Life Stories
100 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 5 years ago - ★★★★ - 11 ratingsBeatrice.com’s Ron Hogan interviews memoirists about their lives and the art of writing memoir.
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Episodes
Life Stories #107: Chavisa Woods
August 05, 2019 04:41 - 25.6 MBChavisa Woods' 100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism is a book that, as our British friends say, does exactly what it says on the tin—chronicling 100 separate incidents of sexist behavior that Woods has faced in her lifetime, a pattern of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse (including sexual assault) that starts when she's five years old and continues to the present day. It's a patten that, I speculated, just about any woman should find instantly recognizable, to which Woods replied: "I keep sayi...
Life Stories #106: Rick Moody
August 05, 2019 03:23 - 21.5 MBIn The Long Accomplishment, Rick Moody takes readers through the first year of his second marriage. It was a moment in time where he'd gained significant control over his addictions, and had extricated from a dysfunctional first marriage—a moment when, as I jokingly said during our conversation, "everything should be coming up Rick Moody." But it didn't go that way; instead, we have an account of a couple grappling with the financial and emotional tolls of fertility treatment, along with v...
Life Stories #105: Glen David Gold
December 19, 2018 07:04 - 29 minutes - 26.8 MBI first met Glen David Gold when he was on a reading tour for his second novel, Sunnyside, which happened to be the name of the neighborhood where I lived at the time; that wasn't the only reason we hit it off, but we did, and so I was excited when I found out he was publishing a memoir, I Will Be Complete. I spoke to him in the summer of 2018 about his family history, how he'd tried to deal with it by writing fiction in his twenties, and the path toward eventually finding the right literary...
Life Stories #104: Minna Zallman Proctor
July 27, 2018 03:51 - 21.8 MBI met with Minna Zallman Proctor a while back, shortly after the publication of Landslide, a collection of autobiographical essays that orbit around her relationship with her mother. One of the things we discussed was how circumspect she was in the portrayal of her own children, and that prompted me to say something about how we don't really know the author of a memoir or an autobiographical essay, that the "I" we read is a controlled, calibrated literary invention. Proctor challenged that a...
Life Stories #103: Michelle Stevens
July 25, 2018 18:36 - 20.1 MBI first met Michelle Stevens in 2014, back when I was an acquiring editor for a startup book publishing company. We took a meeting with her and her agent after reading the proposal for her book, which combined a memoir about surviving childhood sexual abuse with solid explanations of the psychology involved in the dissociative identity disorder that Stevens, among others, developed as a result of that protracted trauma. I was impressed by the proposal, and the meeting, but I wasn't the one w...
Life Stories #102: Elizabeth W. Garber
July 24, 2018 23:49 - 21.9 MBI spoke with Elizabeth W. Garber the Monday right after Father's Day, an apt time to be discussing her memoir, Implosion. It's a story about growing up in Cincinnati in the 1960s and early '70s in a glass house designed by her architect father—years that were so unsettling to live through that when Garber began speaking to her mother and her two brothers about the abuse they all endured, they initially refused to have anything to do with the topic. Which didn't exactly surprise her, because i...
Life Stories #101: David Hallberg
December 18, 2017 06:25 - 24 minutes - 22.2 MBI met David Hallberg at the midtown offices of the American Ballet Theater, where they'd set aside a conference room for us to talk about his new memoir, A Body of Work. It's about his relentless quest for perfection, from his earliest days as a ballet student in Arizona to his role as a principal dancer at ABT (and as the first American to hold a position of comparative stature at the Bolshoi's dance company). But it's also about realizing that, even though he thought he was pushing himself...
Life Stories #100: Kat Kinsman & Andrea Petersen
December 07, 2017 05:07 - 46 minutes - 42.7 MBFor the 100th episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I've been talking to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I wanted to do something special. So, in the spring of 2017, I sat down with Kat Kinsman, the author of Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves, and Andrea Petersen, the author of On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety, for a wide-ranging discussion about their personal experiences with anxiety disorder, about maintaining their mental health while dea...
