The Virtual Memories Show

Writer Lance Richardson rejoins the show to celebrate his magnificent new biography, TRUE NATURE: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen (Pantheon). We talk about his youthful introduction to Peter Matthiessen via The Snow Leopard , how this project grew beyond his (& his publisher's) original concept, the health risks of following PM's trek through Nepal to the Crystal Monastery and the fleetingness...

Political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow (a.k.a. Dan Perkins) is back as we celebrate his new Kickstarter project, OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE ( closing Oct. 30, 2025, so GO SUPPORT THAT ), collecting 5+ years of weekly This Modern World cartoons! We talk about how he keeps his sanity (well, tries to), what it was like to look back at the past half-decade week by week, why he decided not to go down a rab...

With her debut graphic novel, PRECIOUS RUBBISH (Fantagraphics), artist and designer Kayla E explores and investigates the trauma of her upbringing, the fragments of her memories, and the process of reintegration. We talk about why comics were the perfect form for this project, how she found her iconography and the postwar children's comics style for it, what it was like to uncover her memories and...

ICU nurse Hunter Prosper joins me this week as we celebrate his wonderful new book, STORIES FROM A STRANGER: Every Person Has a Story (Simon Element). We talk about the ICU experiences that led him to start talking to strangers in public and asking them deep questions about their lives five years ago, how those conversations have changed him, why he started sharing them online, how he figured out...

With her amazing new novel, HOT WAX (Simon & Schuster), author, critic, and inveterate road-tripper M.L. Rio evokes the rock scene of the '80s and the travails of the not-quite-Almost-Famous band GIL AND THE KILLS. We talk about the redemptive & destructive power of rock & roll, how music is inseparable from her writing process, the challenge of writing about live performance, why it makes sense t...

Curator and archivist David Leopold rejoins the show for a wide-ranging talk centered on the amazing new HIRSCHFELD'S SONDHEIM: A Poster Book (Abrams ComicArts). We talk about David's decades as Hirschfeld's archivist, Sondheim's love of Hirschfeld's work, the process of making his first book of Hirschfeld's art that focuses on a single creator, the connections between Al & Sondheim in David's tex...

It's been a year since his last episode, so what's artist Dmitry Samarov been up to? Plenty! We talk about his new project of redesigning and illustrating public domain books, why he started off with the White Whale itself , and why Babbitt! was next in line, what the common themes are among the six books he's illustrated since this project began, and how it all ties into his reaction to the 2024...

No guest this week, so it's time for our first Ask Me Anything (AMA) episode since 2019 ! Past guests and pals peppered me with questions about the podcast, my reading habits, menswear aesthetics, mental health, comics, hair care, keeping a journal, work/life balance or lack thereof, the one episode I think people are sleeping on, Star Trek vs. Star Wars, the superpower I wish I had, and a lot mor...

With RED LIGHT PROPERTIES: Unfinished Business (Kinjin Storylab), writer/cartoonist Dan Goldman brings us a wildly entertaining graphic novel of midlife, the afterlife, and the south Florida real estate market. We talk about how the concept for RLP grabbed hold of him 20+ years back & never let go, why the story had to take place in/around Miami, how his work in video games and TV/movies affected...

With SONGS FOR OTHER PEOPLE'S WEDDINGS (Abrams Press), writer David Levithan and singer-songwriter Jens Lekman bring the collaborative alchemy, as 20 years of fandom/friendship lead to this wonderful novel about a Swedish singer-songwriter — J — who finds a side-career playing original songs at people's weddings. We talk about the power of a great song, how David & Jens traded writing prompts with...

With PAST TENSE: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself In Therapy (Avery), cartoonist Sacha Mardou brings us a phenomenal graphic memoir about the midlife process of overcoming lifelong traumas and anxiety. We talk about her decision to to make her therapy process (& sessions) public, first as online comics and then as a Past Tense , the benefits of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, what...

With his phenomenal debut memoir, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES (Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic), Oliver Radclyffe takes us on a journey into trans-selfhood. We talk about the gap between a trans narrator and a cis-het reader, the importance of trans visibility, how his understanding of masculinity and being male have changed, and how he faced down the risks and sacrifices in his life as he transitioned, d...

