We're still reconstructing the podcast site, re-posting shows for which the audio fell out.
Here's one that I especially liked: John Irving, author of Last Night at Twisted River and memoirist Novella Carpenter, who talk about fiction and memoir, last lines, first lines, chickens, and more.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: 7/8/2010)
Showing posts with label Memoir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memoir. Show all posts
Monday, May 07, 2012
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Pie Evangelist Beth Howard talks about her memoir with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Beth Howard, author of Making Piece: A Memoir of Love, Love and Pie (Harlequin) discusses how she came to write this memoir about becoming a widow at age 47, and how pie saved her.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: April 18, 2012)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: April 18, 2012)
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Memoirist James Brown on Writers on Writing
Just now podcast: Memoirist James Brown, author of The Los Angeles Diaries and This River spends an hour with me on the show talking about his books, the art and craft of memoir, and the business of publishing. (He will appear on my memoir panel at Literary Orange on April 14, 2012 at UC-Irvine. He will also be guest author at our Pen on Fire Writers Salon on May 15, 2012.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: March 28, 2012)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: March 28, 2012)
Monday, January 30, 2012
Memoirist Glen Retief
As we reconstruct our podcasts that disappeared due to who knows what, here's an interview I very much enjoyed with memoirist Glen Retief, author of The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: July 20, 2011)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: July 20, 2011)
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Jessie Sholl on writing memoir
Jessie Sholl, author of Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding, and I talked a bit more after the show about writing memoir. If you listened to the show, you would have heard some of what's here. If not, here you go!
How did Dirty Secret come about?
After a particularly difficult period in terms of my mother’s hoarding, I joined a support group for children of hoarders; I was shocked by how much shame we all carried because of our parents’ behavior. After all, it wasn’t our shame to carry, nor was it our secret to hold. Yet we all did. I was between projects at the time, so I decided to write about hoarding. By writing about compulsive hoarding and getting the secret out, I hoped to lessen the shame and the stigma surrounding it.
At any point, did you have any misgivings about writing such personal stuff?
I didn’t at all while I was writing the book. That’s because I have a strategy for when I’m writing nonfiction: I just tell myself that no one is going to ever read what I’m writing, so I can write whatever I want. It’s very freeing. Also, I tell myself that if I go into territory that’s way too personal, I can cut it down when I revise.
Right before the book came out I had pretty major anxiety about revealing all of these parts of my life that I’d kept hidden for decades. Before this book I was not very forthcoming with personal information, even to friends. I was very private and quite shy. (I guess I’m still shy.) Anyway, I’ve been really pleased by people’s reactions to the book and there’s nothing in it that I regret including.
Did you feel a need to allow your relatives read your manuscript?
I did, yes. Especially my mother. I let her read it and said if there was anything she strongly objected to, that I’d take it out. Luckily for me, she said “it’s the truth. Leave everything in.” Also luckily for me, she really likes the book.
Did you work off an outline?
Yes. I first wrote a proposal for the memoir, which was extremely detailed – broken down chapter by chapter and within those, scene by scene. I also included three sample chapters; the proposal was 100 pages long and it was a great roadmap to have as I wrote the book.
You were recently on 20/20, on an episode about hoarders. How did this affect the sales of your book? And how did this opportunity come about?
To be honest, I’m not sure how it affected sales. I won’t find out the sales numbers for that month until March of 2012. What’s that expression? Oh right: publishing is glacially slow. There’s always the Amazon ranking, but that’s more of a general gauge and most of the time isn’t all that accurate.
The opportunity came about because one of the producers read and liked The New York Times piece from May, about how children of hoarders deal with their own homes when they become adults. She contacted me, and things took off from there.
Any tips you have for memoirists?
I highly recommend telling yourself that no one is going to read what you’re writing—even if your book has already sold and you know that someone will read it. It’s just an easy way to trick yourself into writing freely. I also did a lot of brainstorming ahead of time for scene ideas, always keeping in mind the focus of the book. Since memoir usually covers a specific topic or period of time (as opposed to autobiography, which is the story of a life), it’s really important not to veer too far from the focus of the book.
One last thing: a good memoir should be as compelling and as rich as a novel. You could have the most unusual topic and the loveliest writing, but story and plot are still crucial. You still need to make the reader want to turn the page, to see what happens next.
How did Dirty Secret come about?
