Let’s Talk Memoir

Dr. Craig Yorke joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the toll of centuries of bigotry, being consumed by race, growing up with psychological financial desperation, living other people’s lives, rethinking what Black studies are, processing shame, shedding identities assigned to us, the use of memory for liberation, being ruthless in our writing and revision process, the steep climb toward clarifying ourselves, bringing n...

After four years of Let’s Talk Memoir, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for being here and share a few exciting updates about what’s ahead for the podcast. In this short episode, I talk about some changes coming in Season 8, new ways to connect with the show and memoir community, and a few things I’ve been quietly working on behind the scenes. Thank you for listening, supporting the show, and being part of this space for writ...

Monica Macansantos joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about organizing her collection of essays around her father’s very sudden and unexpected passing, not being sure she could write again, when common themes begin to emerge, connecting with loved ones through writing, recognizing and exploring complicated relationships with a home town and home country, feeling othered, the literary scene in the Phillipines, how writing ta...

Jacque Gorelick joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up missing a mother, surviving a fractured family and worrying you’re broken in unfixable ways, how her husband's medical crisis upended her life as a new mother, letting our inner selves be cared for, protecting a space where a mother should be, owning our story, gathering all the pieces for structure, weaving in backstory to strengthen the stakes, including ...

Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about contextualizing a memoir in a post-Roe world, what it means to make a choice as mothers, ending a pregnancy, knowing you will write about an experience while it is happening, writing about childhood sexual abuse, returning to a manuscript with your skirt on fire, writing to a point of discovery, putting down our self-defense and  having to be fully, fully vulnerable, g...

Mimi Nichter joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being hijacked on a plane when she was twenty years old in the first incident of international terrorism, how we can be socialized into silence about our stories, processing old trauma on the page, building immediacy in our narratives through contained time frames and present tense, what happens when we “other” people, wanting to get the story right, using humor to mitig...

Rachel Tzvia Back joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about living with depression, losing a sister, when a mother is emotionally and psychologically absent, how myths can be cloaks, listening to our language and what it offers, thinking in image, when stories don’t match, giving our children the space to tell their version of stories about us, incorporating four recurring elements in a hybrid memoir, the architecture of our...

Julie Scolnick joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about falling madly in love with a married Frenchman when she was 20 years old and living in Paris studying music, working our way back from aching first love, searching for answers, cutting everything that doesn’t serve the story, finding a universal truth in your memoir, restructuring a manuscript to include letters at the start of each chapter, the decades-long process of...

Stephanie Weaver MPH joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about family estrangement, gaslighting, her recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, chronic illness, not wanting a book to be about revenge, reframing a memoir around a larger cultural moment to resonate with more people, stepping away from our memoir projects to take care of ourselves, avoiding traumatizing the reader, knowing when a structure has clicked in pla...

Nikkya Hargrove joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the effects of incarceration on the family system, growing up lost and unsure who her family was, accepting the responsibility of becoming her brother’s mother, the spark that got her writing her memoir, gaining the lens to understand our story is worthy of being told, acknowledging the divisions within ourselves, incorporating backstory without slowing the narrative ...

Amanda McCracken joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about what happens when you’re hopelessly, stubbornly in love with longing, fear of intimacy, the idea of falling in love vs. being in love, person addiction, choices around sex, longing for avoidant men, recognizing the illusion of control, applying to speak at Tedx talks, going to social media to find publishers, becoming an expert on a topic, learning how to trust yours...

Wendy C. Ortiz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the English teacher who preyed on her when she was thirteen, writing about the person we are now when writing about our past, placing the reader in the physical and psychological experience of character-you, how important the opening pages are in setting the stakes, feeling fear and shame, taking care of yourself when writing about traumatic events, reminding ourselves...

Mallary Tenore Tarpley joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the middle place between acute sickness and full recovery, living with the imprints of a disorder, resisting thinking in black and white, the memoir plus genre, making memoir reportage and research seamless, showing our imperfections on the page, exploring hard truths along with hope, leaning into the most authentic version of our story, calibrating how much to...

Karen Palmer joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about changing her identity to escape a dangerous ex-husband, being stalked, the consequences of deciding to disappear, coming to grips with the experience of domestic abuse, mistaking grief for maturity, telling a story as truthfully as possible, relinquishing a child, the long-term effect of PTSD, not ever completely knowing ourselves or others, deep truth vs. inconsequentia...

Dorothy Roberts joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her father’s interviews beginning in the 1930s with over 500 back-white couples who crossed the color line in Chicago,  moving to memoir to explore more personal experiences and feelings, growing up in a mixed race family, shifting the lens onto herself, thinking about identity, finding answers via the writing process, staying motivated and organized while working wit...

Rebecca N. Thompson, MD joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about life-threatening pregnancy losses and  weaving her own story of navigating a challenging path to parenting with the stories of others, her decade-long collaboration with a remarkable group of women, how healing others helps us heal, imperfect love, not feeling heard, advocating for our own care, humanism in medicine, the cumulative impact of small actions, acc...

Blair Glaser joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her time on a Catskills ashram during her twenties in the 1990s, yearning and the thrilling and perilous idolization of other human beings, spiritual development, group think, revisiting our experiences with curiosity and excitement, navigating writing about others, pitching agents and digesting their feedback, writing in scene in a sustained way, growing thematically, d...

Bee Wilson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the evolution of our narratives, how each book teaches you how to write it, approaching memoir from many different angles, how there’s no predetermined idea of what a memoir needs to be, writing about divorce and her husband leaving at the end of the first lockdown in the UK, the emotional life of kitchen objects, not being afraid to tell our truth, cooking as salve, oblig...

Alex Poppe joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about working in conflict zones, living abroad and negotiating cultural differences, teaching in northern Iraq, youth and female resilience, pursuing something elusive, using fiction techniques for creative nonfiction and essays, not standing on a soapbox in memoir, moving from the personal to the universal, safe domesticity vs. unpredictable intensity, feeling haunted, the tens...