Let’s Talk Memoir

Barrie Miskin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the rare dissociative disorder she experienced while pregnant and her experience navigating the maternal and mental health care system, the guilt and shame so often connected to motherhood and womanhood, the sweet spot of writing a year into her full recovery, balancing memoir writing with privacy and community, owning who we are and w...

Kanya D’Almeida joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how her life changed when a manuscript by Russell "Maroon" Shoatz, a former member of the Black Panther Party and soldier in the Black Liberation Army showed up in an envelope on her doorstep in 2011, the decades he spent in the Pennsylvania prison system, how their experiences with political violence and civil war intersected, becom...

Sari Botton joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about editing the magazines Adventures in Journalism, Memoir Land, and Oldster, her experience publishing on Substack, editing vs. generating material, putting ourselves in our story, wrestling with what to share, creating safe boundaries, growing into the truest version of ourselves, vomit drafts, leaving the perfectionist out of the room, tu...

Eleanor Vincent joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about trying to save her challenging high conflict marriage, autism in adults and Cassandra Syndrome, what to leave out of a book, self-revelation and honest grappling, the toll of masking autism, emotional abuse, careful framing of those we write about, using a sensitivity reader, support groups for neurodiverse spouses, our narrating per...

Minelle Mahtani joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the grief, love, loss, and repair in losing her mother while finding her voice, noncolonial ways of thinking about stories, writing about her Indian, Iranian, and Canadian identities, what the sound of our voice is worth, paying attention to what we pay attention to, permission to be ourselves, having fun while trying to write precis...

Jarod K. Anderson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about changing our definition of what victory is based on what we can and can’t control, understanding our own minds and contextualizing ourselves in the world, his experience with chronic major depression, the stigma around mental illness, the pain of abstraction and the concrete world, his podcast The Cryptonaturalist, privileging enth...

Sarah Gormley joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about unpacking the baggage of self-doubt and imposter syndrome and moving toward self-love, shaping our memoirs into answers to the questions we have about our life, prioritizing pieces and elements of our story that help show readers transformation, the messiness of mother-daughter relationships, including partners and family in our memoir...

Paula Whyman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about getting out of our comfort zone,  her attempt to restore native meadows in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, becoming obsessed with subjects and deep diving, writing about science and nature, controlling and selecting details for impact, being attentive to what readers need, writing tangentially, the need for deadlines, when yo...

Eiren Caffall joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her generational experience of loss, coming out of the shadows about having an ill body, how polycystic kidney disease (PKD) has shaped her and her family’s life, writing about the collapse of ecosystems in the Atlantic ocean, seamlessly weaving in narrative, historical, lyrical, scientific, and metaphorical threads, allowing our child...

Nadia Colburn joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about tuning into our bodies to discover what we need to say, creating different cultural conversations about surviving trauma, tapping into our subconscious, coming out of secrets, how poetry can help us access material, not needing to share work until we’re ready, what we learn from being in community with other writers, and her signature...

Kristen Van Nest joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how discovered who she was on a global stage and her addiction to travel, loving the growth phase of new projects, how improv and stand up improves our writing, writing funny and the architecture of a joke, having a love-hate relationship with social media and publishing, keeping your ideal reader in mind, marketing our work ourselv...

Jennifer Lang joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about asking the right questions, understanding what home means and where it is, being sure to put your story in the narrative you’re sharing, her sense of self on and off the yoga mat, answers to mid-life questions, learning to write flash prose, putting manuscripts away for a while, being a Jewish writer living in Israel, leaning into expe...

Anne Cheng joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about pivoting from writing scholarly works on race and gender to writing in first person and quite personally, teaching herself how to say the things that had remained unspoken in her life, her cancer diagnosis and treatment, the rise in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, the ways Chinese femininity dovetails with Southern femininity, wh...

Season 5 is coming to an end but season 6 is almost here, along with some more memoir resources and links.     Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Follow Ronit: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com/   Let’s Talk Memo...

David Tereshchuk joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being drawn to journalism to help him cure the matter of unanswered questions in his own life, his early years living in the rural borderlands of Scotland, how he turned to alcohol at a very early age, going from from tea and copy boy to anchorman of a nightly news program, becoming sober in his forties, his pursuit of ironclad trut...

Rachel Zimmerman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about rebuilding her family’s life after her husband’s death by suicide, the physical toll of grief, feeling like a doomed family, finding joy and pleasure after terrible loss, how her career in journalism informed her writing process, not tying things up in a bow, our children getting veto power about what we include in our books, when f...

Sarah LaBrie joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the year her mom was diagnosed with schizophrenia and the legacy of mental illness in her family, rethinking ambitions in light of tragedy and grief, releasing emotional pressure with writing, when fiction doesn’t cut it, finding company for our mental illness stories, knowing why you want to write a memoir, learning to stop punishing o...

Steve Hoffman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about not getting sidetracked from the story you want to tell, the difference between accuracy and truth, coming to terms with who you are, how screenwriting classes improved his memoir, leaning into weaknesses and what we haven’t done well, writing sensorily about food and wine, learning how to tell a story, beyond beautiful prose, vulnerab...

Seth Lorinczi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about going from a state of deep hiding to deep sharing, untangling the scars of the Holocaust and world wars through psychedelics, how ancestral trauma can warp relationships with the people we love, when your spouse is a character in your book, writing the truth and the fear of family betrayal, peeling back everything in his life and putti...

Naomi Cohn joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about becoming legally blind in mid-life and how that changed her writing process, going from poetry to lyric essay, falling in love with Braille, being sure something is done and also realizing there’s more, reading our work aloud, privacy and what’s ours to tell, the perceptual richness of having altered sight, tapping into our senses, Liz Le...

Anne Pinkerton joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about processing the loss of her older brother David, how brothers and sisters get short shrift when it comes to grief in our culture, her Writing Through Loss workshops, disenfranchised grief, when family members are private people, owning our story, taking breaks, giving ourselves grace, and learning how to take care of ourselves when wri...

Dorothy and Rachel Leland join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about Rachel’s battle with Lyme disease beginning at 13 years old, controversial medical diagnoses, advocating for treatment, living with chronic illness, keeping a journal, collaborating on a story, writing a memoir as a mother-daughter team and honoring both of those perspectives, taking care of ourselves when working on physica...

Gina Troisi joins Lets Talk Memoir for a conversation about searching for home and belonging, writing difficult stories and releasing them into the world, feeling too close to our manuscripts and taking breaks, why memoir is sometimes misunderstood, when material feels too difficult, thinking of ourselves as a character, reckoning with self-abandonment and hurting others, writing memoir as fiction...

Jennifer Selig joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how our narratives are both unique and universal, archetypical strategies to connect with readers, writing ourselves into meaning, assuaging the fear the world might not need our memoir, following our memories and trusting order will come later, the many different structures a memoir can embody including segmented, blended, and resear...

Jay Baron Nicorvo joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about his mother’s violent rape and how that event coincided with his sexual abuse at the hands of his babysitter, the pervasiveness of sexual abuse for boys and men, how crucial scenes are in memoir and also how difficult to render, exposition to give the reader and ourselves breaks from difficult material, being a multi-genre writer, o...