After a particularly difficult period in terms of my mother’s hoarding, I joined a support group for children of hoarders; I was shocked by how much shame we all carried because of our parents’ behavior. After all, it wasn’t our shame to carry, nor was it our secret to hold. Yet we all did. I was between projects at the time, so I decided to write about hoarding. By writing about compulsive hoarding and getting the secret out, I hoped to lessen the shame and the stigma surrounding it.
At any point, did you have any misgivings about writing such personal stuff?
I didn’t at all while I was writing the book. That’s because I have a strategy for when I’m writing nonfiction: I just tell myself that no one is going to ever read what I’m writing, so I can write whatever I want. It’s very freeing. Also, I tell myself that if I go into territory that’s way too personal, I can cut it down when I revise.
Right before the book came out I had pretty major anxiety about revealing all of these parts of my life that I’d kept hidden for decades. Before this book I was not very forthcoming with personal information, even to friends. I was very private and quite shy. (I guess I’m still shy.) Anyway, I’ve been really pleased by people’s reactions to the book and there’s nothing in it that I regret including.
Did you feel a need to allow your relatives read your manuscript?
I did, yes. Especially my mother. I let her read it and said if there was anything she strongly objected to, that I’d take it out. Luckily for me, she said “it’s the truth. Leave everything in.” Also luckily for me, she really likes the book.
Did you work off an outline?
Yes. I first wrote a proposal for the memoir, which was extremely detailed – broken down chapter by chapter and within those, scene by scene. I also included three sample chapters; the proposal was 100 pages long and it was a great roadmap to have as I wrote the book.
You were recently on 20/20, on an episode about hoarders. How did this affect the sales of your book? And how did this opportunity come about?
To be honest, I’m not sure how it affected sales. I won’t find out the sales numbers for that month until March of 2012. What’s that expression? Oh right: publishing is glacially slow. There’s always the Amazon ranking, but that’s more of a general gauge and most of the time isn’t all that accurate.
The opportunity came about because one of the producers read and liked The New York Times piece from May, about how children of hoarders deal with their own homes when they become adults. She contacted me, and things took off from there.
Any tips you have for memoirists?
I highly recommend telling yourself that no one is going to read what you’re writing—even if your book has already sold and you know that someone will read it. It’s just an easy way to trick yourself into writing freely. I also did a lot of brainstorming ahead of time for scene ideas, always keeping in mind the focus of the book. Since memoir usually covers a specific topic or period of time (as opposed to autobiography, which is the story of a life), it’s really important not to veer too far from the focus of the book.
One last thing: a good memoir should be as compelling and as rich as a novel. You could have the most unusual topic and the loveliest writing, but story and plot are still crucial. You still need to make the reader want to turn the page, to see what happens next.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Q&A witih memoirist Glen Retief, author of The Jack Bank
Once you listen to the podcast of my show with Glen (posted yesterday), finish up with reading here. Questions we didn't have time for on the show.
Was the first graf, and the first chapter, always the beginning? Or did you revise the beginning over and over?
Believe it or not, the answer to both those questions is yes. Intuitively, I knew I had to start The Jack Bank with those many lessons I remember from childhood about Kruger National Park, where we lived, being a paradise. A few years earlier, I’d written an essay—“Kitsch and the Art of Wildlife Painting,” published in The Massachusetts Review in 2004—about how much I hated African paintings, because to me they projected a kind of false idealism about animals I actually found very scary as a young kid. I linked this feeling of falseness to the general sense I had as a boy that something was untrue about the whites-only paradise created by apartheid—smiling black maids, happy gardeners, crime-free streets, and middle-class comfort. I sensed that this general cheerfulness disguised a very deep racial pain, much as I looked at the pictures of leopards lounging in thorn trees and wondered why the butchered warthogs I saw in the real world never made it onto living-room walls.
So if the first chapter was going to be about my earliest memories of physical vulnerability, due to dangerous animals, then the opening scene had to be about the illusion that I was immortal and safe, because I lived in an earthly heaven.
That said, I worked endlessly on all the sentences and paragraphs in that opening, shortening them, pulling out only the most relevant and evocative details, and trying to be true to my recollections.
The title: At what point did you have it (the subtitle as well)?
The title was the first thing I had. On our podcast I talked about the jack bank as a controlling metaphor for the book—the idea that if we invest in violence and cruelty, it earns compound interest. Also, that the book came out of an essay called “The Jack Bank,” which I published in Virginia Quarterly Review. It never seemed to me the book could be called anything else. The memory of that school prefect allowing us to deposit beatings and earn interest on them, and the enthusiasm with which all of us younger boys volunteered to be hurt—this was all just so weird to me, so haunting. To me, it said more about story of coming to terms with apartheid’s violent side, and my own temptation to solve conflicts with violence—than any other recollection in the book.