Life Stories #99: Lauren Marks
December 01, 2017 19:00 - 41 minutes - 38.4 MBLauren Marks was an actress in her late twenties when she went to Edinburgh in 2007 to direct a friend's play in the city's annual Fringe Festival. One night, they went out to a bar, and she was in the midst of a karaoke number when an aneurysm in her brain burst. When she regained consciousness, her ability to communicate with the people around her was massively impaired. A Stitch of Time is the story of her recovery from that aphasia—which was so severe at one point that she lacked a consc...
Life Stories #98: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
November 21, 2017 18:31 - 21 minutes - 19.2 MBWhen Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich was in law school, she did a summer internship at a Louisiana law firm. She was firmly against the death penalty, and then they asked if she would be prepared to work on the case of convicted child murderer Ricky Langley. Attempting to familiarize herself with the case, she was overwhelmed by memories of being molested by her grandfather—and though her career as a lawyer was pretty much over before it had even begun, her future as a writer was just beginning...
Life Stories #97: Andrew Forsthoefel
November 20, 2017 17:11 - 26 minutes - 24.5 MBAs I was talking with Andrew Forsthoefel in the spring of 2017 about his 4,000-mile walk across the United States, which he writes about in Walking to Listen, I asked a kidding-but-not-kidding question: "So, what were you walking away from?" Because you don't set off on foot to talk to random strangers unless there's something you don't want to deal with at home—but, as Andrew explains, the journey actually forced him to confront everything he'd been dealing with since his parents' divorce a...
Life Stories #96: James Rhodes
November 18, 2017 06:14 - 22.3 MBIn the early months of 2017, I met the British concert pianist James Rhodes, who had come to the United States to discuss Instrumental, "a memoir of madness, medication, and music" as the subtitle puts it. Rhodes has a fascinating personal story: He'd played the piano some in his adolescence, then gave it up for a career in financial publishing. When he was twenty-eight, he decided that if he couldn't be a musician, he'd be an agent for musicians, and reached out to one of the best agents ar...
Life Stories #95: Lauren Collins
November 17, 2017 06:17 - 23 minutes - 21.5 MBBack in 2016, I had a fantastic conversation with Lauren Collins, a staff writer with The New Yorker who had just published When in French: Love in a Second Language, which is simultaneously a personal story about how Collins fell in love with a French man without really knowing the language—he spoke perfect English, sure, but there was still a significant aspect of his life, his personality, his identity that was closed off to her until she could become fluent—and a broader account of how la...
Life Stories #94: Okey Ndibe
June 17, 2017 02:03 - 24 MBWhen Okey Ndibe came to America at the end of 1988 at the invitation of fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe to edit a magazine about African culture, nobody thought to tell him about winter. He'd read about winter in American novels, of course, but he just assumed it would be like the annual cold snap in Nigeria, when the temperature could drop as low as sixty-five degrees, and he dressed accordingly. After his flight arrived in New York City, he stepped out of the terminal to look for his escort, ...
Life Stories #93: James Rebanks
June 15, 2017 16:30 - 25 minutes - 23.1 MBLike many people, I first became aware of James Rebanks through his Herdwick Shepherd Twitter feed, where he posts pictures of his flock and talks about life as a farmer in England's Lake District. When he came to the United States for the first time in the fall of 2016 to promote his two books, The Shepherd's Life and The Shepherd's View, I was excited to chat with him about how Internet fame has changed his life (not much, it turns out) and his role as an advocate for sustainable practices ...
Life Stories #92: Thomas Dolby
June 13, 2017 20:04 - 23 minutes - 21.7 MBAs I mention at the beginning of this episode, my inner 13-year-old was thrilled at the opportunity to talk to Thomas Dolby about his memoir, The Speed of Sound, because I’d been a big fan of “She Blinded Me with Science†and the album it came off of, The Golden Age of Wireless, for over three decades. But grown-up me was also excited to learn more about the inspiration Dolby took from the ’70s punk scene in London, and about the lessons he learned about himself and his craft while wo...
