Memoir Nation

This week’s guest, David Lauterstein, joins us to talk about art and writing and purpose. Lauterstein’s book couldn’t NOT catch our eye. Sodomy Gods is a provocative title, and the point of giving his memoir this title was to make a point, to push readers to think about unequal treatment, and to stand proud. Lauterstein’s company, Nasty Pig, similarly pokes at assumptions, biases, and shame so oft...

Given our deep love of the show “Somebody, Somewhere,” Memoir Nation is thrilled to have Murray Hill as a guest on the show. We’re celebrating his new memoir, Showbiz! My Life as a Middle-Aged Man , where he shares how reading the stories of people like Tina Turner and Viola Davis inspired him to tell his own. Murray talks about the value of chosen family, how he chose to write about abuse in his...

This week we’re honoring the power of the travel memoir, which is a popular subgenre of memoir—and a place where exploration meets self-discovery. The act of travel in fact has much in common with writing memoir, as both pursuits push you outside your comfort zone, and both invite self-interrogation. Not to mention, memoir-writing itself is a form of travel—to your past, into the recesses of perso...

This week’s show explores writing the hard thing—and how releasing the hard thing into the world frees us from the burden of carrying secrets and being anything less than our whole selves in the world. Guest Jessy Easton is a beautiful writer with a strong Substack following for her work in somatic writing and her serialization of her memoir, The One Who Leaves. We’re excited to share with listene...

There’s so much self-understanding to be gleaned from how we move in the world. This week Brooke and Grant explore adventure and migration and living abroad, springing from the stories of guest Terria Smith, whose memoir, Love You So Many, explores all of these themes and more. What sometimes looks like a jagged arc of a life can in fact be destiny—and Terria’s journey-memoir drives that point hom...

We’re taking the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 to explore monoculture moments in memoir. These are collective events that we’ve all gone through together, where you know exactly where you were when an event happened. Captain Nia Gilliam had one of the most rarified views of 9/11 imaginable, from the cockpit of the last plane cleared for takeoff at Newark Airport on 9/11. Her sto...

We are back from our summer break with the first guest of our ninth season, Reyna Grande, in conversation about her new book, Migrant Heart. In this book, Reyna examines the ways in which she’s gravitated toward the memories that most hurt. There’s a real tension between excavating sadness and joy in our work, and discovering how both might show up on the page. Reyna’s honest look at questions of...

This is the last of our summer Best-Of episodes, this one featuring clips from our interviews with Andre Dubus III and Marya Hornbacher. Yes, these two authors are legacy memoirists, both of whom have written New York Times bestsellers. But also, both know something of the cost of telling the truth. Andre speaks to the cost to his relationships, while Marya speaks to the cost to her reputation. Bo...

These two former guests are partnered for their clear-eyed take on the world and their unwillingness to back down. Roxane Gay and Myriam Gurba are as loved as they are rebuked for their honesty and their critical takes‚ and for writing things that others might not dare. This week we’re celebrating bravery on the page, and heroines like Roxane and Myriam who say the things that need to be said. And...

During the month of August, Memoir Nation revisits its favorite guests of the past year. This week we’re pairing up powerhouse authors Jose Antonio Vargas and Beth Macy, whose memoirs touch on social-cultural issues that force conversation—and effect change. These two episodes circle questions of immigration and who gets to claim belonging in this country (Vargas) and poverty and who can get ahead...

Happy August, Memoir Nation! As is our custom, we bring you our favorite guests of the past year, partnered by theme. This week we chose Kwame Alexander and E. Jean Carroll, both of whom have seen major personal victories in the months since we originally interviewed them. Kwame Alexander launched his own imprint, Kwame Alexander Books, and E. Jean Carroll finally got her settlement money from Tru...

These week comedian Roz Hernandez opens up her heart and her story to us—and shares about the acceptance that comes when you stop trying to be “for everyone.” As a transgender comic, Roz talks about the experience of being hated just for existing, and why she decided to take her comedy show on tour to LGBTQ+ bars around the country—and experience that would later become the foundation for her memo...