The subtitle merited a bit more discussion. As we said in the interview, this memoir sits close to the “fiction” end of the journalism-novel continuum. I gave myself permission to make educated guesses about what happened. Written in the present tense, the book reads much like a novel. I briefly talked with my editor as well with the St Martin’s Press lawyers about whether these artistic liberties meant I could no longer call The Jack Bank “memoir.” They agreed that so long as it was a good faith attempt to recreate the past, and as long as I was upfront in my Author’s Note about my artistic methodology, there wasn’t a problem. I really don’t have the faintest doubt that this is my personal story rather than that of a fictional character’s, so I stand by the subtitle.
My editor suggested, “Memoir of a South African Childhood” rather than just “A Memoir,” so as to send a signal to readers about the book’s content.
Re memoir as a form....one editor I spoke with said she thought memoir was replacing the novel as the most popular genre, that as a culture we are so into reality everything, the memoir is the written form of reality shows. What do you think about this?
There may be a grain of truth in the idea. The novel rose to prominence with the bourgeois nuclear family. Before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost everyone in Europe would have known all about their neighbors’ lives, as a result of living on top of them in a crowded village. Street chitchat and evenings around the hearth with family and friends would have provided more stories, which is to say more knowledge of how to deal with life. But as more people moved into large, middle class, private houses, they needed different forms of storytelling. The novel allowed them to live vicariously, and thus learn how to cope with life, while preserving their and other middle-class people’s privacy.
The big change came, I think, not with Survivor and Jersey Shore, but in the 1960s and 70s, with feminism, Black liberation, and gay liberation. Suddenly, privacy wasn’t a source of freedom, power, and privilege anymore. It provided a screen for women and children to be abused in the home. It provided a way for society to hold LGBT people in contempt while still enjoying our talents—if your hairdresser is in the closet, you don’t have to grant him any rights. Ordinary people came to believe the personal was political and should therefore be given voice. In popular culture, this eventually led to reality TV; in universities, among other things it fed the growth of creative writing programs. Community, as an alternative to isolated suburban family, made something of a comeback—remember hippy communes and women’s consciousness-raising groups?
I write out of that intellectual tradition of 60’s style activism—in the book I talk about my years in feminist, socialist, anti-apartheid, and gay activist circles. Hence my statement in my Author’s Note that I continue to believe in memoir as a social act, because if no one is willing to break the protective veil of silence over individual lives, how will we ever learn from each other? But it’s important to distinguish literary memoir from Big Brother 8. The memoirist digs deeper, and tells her story with more artistry, than the housemates talking about kitchen crumbs or bedroom shenanigans.
Also, novels and memoirs are always going to provide different pleasures to readers. With memoir comes testimony—someone saying this is an honest attempt to be real. But with novel comes the extraordinary joy of seeing an author’s imagination ranging free. That satisfaction will never be redundant.
Were there memoirs you found inspirational or informative as you were writing yours?
So many! Clearly, my main influences were the more novelistic memoirs. Angela Ashes made me want to write in a filtered child’s voice, where the language and perception is simultaneously that of a young person’s and that of an adult looking back and shaping what the child sees. The Glass Castle showed me what could be done with a brilliant but subtle overarching metaphor.
J.M. Coetzee’s memoir, Boyhood, resonated both in subject matter—he writes about many of the same things I do, like English-Afrikaans tension and the masochistic pleasure white South African boys took in corporal punishment—and in style. I loved the way he wrote his whole story in third person, present tense. I almost did the same, except that as a first time author I didn’t think I could get away with third person. I did use the present tense. Both formal choices—third person and present tense—are signals to readers that the author is giving himself permission to re-imagine the past.
I didn’t like all of the Afro-pessimism in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, but it would disingenuous of me to pretend that memoir didn’t deeply influence my vision of South African culture—both black and white—as being soaked in extraordinary violence, as a result of our strange history.
I read and re-read Vivian Gornick, George Orwell, and Natalia Ginzburg to inspire me to write with the clarity that I think is my literary aesthetic. Fierce Attachments was my model of a “movement memoir” that never became preachy or didactic. Ginzburg’s classic essay, “He and I,” about the ups and downs of an intimate relationship, was the inspiration for my chapter about Afrikaners. The chapter title, “Them and Me,” is a nod to Ginzburg.