Life Stories #91: Danielle Trussoni
June 12, 2017 17:39 - 21.5 MBI spoke to Danielle Trussoni about her second memoir, The Fortress, in late 2016, just a few days after the news had broken about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marriage falling apart. The timing was apt, given that Trussoni's book detailed how, in a desperate bid to save her own marriage, she took the windfall she'd earned from her first novel and moved with her husband and two children to a medieval fortress in the middle of France. Spoiler alert: Moving to the other side of the world doesn...
Life Stories #90: Barbara Schoichet
May 02, 2017 17:07 - 18.3 MBBarbara Schoichet got hit with a triple whammy just before her fiftieth birthday—she lost her job at a movie studio in Los Angeles, her girlfriend left her, and then her mother died. Don't Think Twice is the story of how she pushed back against all that by learning to ride a motorcycle, then flying out to New York to buy a Harley Davidson and ride it back home across the country. Almost immediately, she got first-hand experience of the camaraderie that exists between Harley drivers, through...
Life Stories #89: Jamie Brickhouse
February 22, 2017 18:30 - 31.7 MBI've known Jamie Brickhouse for a long time; in his former life as a book publicist, he was someone to whom I'd frequently reach out when I wanted to talk to... well, people like him in his current life as the author of Dangerous When Wet, "a memoir of booze, sex, and my mother," as the subtitle sums it up. So, among the many other things we talk about in this episode, we discuss how the publishing industry was a place where he was able to hide his alcoholism in plain sight for a long time—...
Life Stories #88: John Kaag
January 18, 2017 17:56 - 21 minutes - 19.9 MBI spoke to John Kaag about his memoir, American Philosophy, shortly after the 2016 presidential election, so although we did spend a fair amount of time talking about his personal story, and how a rare book collection tucked away in an old building in the woods of New Hampshire helped Kaag make his way back from a profound, life-questioning despair, we also discussed what American philosophy can do to give solace to those of us who were shocked by what looked (and still looks) like the triump...
Life Stories #87: Barry Yourgrau
October 05, 2016 05:13 - 27.1 MBBarry Yourgrau actually lives just around the corner from me in Queens, so it was absurdly easy for us to get together to chat about his memoir, Mess—and the fact that this episode was recorded in my kitchen explains the occasional traffic noises from outside the second-floor window. Anyway, we had a great time talking about why he didn't let anyone into his working studio—;not even his girlfriend, whose apartment it was originally—and what happened when she finally told him to get it t...
Life Stories #86: Matteson Perry
September 28, 2016 03:49 - 23.8 MBAfter Matteson Perry broke up with his "Manic Pixie Dream Girl," he realized that he'd never really NOT been in a serious relationship since high school, and decided it was time to get casual. Available recounts his adventures, and over the course of our conversation he explained what he learned about himself during his year of no-strings-attached dating, including how the validation he got from being able to land so many first dates was like the thrill he got as a stand-up performer—as wel...
Life Stories #85: Kim Addonizio
September 22, 2016 04:47 - 27.5 MBI didn't realize until well into my conversation with Kim Addonizio that she'd written (but never published) a full-length memoir, a straightforward narrative about the breakup of a longterm relationship, before Bukowski in a Sundress, the collection of autobiographical essays that we'd met to discuss. That got us to talking about rejection and failure, which dovetailed nicely into some of the larger themes we'd been pursuing about finding the right voice for each of these essays—some of wh...
Life Stories #84: Emily Winslow
July 13, 2016 18:54 - 22 minutes - 20.5 MBIn the winter of 1992, Emily Winslow was a young theater major getting ready for her next semester when she was followed into her building by a stranger who then forced his way into her apartment and raped her. Over the years, she had kept in touch with the sex crimes unit of the Pittsburgh police, even after she moved to Cambridge, England. Then, in 2013, the DNA evidence finally produces a match. The suspect is arrested, and the path to justice begins. Jane Doe January is Winslow's account ...
