Let’s Talk Memoir

Gayle Brandeis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing her mother to suicide and finding a way to write about it, her work across genres, leaning into what makes us unique on the page…

Jennifer Lunden joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her experience with ME/CFS and her new braided memoir American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Cent…

Camille T. Dungy joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about who speaks about the natural world and how, erasure in life and in art, the white gaze, reviewing the cannon of environmental literat…

Sarah Birnbach joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about grief and the wished-for mother, how Jewish prayer anchored her as she mourned the father she adored, birth order and responsibility, h…

Candace Cahill joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about placing her newborn son for adoption and meeting him as an adult shortly before his death, writing for clarity, negotiating guilt, find…

Maggie Smith joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about having and holding boundaries in our work and in our lives, trusting our instincts as writers, taking risks, telling the truth as we know…

Erika Bornman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her experience escaping from KwaSizabantu and her participation in News24’s exposé alleging this strict Christian mission is a cult is a…

Sandi Wisenberg joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about finding home, the structure our books need, her career as a journalist, negotiating a legacy of woman shame and Jewish shame, writing …

Stacey Freeman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how her husband’s infidelity became the impetus for her writing career, single parenthood and the shock of dating after divorce, gettin…

Jasmin Faulk-Dickerson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up in Saudi Arabia under an oppressive regime, what being a woman of color does and doesn’t mean to her, invisible iden…

Debbie Weiss joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about widowhood and capturing grief and loneliness in ways that keep readers invested, starting scenes in the middle, finding themes in your st…

Laura Cathcart Robbins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about writing Stash, her new memoir that delves into addiction, privilege, and race, what self-care looked like for her while she tac…

Suzanne Roberts joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the difficulty of being in a human body - especially a woman’s, the male gaze, deciding how to approach our work, writing about loss, …

Felicia Thai Heath joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up on the run to help keep her father, a notorious Vietnamese kingpin, safe from capture, the power of dialogue to tell our…

Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of artistic partnership, Vincent Paterson and Amy Tofte join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation on their experience collaborating on their new book Icons and Instinc…

Maria Giura joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about which stories define us, avoiding the self-pity trap, the importance of allowing the reader to make decisions about the characters in our …

Buick Audra joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her new album and companion memoir in essays Conversations with My Other Voice, the importance of protecting our work from judgment, being…

Beth Kephart joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the crucial differences between a book of essays and a memoir in essays, choosing what to keep and what to cut, the gifts of nonlinear st…

Lori L. Tharps joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about why memoirs are not an indulgence, the importance of finding your memoir’s theme, deciding where your book should begin, having a writi…

Literary Citizen of the Year Allison K Williams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the importance of plot, structure, and dramatic arc in memoir, the elements that make a story a story,…