I love memoirs with poetry and collage in them, like Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Books that make fun of the genre help me keep my feet on the ground. I think of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and, even better, Lauren Slater’s Lying. The latter is a true heartbreaking (and hilarious) work of staggering genius! You can’t read it and take yourself completely seriously; she reminds us that the act of self-characterization on the page is inevitably a kind of lie or at least oversimplification.
Structure: You had so many topics in your book. Was it a challenge knowing what to keep and what to leave out, and how did you decide how much ink to give each?
There was no system. It was intuitive. In my head I was trying to tell a story rather than explore topics, so I addressed topics only to the extent that this felt relevant to my central question, which was: “What did it mean to me to grow up in a culture with an abusive streak?”
My editor asked for more about faith and about religion, and I agreed with her, so in the final draft I added the section in chapter 7 about losing my Catholicism in comparative religion class. This narrative does “talk” to the main story in the chapter, where my friend Aubrey is teaching me to take risks that my previous Catholic faith might not have permitted.
What was harder than leaving out topics was leaving out sub-narratives. At moments I felt as if I was lying to readers, but really, all I was doing was keeping the book manageable. For instance, in the second chapter, Kobus van der Walt and I had had a history together. We’d played together, got along and then annoyed each other—so when he prevents me from entering the hall to see what the Afrikaner Nationalist youth group is doing, there are more emotional layers than I let on to readers. But I couldn’t figure out how to discuss all this without hopelessly slowing down—and distracting from—the story I was trying to tell in the chapter, so I focused only on the cultural dimension, the fact that this was another way I couldn’t be Afrikaans. Without making ruthless cuts like this, I don’t think it’s possible to write a coherent autobiographical narrative.
Agents and editors constantly talk about voice, in terms of memoir, that voice is—if not everything, it’s a LOT of why they’re attracted to certain memoirs and not attracted to others. Do you think voice makes a difference whether a memoir will be compelling, or will it always be the big story, the dramatic story, that’s the most compelling?
Yes--voice, voice, voice, that’s what matters—not the big story!
Look, I’m not going to pretend some inherent drama doesn’t help. As a memoirist I don’t regret my material--the lions outside my tent when I was ten years old, the proximity to a notorious serial killer, and so on. But as I think I said on the podcast, I feel it’s my voice—a function of hard literary labor—that makes these recollections emotionally compelling. As mere anecdotes they might be entertaining, but not memorable. What deepens them is an adult narrator looking back and trying to figure out what they meant.
Some of the memoirists and essayists I most admire—E.B. White, Natalia Ginzburg, Vivian Gornick, Gretel Ehrlich, Philip Lopate—built whole careers on writing about everyday experiences loaded with meanings that would be easy to miss. Except that these writers noticed. They meditated on these trivial occurrences—a dinner party, a husband getting irritated if his wife puts on a sweater on an evening that he experiences as hot—and reached tremendous feeling. That’s perhaps a memoirist’s most important job—simply to live the examined life.
Was the first graf, and the first chapter, always the beginning? Or did you revise the beginning over and over?
Believe it or not, the answer to both those questions is yes. Intuitively, I knew I had to start The Jack Bank with those many lessons I remember from childhood about Kruger National Park, where we lived, being a paradise. A few years earlier, I’d written an essay—“Kitsch and the Art of Wildlife Painting,” published in The Massachusetts Review in 2004—about how much I hated African paintings, because to me they projected a kind of false idealism about animals I actually found very scary as a young kid. I linked this feeling of falseness to the general sense I had as a boy that something was untrue about the whites-only paradise created by apartheid—smiling black maids, happy gardeners, crime-free streets, and middle-class comfort. I sensed that this general cheerfulness disguised a very deep racial pain, much as I looked at the pictures of leopards lounging in thorn trees and wondered why the butchered warthogs I saw in the real world never made it onto living-room walls.
So if the first chapter was going to be about my earliest memories of physical vulnerability, due to dangerous animals, then the opening scene had to be about the illusion that I was immortal and safe, because I lived in an earthly heaven.
That said, I worked endlessly on all the sentences and paragraphs in that opening, shortening them, pulling out only the most relevant and evocative details, and trying to be true to my recollections.
The title: At what point did you have it (the subtitle as well)?