Life Stories #83: Val Wang
July 13, 2016 02:52 - 20 minutes - 19.2 MBIn her memoir, Beijing Bastard, Val Wang writes about growing up as a Chinese-American and then moving to Beijing in the late 1990s: "I think a lot of people think I was looking for my roots; that's a popular storyline for a Chinese-American. But it was really the opposite for me. I was really rebelling from my roots and looking for myself. That very American kind of journey abroad to find yourself is what I thought I was there for."
Life Stories #82: Maria Venegas
August 17, 2014 02:40 - 20 minutes - 18.8 MBWhen Maria Venegas was a young girl growing up in Chicago, her father killed a neighbor and in the process of evading the police abandoned her and the rest of her family. It would be 14 years before she saw him again, and in the process of reconnecting with him she tried to get at the truth not just behind this incident but many other violent moments from his life. Bulletproof Vest is her story, and it's his story, and in putting the two together it becomes something even bigger.
Life Stories #81: Nicole C. Kear
August 11, 2014 02:23 - 22 minutes - 20.1 MBNicole Kear was 19 when she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that, at the time it was discovered, was chipping away at her peripheral and night vision and would, she was told, result in more and more loss of vision over the years. Your life is going to change dramatically, her doctor told her; start planning now. So, as she writes in her new memoir, Now I See You, she made a huge effort to keep her deteriorating eyesight a secret from all but those closest to ...
Life Stories #80: Ava Chin
August 10, 2014 02:27 - 19 minutes - 17.9 MBAs a New York Times columnist, Ava Chin spent several years writing about her experiences foraging for edible plant life within the city limits. But Eating Wildly isn't just a handbook on how to find mulberries, (safe) mushrooms or other potential foodstuffs in an urban environment. It's also a memoir about how growing up feeling as if her own identity was defined by the father who left before she was born, and about her relationships with her mother and grandparents... and about taking the s...
Life Stories #79: Molly Wizenberg
August 03, 2014 17:12 - 21 minutes - 19.4 MBWhen Molly Wizenberg's husband told her that he wanted to open a New York-style pizzeria in Seattle, she encouraged him--even though she wasn't convinced it would ever happen. But as his plans got further along, she found herself taking on a bigger and bigger role in the restaurant's launch, as she recounts in her new memoir, Delancey.
Life Stories #78: Jen Doll
August 02, 2014 19:24 - 21 minutes - 19.2 MBJen Doll's been to a lot of weddings. Some of them have been great experiences, others not so much. She tells both kinds of stories in her memoir Save the Date... and, along the way, she has a lot to say about friendships, relationships, and making our way into adulthood. (And, over the course of our conversation, some tips for what to do the next time YOU'RE invited to a wedding.)
Life Stories #77: Elaine Lui
July 24, 2014 18:25 - 31 minutes - 29.3 MBSome people will read Listen to the Squawking Chicken and decide that Elaine Lui's mother is not just emotionally manipulative but outright abusive, but Lui has a nuanced perspective on her upbringing and her mother's insistence of filial piety. Sure, she's not happy about how often her mother chased away her childhood and adolescent friends lest they turn out to be good influences, but she can also see how all the shaming -- and pre-shaming -- prepared her for adulthood. We talk about that.....
Life Stories #76: Kelly Cogswell
July 22, 2014 01:57 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MBKelly Cogswell went to the first meeting of the Lesbian Avengers in 1992 because she wanted to be able to embrace her lesbian identity more confidently. She wound up playing a role in many of that group's direct action campaigns, but also bore witness to the internal conflicts that derailed the original New York chapter even as they were inspiring other groups around the world. Eating Fire (University of Minnesota Press) is her story of life as a Lesbian Avenger and its legacy.
Life Stories #75: Rayya Elias
July 06, 2014 22:45 - 27 minutes - 24.7 MBRayya Elias was born in Syria, then came to Detroit with her family just in time for the riots of the late '60s. As a young adult, she got involved in the local punk scene, then escaped to New York City to start her life over. Harley Loco takes readers back to a time when downtown Manhattan was a creative hotbed and a danger zone, with a powerful story of addiction and recovery and hard-won lessons -- which we talk about, along with the story of Elizabeth Gilbert's pivotal role in Elias's dev...
