Let’s Talk Memoir

KB Brookins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about transness, masculinity, and race, how how being a writer has crystalized their experience and made it legible to an audience and to themselves, turning to prose to say the hard things, the tenacity of memoir, resisting erasure and pushing back on toxic systems, coming at creative nonfiction from a poetic impulse, having patience with ourselves, what we might need to let g...

Michelle Yang joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her bipolar diagnosis and becoming a mental health advocate, immigrating to the U.S. as a young child, writing at the intersection of body image, mental health, and Asian American identity, building an author platform, revisiting old family dynamics and patterns, grieving a family of origin, mourning make-believe mothers, doing a lot of processing before writing about t...

Julie Brill joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and her journey to understand the unexamined childhood stories she grew up with, being a reluctant memoirist and leaning into telling the story of an ordinary person figuring things out, the Holocaust and the history of the Jews of Serbia, inherited memories, making ourselves the central character, when our parents’  foundat...

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 grows tiresome, devoting chapters to a ...

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: Messages from My Ancestors.

Also in th...

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 them again through memoir, spiritu...

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, the physiological effects of syste...

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 feels like now, moving elegantly t...

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, feeling structure in our bodies, wri...

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 failure, playing the long game, the...

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 depict world-altering events, being ...

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 to truth and understanding, groundi...

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 secrets, changing names of family me...

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, chasing threads, the duty we have to...

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, focusing on we’re enthralled with...

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 page, how we are haunted by the lo...

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 from ourselves, accepting loved ones...

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, landing on the structure, how our w...

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 what we need to write, helping peopl...