The title was the first thing I had. On our podcast I talked about the jack bank as a controlling metaphor for the book—the idea that if we invest in violence and cruelty, it earns compound interest. Also, that the book came out of an essay called “The Jack Bank,” which I published in Virginia Quarterly Review. It never seemed to me the book could be called anything else. The memory of that school prefect allowing us to deposit beatings and earn interest on them, and the enthusiasm with which all of us younger boys volunteered to be hurt—this was all just so weird to me, so haunting. To me, it said more about story of coming to terms with apartheid’s violent side, and my own temptation to solve conflicts with violence—than any other recollection in the book.
The subtitle merited a bit more discussion. As we said in the interview, this memoir sits close to the “fiction” end of the journalism-novel continuum. I gave myself permission to make educated guesses about what happened. Written in the present tense, the book reads much like a novel. I briefly talked with my editor as well with the St Martin’s Press lawyers about whether these artistic liberties meant I could no longer call The Jack Bank “memoir.” They agreed that so long as it was a good faith attempt to recreate the past, and as long as I was upfront in my Author’s Note about my artistic methodology, there wasn’t a problem. I really don’t have the faintest doubt that this is my personal story rather than that of a fictional character’s, so I stand by the subtitle.
My editor suggested, “Memoir of a South African Childhood” rather than just “A Memoir,” so as to send a signal to readers about the book’s content.
Re memoir as a form....one editor I spoke with said she thought memoir was replacing the novel as the most popular genre, that as a culture we are so into reality everything, the memoir is the written form of reality shows. What do you think about this?
There may be a grain of truth in the idea. The novel rose to prominence with the bourgeois nuclear family. Before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost everyone in Europe would have known all about their neighbors’ lives, as a result of living on top of them in a crowded village. Street chitchat and evenings around the hearth with family and friends would have provided more stories, which is to say more knowledge of how to deal with life. But as more people moved into large, middle class, private houses, they needed different forms of storytelling. The novel allowed them to live vicariously, and thus learn how to cope with life, while preserving their and other middle-class people’s privacy.
The big change came, I think, not with Survivor and Jersey Shore, but in the 1960s and 70s, with feminism, Black liberation, and gay liberation. Suddenly, privacy wasn’t a source of freedom, power, and privilege anymore. It provided a screen for women and children to be abused in the home. It provided a way for society to hold LGBT people in contempt while still enjoying our talents—if your hairdresser is in the closet, you don’t have to grant him any rights. Ordinary people came to believe the personal was political and should therefore be given voice. In popular culture, this eventually led to reality TV; in universities, among other things it fed the growth of creative writing programs. Community, as an alternative to isolated suburban family, made something of a comeback—remember hippy communes and women’s consciousness-raising groups?
I write out of that intellectual tradition of 60’s style activism—in the book I talk about my years in feminist, socialist, anti-apartheid, and gay activist circles. Hence my statement in my Author’s Note that I continue to believe in memoir as a social act, because if no one is willing to break the protective veil of silence over individual lives, how will we ever learn from each other? But it’s important to distinguish literary memoir from Big Brother 8. The memoirist digs deeper, and tells her story with more artistry, than the housemates talking about kitchen crumbs or bedroom shenanigans.
Also, novels and memoirs are always going to provide different pleasures to readers. With memoir comes testimony—someone saying this is an honest attempt to be real. But with novel comes the extraordinary joy of seeing an author’s imagination ranging free. That satisfaction will never be redundant.
Were there memoirs you found inspirational or informative as you were writing yours?
So many! Clearly, my main influences were the more novelistic memoirs. Angela Ashes made me want to write in a filtered child’s voice, where the language and perception is simultaneously that of a young person’s and that of an adult looking back and shaping what the child sees. The Glass Castle showed me what could be done with a brilliant but subtle overarching metaphor.
J.M. Coetzee’s memoir, Boyhood, resonated both in subject matter—he writes about many of the same things I do, like English-Afrikaans tension and the masochistic pleasure white South African boys took in corporal punishment—and in style. I loved the way he wrote his whole story in third person, present tense. I almost did the same, except that as a first time author I didn’t think I could get away with third person. I did use the present tense. Both formal choices—third person and present tense—are signals to readers that the author is giving himself permission to re-imagine the past.
I didn’t like all of the Afro-pessimism in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, but it would disingenuous of me to pretend that memoir didn’t deeply influence my vision of South African culture—both black and white—as being soaked in extraordinary violence, as a result of our strange history.