No conversation this week, unless you count me talking to myself. This episode, I share some thoughts and memories about my father, following his death last week at the age of 88 — or 87, depending on who he was lying to — along with the eulogy I gave at his funeral. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe , Patreon , or Paypal , and subscribe to our e-newsletter

How did Russian Jews wind up migrating to Galveston, Texas in the early 1900s? How did the image of America as melting pot come into existence? How did a family memoir evolve into a forgotten history of Zionism? Find out during my conversation with Rachel Cockerell about her amazing new book, MELTING POINT: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land (FSG)! We talk about the tightrope walk...

Thirty-plus years in the making, the graphic adaptation of Paul Auster's THE NEW YORK TRILOGY (Pantheon) is here at last! Paul Karasik rejoins the show from Yaddo Artists Retreat to talk about the process of adapting Auster's postmodern crime novels into comics, how he collaborated with David Mazzucchelli ( CITY OF GLASS ) and Lorenzo Mattotti ( GHOSTS ) on the first two and how he wound up drawin...

One of my fave guest/friends, Kate Maruyama , rejoins the show to celebrate her wonderful new novel, ALTERATIONS (Running Wild Press)! We talk about the book's long gestation/publishing history, Kate's love of old Hollywood & costume design, closeted movie stars and how she told the story of a gay relationship in the '30s & '40s, and how it felt to write a non-horror horror story. We get into her...

With his fantastic new book, EMINENT JEWS (Holt), writer and critic David Denby explores the impact on American culture of Jews Unbound through profiles of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. We talk about how he selected his four subjects, how each of them came of age in an environment that Jews hadn't experienced in millennia, the ways each handled the responsibiliti...

Can we find the poet in their poems? With HORACE: Poet on a Volcano (Yale University Press), Peter Stothard explores how the life of the great Roman poet unfolds though his art and the histories. We talk about why he wrote this biography through a critical study of Horace's poems (and why that's been a controversial approach), how Horace embodied the artist-as-madman long before the Romantic era,...

With her bewitching and beautiful novel NEVERMORE (Seagull Books, translated from French by Tess Lewis , who joins our conversation), Cécile Wajsbrot takes us on a tour of Chenobyl's Forbidden Zone, the High Line in NYC, Dresden, Paris, under the shadow of the  Time Passes section of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse . We talk about the challenges of writing a first-person novel about translation...

She may be able to quit cartooning (for a while), but Keiler Roberts can't quit The Virtual Memories Show ! With her wonderful new book, PREPARING TO BITE (Drawn & Quarterly), Keiler returns to comics with a collection of (mostly) hilarious vignettes about domestic life, middle-age, the impact of multiple sclerosis, and having too many pets. We talk about why she walked away from comics and how sh...

With his new graphic novel, INSECTOPOLIS (WWNorton), Peter Kuper brings us the 400-million-year history of insects in their own words as they take a post-human tour of the New York Public Library. We talk about how Insectopolis began when he was around 4 years old and saw the 17-year cicada brood, how Peter needed a new mode of comics-making for this book, and how he made the NYPL a key character...

With SEARCHES: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon), tech writer Vauhini Vara explores how our sense of self has been co-opted, quantified, and exploited by big tech as a way of selling us more stuff or selling us to third parties. We talk about what we talk about when we talk about our Google searches (& Amazon purchases, Twitter subject preferences, etc.), the interface of exploitation and sel...

Artist Craig Thompson joins the show at long last to celebrate his new book, GINSENG ROOTS: A Memoir (Pantheon). We talk about how he spent ten summers of his childhood helping farm ginseng, how that herb connects rural Wisconsin with China and South Korea, how he balanced history, journalism, economics, and memoir in the pages of his book, and why he chose to make Ginseng Roots as a serial comic...

Artist, professor and now like-it-or-not cartoonist Ari Richter joins the show to talk about his fantastic book, Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance (Fantagraphics). We talk about how he he began this project in the wake of the Tree of Life massacre in 2018, how it helped him exorcise the demons of his imagination after a lifetime of hearing his fami...

Author and curator Dan Nadel joins the show to celebrate the publication of his amazing new biography, CRUMB: A Cartoonist's Life (Scribner). We get into Robert Crumb's significance in American art, comics, and culture, Dan's first experience with a Crumb comic (it was an ish of American Splendor ), the challenge of capturing the underground comics scene of the '60s & '70s, and what it took for hi...