Life Stories #74: Damian Barr
July 01, 2014 04:23 - 30 minutes - 28.2 MBDamian Barr grew up in a small town in Scotland in the 1980s that was hit hard by the policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. As his family struggled with the economic hardships affecting the community, and he endured emotional and physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather, Damian also began to realize that he was gay... which created its own set of complications. Maggie & Me brings his childhood and adolescence to life with vivid immediacy.
Life Stories #73: Annabelle Gurwitch
May 30, 2014 04:26 - 22 minutes - 20.9 MBI've known Annabelle Gurwitch for years, and one of the things I've always loved about her writing is the ways she's able to find things in her personal experience that we can all identify with, and I See You Made an Effort is no exception. It's a collection of essays about life at "the edge of 50" that touches upon health concerns, beauty anxieties, family turbulence, and the increasing realization that you're just not the young person you'd gotten used to seeing yourself as anymore. I'm hug...
Life Stories #72: Ophira Eisenberg
May 28, 2014 03:26 - 28 minutes - 25.9 MBOphira Eisenberg wasn't interested in long-term relationships, and had taken up a casual approach to dating and sex as a young adult. Then she met a man who wanted more than just a fling. Screw Everyone is the story of how she made the transition from a pragmatic "not choosy" approach to dating to settling down into marriage, shaped by a sharply funny perspective that doesn't hold back from making her the butt of her own humor when that's the way it happened. (Note about the explicit tag: It'...
Life Stories #71: Katherine Bouton
May 26, 2014 22:41 - 20 minutes - 18.9 MBKatherine Bouton first began experiencing hearing loss in one ear at age 30, and spent years trying to work around the problem without really addressing it. That, she discovered, only made her life more frustrating. Shouting Won't Help is the story of how she came to face her condition head-on, including the impact of cochlear implants on her hearing and her overall quality of life, but it's also an extensively reported account of how widespread hearing loss is among Americans of all ages--fr...
Life Stories #70: Julia Angwin
May 25, 2014 19:27 - 20 minutes - 18.3 MBAs a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, Julia Angwin has spent several years addressing the surveillance of our online activities. Dragnet Nation is the story of how she set out to erase as much of her digital footprint as possible--not, she explains early on, to make it impossible for law enforcement agencies to track her, but simply to make them (and corporations) really work to find the information. We talk about the steps she took to avoid email providers who scan our me...
Life Stories #69: Misty Copeland
May 09, 2014 03:12 - 18 minutes - 17 MBWhen Misty Copeland was growing up, she wanted to be a gymnast, and then she joined her middle school's drill team. She was eventually steered towards ballet classes, and it turned out she had an uncanny ability to learn and replicate complex moves. Eventually, that got her out of Southern California and into the American Ballet Theater, where she became one of the few African-American principal soloists in that company's history. Life in Motion is her memoir, where she talks about the challe...
Life Stories #68: Megan Hustad
April 30, 2014 04:11 - 23 minutes - 21.4 MBWhen Megan Hustad was a young girl in the 1970s, her parents took her and her older sister with them to Bonaire, a small island in the Caribbean, where they'd decided to become missionaries with a evangelical Christian radio station. In More Than Conquerors, Megan talks about her years there, their subsequent mission in Amsterdam, and what it was like to return to the United States and a fundamentalist culture somewhat different from the Christianity of her upbringing... as well as what happe...
Life Stories #67: Arlo Crawford
April 11, 2014 03:48 - 21 minutes - 19.9 MBSubscribe to Life Stories in iTunes photo: Kristen Fortier In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m talking with Arlo Crawford about A Farm Dies Once a Year, the story of how he quit his job at 31 and […]
Life Stories #66: Kelly Corrigan
April 01, 2014 04:13 - 19 minutes - 17.7 MBAfter graduating from college in the early '90s, Kelly Corrigan couldn't wait to get out of her family's house and make some adventures for herself on the other side of the world. But when her funds ran low in Australia, she ended up taking a job as a nanny to a widower and his children -- a situation that forced her to begin thinking about her own mother in a new light. In recent years, she's had cause to reflect on that experience, and she's chosen to share what she learned, back then and n...