I read and re-read Vivian Gornick, George Orwell, and Natalia Ginzburg to inspire me to write with the clarity that I think is my literary aesthetic. Fierce Attachments was my model of a “movement memoir” that never became preachy or didactic. Ginzburg’s classic essay, “He and I,” about the ups and downs of an intimate relationship, was the inspiration for my chapter about Afrikaners. The chapter title, “Them and Me,” is a nod to Ginzburg.
I love memoirs with poetry and collage in them, like Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Books that make fun of the genre help me keep my feet on the ground. I think of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and, even better, Lauren Slater’s Lying. The latter is a true heartbreaking (and hilarious) work of staggering genius! You can’t read it and take yourself completely seriously; she reminds us that the act of self-characterization on the page is inevitably a kind of lie or at least oversimplification.
Structure: You had so many topics in your book. Was it a challenge knowing what to keep and what to leave out, and how did you decide how much ink to give each?
There was no system. It was intuitive. In my head I was trying to tell a story rather than explore topics, so I addressed topics only to the extent that this felt relevant to my central question, which was: “What did it mean to me to grow up in a culture with an abusive streak?”
My editor asked for more about faith and about religion, and I agreed with her, so in the final draft I added the section in chapter 7 about losing my Catholicism in comparative religion class. This narrative does “talk” to the main story in the chapter, where my friend Aubrey is teaching me to take risks that my previous Catholic faith might not have permitted.
What was harder than leaving out topics was leaving out sub-narratives. At moments I felt as if I was lying to readers, but really, all I was doing was keeping the book manageable. For instance, in the second chapter, Kobus van der Walt and I had had a history together. We’d played together, got along and then annoyed each other—so when he prevents me from entering the hall to see what the Afrikaner Nationalist youth group is doing, there are more emotional layers than I let on to readers. But I couldn’t figure out how to discuss all this without hopelessly slowing down—and distracting from—the story I was trying to tell in the chapter, so I focused only on the cultural dimension, the fact that this was another way I couldn’t be Afrikaans. Without making ruthless cuts like this, I don’t think it’s possible to write a coherent autobiographical narrative.
Agents and editors constantly talk about voice, in terms of memoir, that voice is—if not everything, it’s a LOT of why they’re attracted to certain memoirs and not attracted to others. Do you think voice makes a difference whether a memoir will be compelling, or will it always be the big story, the dramatic story, that’s the most compelling?
Yes--voice, voice, voice, that’s what matters—not the big story!
Look, I’m not going to pretend some inherent drama doesn’t help. As a memoirist I don’t regret my material--the lions outside my tent when I was ten years old, the proximity to a notorious serial killer, and so on. But as I think I said on the podcast, I feel it’s my voice—a function of hard literary labor—that makes these recollections emotionally compelling. As mere anecdotes they might be entertaining, but not memorable. What deepens them is an adult narrator looking back and trying to figure out what they meant.
Some of the memoirists and essayists I most admire—E.B. White, Natalia Ginzburg, Vivian Gornick, Gretel Ehrlich, Philip Lopate—built whole careers on writing about everyday experiences loaded with meanings that would be easy to miss. Except that these writers noticed. They meditated on these trivial occurrences—a dinner party, a husband getting irritated if his wife puts on a sweater on an evening that he experiences as hot—and reached tremendous feeling. That’s perhaps a memoirist’s most important job—simply to live the examined life.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Memoirist Glen Retief podcast just up
Glen Retief, author of the memoir, The Jack Bank, in conversation with me for the entire hour.
Download audio
(Broadcast date: July 20, 2011)
Download audio
(Broadcast date: July 20, 2011)
Monday, June 13, 2011
Robert Sabbag and Ander Monson
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Robert Sabbag, author of Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival and Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir.
Download audio.
(Broadcast Date: May 19, 2010)
An earlier, incomplete version of this show was posted in 2010.
Download audio.
(Broadcast Date: May 19, 2010)
An earlier, incomplete version of this show was posted in 2010.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Mira Bartok and Maira Kalman on Writers on Writing
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Mira Bartok, author of The Memory Palace and Maira Kalman, author/illustrator of In Pursuit of Happiness.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: March 16, 2011)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: March 16, 2011)
Monday, June 06, 2011
Catherine Friend and Caitlin Kelly on Writers on Writing
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Catherine Friend, author of Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep & Enough Wool to Save the Planet, and Caitlin Kelly, author of Malled: My Untentional Career in Retail.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: May 11, 2011)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: May 11, 2011)
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Jill Bialosky and Linda Gray Sexton
Marrie Stone interviews Jill Bialosky, author of History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life and Linda Gray Sexton, author of Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: January 26, 2011)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: January 26, 2011)
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Piper Kerman
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison.
