Let’s Talk Memoir

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...

Kaila Yu joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how she hated writing at first and has had an accidental career in it, how she had no intention of writing a memoir, selling a book on proposal and pitching off a timely event, racial and sexually motivated hate crime, Asian fetishization and the feeling of being other, her experience as a pin up model in the 90s, sexual assault and the fli...

Tamara Jong joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up Jehovah’s Witness, her mother's untimely passing, losing faith, disguising who we are, trying multiple approaches to a writing practice, navigating material that resists us, becoming vulnerable, the tenderness of losing, learning to trust ourselves, weaving in motherhood and mother figures in our work, finding community and ho...

Diane Gottlieb, Jennifer Fliss, and Nina B. Lichtenstein join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about their work as editors and what they look for in submissions, setting your writing apart, knowing where to omit for maximum impact, the magic of prompts, working with supportive editors, how constraints give us freedom, ordering an essay collection, how stories sustain us, disentangling the arti...

Edgar Gomez joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up poor in Florida, wanting to believe in the American dream and realizing it’s not accessible, surviving a precarious childhood, reckoning with trauma, grappling with and excavating shame, what queer people want vs. what they get, navigating sex work, the Pulse nightclub tragedy, when to tell family about our memoirs, writing ab...

Anne Abel joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her experiences winning the Moth StorySLAM, what she learned from the storytelling community, the lifelong toll of her parents’ abuse and her chronic, recurrent depression, overcoming self-loathing, how Bruce Springsteen changed her life, following a hunch, overcoming writers block, why it’s better to overwrite than underwrite, her giant f...

Heather Sweeney joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her quest to find out who she was apart from her life as a military wife, mining 20 years worth of journals, uncovering internal dynamics through writing, knowing where to begin a memoir, managing multiple settings with a chronological timeline, cutting redundancies, retitling a memoir late in the game, killing our darlings, writing...

Kelly Foster Lundquist joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about falling in love with creative nonfiction, believing our story is worth sharing, contemplating how to tell it without hurting someone else, shifting from writing academically to personally, taking 20 years to complete a memoir, leaning into and trusting the particularity of our story, learning to stop explaining in our manuscri...

Shigeko Ito joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the lasting impact of childhood emotional neglect, how invisible trauma can manifest in adult life, fragmented memories, facing a fierce inner critic, accepting limits, growing as a person and as a writer, when the back story feels as important and relevant as the front story, the often chaotic experience of managing lots of material, be...

Leslie Johansen Nack joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up with parents who struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, surviving an inappropriate and domineering father, getting tools to heal, making ourselves safe, knowing as a child you will write your story, becoming sober, portraying difficult and abusive people as whole human beings, writing a memoir like a novel...

Sue William Silverman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about evolving as a writer and bringing freshness to the same subject, experimenting with truncated and fractured forms, making a collection more cohesive, writing to feel centered, utilizing a recurring persona, the divided self in memoir, trusting the pieces will fall into place, giving ourselves new challenges, leaning into sensor...

Ren Cedar Fuller joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how when we love people we want their world to be bigger, raising a transgender child, having a disability, writing a lot of drafts for the right structure to snap into place, revising for months, not forcing an ending, writing about other people, including our children in our work, putting a collection together, finding themes in o...

Gina Tron joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about coming of age in the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, the myth of the bullied school shooter, revenge fantasies, her advocacy work, capturing the 1990s, connecting a personal story through journalism and interviews, being a suspected school shooter, when a publisher gets cold feet, leaning into shame, not wanting to be a problem author...

Jocelyn Jane Cox joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the challenges and guilt around caretaking, her childhood experience as a competitive figure skater, telling a story in the structure of a day, using the directed “you” in a book, writing about what has shaped us and played a role in the story we are trying to tell, using Post-It Notes, ordering our backstory, listmaking a low press...

Gaar Adams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about living amongst and depicting queer and migrant communities in the Gulf states, falling in love with Arabic literature and translation, the undeniable parallels between queerness and migration, exploring subversive acts, capturing ourselves in less than flattering ways, combating self-censorship, concern with how loved ones might perceive...

Bridey Thelen-Heidel joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up with a mom who was addicted to everything including dangerous men, revisiting and writing about a traumatic childhood forty plus decades later, when you have to let go to protect yourself, choosing to balance the heaviness and dysfunction in a story with pop culture and lightness, writing creatively with an audience i...

Sarah Boon joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about allowing elements of a memoir to reveal themselves, radical acceptance of what we need as a writer and what we can feasibly accomplish with the resources we have, getting to know who we are as creatives, publishing with an academic press and the peer review process, navigating refusals, struggling with narrative arc, her experience as a w...

Michael Jamin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about his career as a TV writer, moving from mimicking to discovering and trusting our own voice, allowing our style to evolve, making sense of ourselves through art, imposter syndrome and feeling displeased with our work, comedy writing, performing staged readings to test out material, building a bridge between separate sections of our stor...

Melissa Fraterrigo joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the personal and emotional toll of being female, becoming a mother and watching her daughters navigate culture, making sense of our world through memoir and essay, discovering a softness for the younger versions of ourselves, when the fictional world doesn’t hold our attention, processing different time periods, making sure there...

Gail Eisnitz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about structuring her memoir around her pursuit of answers to a lifelong medical mystery, coming to terms with her own humanness, writing about her career in animal advocacy, exposing the underbelly of the meat industry and effecting change for millions of animals, working on difficult and hard-to-sell material, not sharing a book project wit...

Alex DiFrancesco joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about using rituals and tarot as a framework in a manuscript, Italian folk tradition as a spiritual outlet, the sometimes difficult path to publishing, being sued for defamation, finding a publisher brave enough to publish our work, writing about sexual assault, thinking in sections, using books as inspiration, complex PTSD, hiding who we...

Nina B. Lichtenstein joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about writing to metabolize, using body parts as portals, pivoting from academic writing to memoir, discovering an authentic writer’s voice, finding the right form as a neurodivergent writer, allowing various stories to cross-pollinate, opening doors with exploration, transforming shame into a shared experience, writing about the memo...

Sonita Alizada joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about surviving the Taliban in Afghanistan, speaking up against forced child marriage and racism, finding a voice through music, when we have nothing else to help us survive but art, protesting against an oppressive government, fighting for an education, the lack of meaningful action from NGOs, how much we can live through and endure, survi...

Maura Casey joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the toll longterm illness has on a family, her sister Ellen’s kidney disease and researching the history of kidney transplants for her memoir, when alcohol is a member of the family, growing up with a manipulative parent who didn’t keep promises, sibling dynamics, being a lifelong diary keeper, her decades in journalism and transitioning...

Linda Trinh joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her personal spiritual journey, opening a memoir with a question, sparks of creativity even when we’re not actively writing, focusing on voice, owning our many identities and communities, making meaning from experience, paying attention to both the external and internal search, memoir as a time capsule, being okay with the version of our...