the color line in Chicago,  moving to memoir to explore more personal experiences and feelings, growing up in a mixed race family, shifting the lens onto herself, thinking about identity, finding answers via the writing process, staying motiva...

Rebecca N. Thompson, MD joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about life-threatening pregnancy losses and  weaving her own story of navigating a challenging path to parenting with the stories of others, her decade-long collaboration with a remarkable group of women, how healing others helps us heal, imperfect love, not feeling heard, advocating for our own care, humanism in medicine, the cumu...

Blair Glaser joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her time on a Catskills ashram during her twenties in the 1990s, yearning and the thrilling and perilous idolization of other human beings, spiritual development, group think, revisiting our experiences with curiosity and excitement, navigating writing about others, pitching agents and digesting their feedback, writing in scene in a sus...

Bee Wilson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the evolution of our narratives, how each book teaches you how to write it, approaching memoir from many different angles, how there’s no predetermined idea of what a memoir needs to be, writing about divorce and her husband leaving at the end of the first lockdown in the UK, the emotional life of kitchen objects, not being afraid to tell...

Alex Poppe joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about working in conflict zones, living abroad and negotiating cultural differences, teaching in northern Iraq, youth and female resilience, pursuing something elusive, using fiction techniques for creative nonfiction and essays, not standing on a soapbox in memoir, moving from the personal to the universal, safe domesticity vs. unpredictable i...

Louise Southerden joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about building a tiny home in Australia by hand during the Covid pandemic, being a travel writer for much of her career, choosing freedom over security, writing about exes, struggling with how much backstory to put in, narrative arc and the hero’s journey, firming up a timeline, wanting to be fair in depicting loved ones, taking care of...

Anna Rollins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the relationship between evangelical purity culture and diet culture, incorporating research and reporting into personal narrative, the intricate connections between religion, God, and body shame, fearing our own desires, extreme thinking, body dysmorphia, viewing our bodies as suspect, the physical effects of belief systems, writing me...

Steve Eichenblatt joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing a father through abandonment, the abuse he endured from his adoptive father, living in a household of trauma, feeling emotionally disconnected, verbal abuse and the wounds that don’t go away, embracing vulnerability and learning how to connect, writing and processing old, longstanding anger, sharing manuscripts with family b...

Dr. Camille U. Adams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about generations of mothers choosing to unmother their children, colonial violence in Trinidad and Tobago, stifling relationships, cognitive dissonance, finding the psychological, emotional, and geographical distance we need, narcissism and the golden child, not wanting to tell the story we ultimately find a way to tell, being a poet...

Lora Abrador joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation weaving together three themes in her memoir, writing about the ancient technique of egg tempura paint, incorporating 300 images in her book, gaining confidence as an artist, struggling to form a lasting romantic partnership, nature vs. nurture, our innate personalities, self-actualization, love addiction, feeling like a wounded bird, really c...

Gretchen McGowan joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the grit and glam of the 90s in New York, her career producing independent films, the thrill of creating something from nothing, honoring our own process, willing to be self-deprecating, negotiating manuscript revisions in digestible ways, keeping writing momentum in mind, getting character-you into trouble, when everyone around you...

Sarah Gallucci joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being the child of a teen mom and early influences on ideas of love and relationships, pivoting from journalism to reporting on her own life, the hey day of mommy blogging, when relationships become incredibly messy, how we experience pleasure, manipulative, coercive, and nonconsensual sex, giving a partner a hall pass, measuring the...

Elizabeth Rynecki and Tony Kaplan join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about multi-disciplinary approaches to memoir, the different skills we need for storytelling modalities, their new podcast That Sinking Feeling: Adventures in ADHD and Ship Salvage, searching for answers to family stories, the documentary about Elizabeth’s great grandfather who perished in the Holocaust, drawing connection...

Sarah Chauncey joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her many careers in writing, working on a memoir and deciding not to publish, framing the story we want to tell, experiencing ourselves as a part of living system, going deeper and becoming more vulnerable, taking responsibility for our wellbeing and mental health, not seeing oneself as a limited, pursuing inner peace, reading subtext...