Life Stories #65: Su Meck
February 27, 2014 16:08 - 22 minutes - 20.8 MBIn 1988, Su Meck was hit in the head by a low-hanging ceiling fan, further hitting her head on the kitchen counter as she collapsed to the floor. She experienced a traumatic brain injury that completely erased her memories of the first twenty-some years of her life. I Forgot to Remember is the story of how she slowly, painfully rebuilt her life. In this conversation, she discusses what happened to her, and why her memoir's not the feel-good version of her story that people might have been exp...
Life Stories #64: Janet Mock
February 19, 2014 02:35 - 31 minutes - 28.4 MBWhen she was a child, everybody had a firm idea about who Janet Mock was--and their idea didn't include womanhood. In Redefining Realness, Mock talks about what it took to become the woman she knew herself to be, overcoming a childhood of poverty, sexual abuse, and drug-addicted parents, through her adolescent involvement in the sex work industry (where she also first met other women who understood her situation) and onto the failures of certain mainstream media outlets to grasp what's at sta...
Life Stories #63: Leah Vincent
February 16, 2014 04:37 - 23 minutes - 21.7 MBLeah Vincent grew up in an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism that keeps women in strictly regimented subservient roles, impressing upon them from the early age the importance of modesty. Her family essentially wrote her off as a lost cause because she had exchanged letters with a boy, abandoning her at the age of 17 to make her own way in New York City... and she took a deep spiral downward before she was able to pull herself back up, not only putting herself through college but getting into gra...
Life Stories #62: Rebecca Mead
February 11, 2014 18:53 - 19 minutes - 18.2 MBRebecca Mead first read George Eliot's Middlemarch as a teenager in England, and she's returned to the novel about every five years or since -- and what she discovers in her reading is much different now than it was then. My Life in Middlemarch discusses how her attitudes towards the story's characters have changed, as well as offering an appreciation of Eliot's role in literature from a deeply personal perspective.
Life Stories #61: David Stuart MacLean
February 06, 2014 01:36 - 23 minutes - 21.5 MBIn 2002, David Stuart MacLean snapped into consciousness on a train platform in India -- but he didn't know that at the time. He had no idea where he was... or who he was. He was told he was having a bad drug trip, and he believed it; the truth was that an anti-malarial medication called Lariam had slipped from his bloodstream into his brain with catastrophic effects. The Answer to the Riddle Is Me is MacLean's story of trying to piece his life back together... or, perhaps, to start over.
Life Stories #60: Scott Stossel
January 26, 2014 23:19 - 30 minutes - 27.8 MBScott Stossel has been plagued by anxiety since early childhood--for more than a quarter-century, he's tried just about every therapeutic technique, every new medication. In My Age of Anxiety, he writes with candor about the effect anxiety disorder has had on his life... but he also opens the lens much wider, to consider how the medical and psychiatric communities, and the culture at large, have regarded and attempted to address this condition. We discuss that history, and why Stossel's thera...
Life Stories #59: Katie Heaney
January 23, 2014 04:36 - 19 minutes - 17.4 MBKatie Heaney is in her late twenties and she's never been on a date, let alone had a romantic relationship. In Never Have I Ever, she looks back at her history of awkwardness around the opposite sex... and, in this interview, she talks about why she's not just okay with being single, she's gotten really good at it.
Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart
January 18, 2014 20:38 - 29 minutes - 26.6 MBGary Shteyngart and his family came to New York City from the Soviet Union when he was a young boy, but their parenting style remained, as he describes it, distinctly Russian. Little Failure isn't just the title of his memoir; it's his mother's actual nickname for him in his 20s--a step up or down, depending on how you look at it, from when his father called him "Soplyak," or "Snotty." In this interview, we talk about how the lonely boy, who grew up to become a confused and angry young man, ...