Let’s Talk Memoir

Margaret Anne Mary Moore joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her realization at an early age that she wanted to be a nonfiction writer and memoirist, facing severe discrimination as a child with disabilities, how she wrote about her disability experience on a granular level, using a communication device, taking breaks to work on other aspects of a project when the writing process grow...

Diana Raab joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about connecting with ancestors and tuning into their guidance, books that need to be written, when publisher requests don’t resonate with us, adding prompts for readers, unwanted daughters and intergenerational trauma, how books we don’t like help us, adding prompts for readers, tapping into authentic voice, and her new book Hummingbird: Messa...

Rebe Huntman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about who are we as women and what holds us together as a culture, following questions to their conclusions and changing in the process, running away from grief,  magical thinking, reinventing ourselves, Afro-Cuban traditions and relationships to the dead, hungering for answers, permission to be more than one thing, losing mothers and finding...

Bridgett M. Davis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the effect of trauma and weathering on Black lives, the unique bond between sisters, showing relationships in action and dialogue, homing in on a throughline, giving our books and writing the space they need,finding patterns and switching lenses, exploring varying lived experiences within family structures, shedding light on Lupus,...

Megan Williams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being a new mother while training at the police academy, looking for validation, resisting the urge to punish ourselves, pushing back against the voice of patriarchal culture, writing to our past self, going too far and not going far enough, the loneliness of motherhood, setting boundaries in memoir, testing ourselves, what motherhood...

Paul Lisicky joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how his appreciation for Joni Mitchell  and love of her work shaped his life as a musician and a writer, vulnerability and uncertainty on the page, falling outside the containers of what’s expected, the singular and universal in our work, vulnerability and uncertainty in our creative process, corralling ourselves back to our 5 senses, f...

Maggie Smith returns to Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about letting imposter syndrome go, fiercely guarding your interior life, getting back to the core place where creativity thrives, rewriting a book from scratch, how writing feels in the body, swerving out of your creative lane, battling the sophomore slump, what it feels like to be watched, when ego gets in the way, fears of paralyzing...

Karen Kirsten joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the messy complexity of family, asking the right questions, writing about a time in history when you weren’t present in that history, utilizing and incorporating primary research, recorded interviews, archived documents, diaries, film, and photographs into memoir, writing fact-based vivid scenes, working with historians to accurately d...

Paula Delgado-Kling joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how her research and reporting on child soldiers, drug trafficking, and the revolutionary armed forces of Columbia (FARC) led her to tell the story of one woman and her family, the relationships we forge with whom we write about, allowing memoir to answer our questions, negotiating language barriers and class differences, coming...

Diane Vonglis Parnell joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up with 9 siblings on an isolated farm under the tyranny of her abusive father and living in constant fear, homing in on the story we are called to tell, steering clear of portraying ourselves as victim or hero, not having closure, yearning for a mother, emotional absence, self-nurturing, trusting readers, the toll of s...

Martha S. Jones joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being Black, white, and other in America, the origins of her family in slavery and sexual violence, anti-miscegenation laws, passing, who we call kin and why, taking up space, avoiding the Black-White binary, discovering family stories, writing in a full-throated way, leaving complexity in our work, being patient with our material, c...

Nicole Graev Lipson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about our culture’s fascination with reducing women to readymade templates and archetypes, performing fictional versions of ourselves, finding our way back to who we are, the essay as a place where writers can grapple with confusion, working sentence by sentence, finding the most precise microscopic truth, embracing our particularities...

Sarah Jaffe joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about allowing ourselves to be known on the page, learning how to pivot from journalism to the very personal, processing experiences through writing, being upended by grief, taking care of ourselves when writing about violence and terror, witnessing and giving voice to other people’s hardships with integrity and respect, becoming undone on the...

Susan Lieu joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about realizing you’re an artist later in life, becoming a multi-hyphinate storyteller, being a mother when you never knew your own, piecing together a family story, feeling plagued by structure, sticking to the throughline, writing residencies, writing down goals, deciding to stop searching for approval from loved ones and getting it for and f...

Casey Mulligan Walsh joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the search for belonging in the wake of repeated loss, learning to live with grief alongside joy, finding a purpose for our story, homing in on the aboutness, patterns and themes in our memoir, managing flashbacks and whether or not to use them, setting up the essential question for your book, whether or not to have a prologue,...

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...