Download Audio.
(Broadcast Date: December 8, 2010)
Download Audio.
(Broadcast Date: December 8, 2010)
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Stephen Elliott
Marrie Stone interviews Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder.
Download Audio.
(Broadcast Date: December 30, 2009)
Download Audio.
(Broadcast Date: December 30, 2009)
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Susannah Charleson and Sarah Moss
Marrie Stone interviews Susannah Charleson, author of Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog and Sarah Moss, author of Cold Earth.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: May 12, 2010)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: May 12, 2010)
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Fictional novel, true memoir: Not
Those of you who already know this, please, don't throw tomatoes, potatoes, or pie. Some quite intelligent writers have trouble with this one. (With each one of us, it's always something...)
This comes up a lot with new(ish), or not so new(ish) writers: In talking about their work, they say, "My fictional novel...."
No no no.
If you query an agent and you say this, you risk said agent pitching your project into the trash, or at the very least, sending you a form rejection letter.
Why is it a big deal?
Because agents figure that if you're writing a novel, you know it's fiction. Just as if you're writing a memoir, one hopes it's true. And if you say "fictional novel" or "true memoir" to an agent, it makes it easy for them to say no to you, and what with all the material slamming agents on a daily basis, if there's the slightest reason to say no, they will.
Of course they want to say yes. They want stellar work to come in the door, mailbox, email inbox, wherever! So make it easy for them to say yes. Learn the business of writing as well as the craft, and never ever ever say "fictional novel."
This comes up a lot with new(ish), or not so new(ish) writers: In talking about their work, they say, "My fictional novel...."
No no no.
If you query an agent and you say this, you risk said agent pitching your project into the trash, or at the very least, sending you a form rejection letter.
Why is it a big deal?
Because agents figure that if you're writing a novel, you know it's fiction. Just as if you're writing a memoir, one hopes it's true. And if you say "fictional novel" or "true memoir" to an agent, it makes it easy for them to say no to you, and what with all the material slamming agents on a daily basis, if there's the slightest reason to say no, they will.
Of course they want to say yes. They want stellar work to come in the door, mailbox, email inbox, wherever! So make it easy for them to say yes. Learn the business of writing as well as the craft, and never ever ever say "fictional novel."
Friday, February 12, 2010
Memoirists Dani Shapiro and Rhoda Janzen
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion: A Memoir and Rhoda Janzen, author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home.
One caveat: A little into the interview we lose sound, music goes on and stays on for a few minutes, then we bring Dani back on. The end of the recording, with Rhoda, is also garbled. So sorry for these frustrating elements that sometimes occur. We will soon podcast Dani's appearance at the Pen on Fire Speakers Series, so there will be another chance to hear Dani and Barbara talk about Devotion.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: February 10, 2010)
One caveat: A little into the interview we lose sound, music goes on and stays on for a few minutes, then we bring Dani back on. The end of the recording, with Rhoda, is also garbled. So sorry for these frustrating elements that sometimes occur. We will soon podcast Dani's appearance at the Pen on Fire Speakers Series, so there will be another chance to hear Dani and Barbara talk about Devotion.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: February 10, 2010)
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Memoirists Michelle Maisto and Abigail Thomas
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Michelle Maisto, author of The Gastronomy of Marriage: A Memoir of Food and Love and Abigail Thomas, author of Thinking About Memoir.
Download audio.
(Broadcast Date: November 11, 2009)
Download audio.
(Broadcast Date: November 11, 2009)
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Danzy Senna and Peter Gadol
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Danzy Senna, author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History and Peter Gadol, author of Silver Lake.
Download Audio.
(Broadcast Date: September 30, 2009)
Download Audio.
(Broadcast Date: September 30, 2009)
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Betsy Lerner and Rachel Resnick
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews literary agent Betsy Lerner and Rachel Resnick, author of Love Junkie.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: September 09, 2009)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: September 09, 2009)
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Katherine Russell Rich
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Katherine Russell Rich, author of Dreaming in Hindi.
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: July 22, 2009)
Download audio.
(Broadcast date: July 22, 2009)
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