Memoir Nation explores the hardest things this week with guest Emily Rapp Black. Her new book is I Would Die If I Were You, part memoir, part how-to, that supports writers through writing trauma and the things that won’t let us go, and how to stay the course. In this week’s show, we talk a lot about process—doing the work, the permission to write what is calling to be written, and how to shake thi...

This week’s show is a meditation on grief and the ways it weaves itself into our writing. Guest Siri Hustvedt says so many profound things about the writing process, about writing after loss, and about how to make sense of a life in the absence of a person who’s been part of your everyday for more than four decades. Hustvedt was married to the acclaimed novelist Paul Auster for 43 years, and her n...

This week we’re taking a bit of a departure from all things memoir to celebrate independent media with Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman, who bought “The Rumpus” in 2025. We’re supporting their relaunch in this interview, and talking about the indie media landscape, some of their new initiatives, when they knew they were buying the magazine, and also the all-important role their dog Max plays in the n...

So much of what’s funny stems from what’s terrible and tragic, and the funniest people are also often the darkest ones. This week we explore that truth with comedian Rosebud Baker, who talks with Grant Faulkner about her alcoholism, what happens to women when they become moms, and also her anger—and how she turns that into humor. This is a permission-giving show, as so many Memoir Nation episodes...

This week’s show is a nuanced exploration of the various and creative ways memoir can be an exploration of identity, culture, and history, and how in unearthing our own stories, we can discover so much about the world around us. Guest Beronda Montgomery has written a thoughtful and “thinking” memoir that has us ruminating on trees, legacy, ancestors, and who gets and is denied credit in our societ...

This week’s episode will be a fast favorite because guest Ronit Plank is speaking the language of a memoir advocate. We get right to the heart of so many things that make memoir special and important. Ronit speaks about coming to memoir kicking and screaming, and how it opened her up, and how memoir makes us all more empathetic. A true memoir advocate, with her own popular memoir podcast, Let’s Ta...

Form, form, form. We can’t stop circling it on Memoir Nation because everyone has a different approach to it. Mostly we’re taught that once you know your form, you can pour your content into it. And yet, we keep hearing from authors whose process is the exact opposite—which is that form follows content. Today we talk with Eleni Sikelianos about the ways in which she followed her subject matter to...

If you’re a regular listener of Memoir Nation, you know we love to cover memoir in all its changing and emerging forms. The micro memoir is a form all its own—different from the fragmented style that’s been so popular of late. In this week’s show, we’re going micro, exploring how writers can boil the essence of what needs to be said into the fewest number of words. We’ll talk about the form, its b...

This week on Memoir Nation we take a specific guest with a specific skillset/talent and look at ways to apply what he does to our broader writing community. Guest Brandon Deyette shares with us how he channels story by being hyper-attuned to his emotions, and Brooke and Grant speculate that this kind of attention is an emotional practice that any memoirist can cultivate. When you write memoir, you...

It’s our 400th episode and we’re celebrating with celebrated food critic and author Ruth Reichl! Ruth wrote her first food memoir before food memoir was a thing, and she takes us back there to when bookstores didn’t know what to do with her work. Ruth is a pioneer of the food movement in America, and is known for her mission to demystify the world of fine cuisine. This is a generous interview, ful...

We’re late to celebrate Grant’s new book, something out there in the distance, so we’re doing it this week, bringing on his co-collaborator on the project, Gail Butensky. Grant and Gail partnered up to create a beautiful and unusual project. This week’s show mixes things up a bit because Brooke interviews Grant, and Grant interviews Gail, and Grant shows up for his segments in all kinds of locatio...

Lots of writers want to write about sex and all the ways it shows up in their lives—and yet, it’s incredibly challenging to do. It’s exposing and uncomfortable. It means sharing the most intimate moments of our own lives, but also the lives of others. It can involve sharing mistakes, shame, and also some of the worst things that have ever happened to us when it comes to the negative side of the se...

This week is a treat because at the heart of many memoirs are stories of people throwing themselves into meaningful distractions in order to not have to face the challenges and unravellings so common to adult life. In her new book, Why Fly, Caroline Paul becomes obsessed with learning to fly a gyrocopter as her long-term marriage is dissolving. In the show we speak about risk, about love and loss,...