Life Stories

Chavisa 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 saying a lot of memoirs are written because the author thinks it's an exceptional story. I actually felt like I needed to write this memoir because my story is not exceptional at all, and I wanted to show how pervasive sexism is in multiple spheres of society... I just wanted to show how pervasive it is everywhere and how it affects us constantly throughout our lives."

In 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 various other assaults from the outside world... and, as Moody describes it, a shutdown of his creative faculties so all-encompassing that, eventually, the only thing he could see himself writing about was what was happening to the two of them.

I 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 structure through which to tell the story. One of the first things I mentioned is how perfectly it illustrated that famous Philip Larkin verse about what your parents do, which eventually brought us to a discussion of how some relationships simply can't be fixed. We also talked about how working on I Will Be Complete has made Glen a more confident writer, and the newly honed skills he's been able to take back to his fiction. Plus the story of how David Leavitt became his literary archnemesis, until he actually went to a David Leavitt reading...

I 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 assumption. "The book is, at best, a portrait of my brain," she told me, "of the way I think of things. In that sense, it's incredibly honest. I don't think that you can write a book like this without a degree of intimacy, a degree of candor and vulnerability—a great degree of those things—and I think that the vulnerability that I express in my personal essay writing... and sometimes my book reviews, too, for that matter... is in that I am laying it all out. This is the way my brain works."

I 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 who got to make those sorts of decisions, so we ended up passing on the book—fortunately, Scared Selfless wound up with a great publisher who was able to support the book in a way it deserved, so chances are that, sometime in 2017, you might have seen her in a magazine you were reading, or on a daytime talk show... Happily, she and I were able to keep in touch, so when she came to New York City to do some media, we were able to get together for a frank conversation about—among other things—what dissociative identity disorder is (and what it isn't), about how surviving her trauma motivated her career in psychotherapy, and about what it's like to come forward with a story about surviving sexual abuse in a country where, let's face it, the outcome of the most recent presidential election suggests our concern about sexual assault is not what it should be. I'm delighted to finally be able to share this conversation with you.

I 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 it was the last thing she ever intended to write about, either. During our conversation, Garber and I discussed how she had mentally and emotionally blocked out her father's most invasive and abusive behavior while it was happening, and about how friends and neighbors, and even her father's therapist, turned a blind eye to the blatant signs of his mental and emotional condition. We also discussed how her father's most famous project became a landmark metaphor for all the shortcomings of modernist architecture... along with the more personal meaning it accrued within the family.

I 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 to the limit, he was really holding himself back—and about how a career-threatening injury drove him not just into physical therapy but into a complete overhaul of his emotional approach to his craft. As I was reading A Body of Work, I started thinking Jim Bouton's classic baseball memoir, Ball Four. Both books are by young men who've dedicated themselves to their field but find themselves coming face-to-face with the prospect of no longer being able to do the thing they love, far sooner than they'd ever anticipated. Fortunately, Hallberg was able to make the comeback, and as this episode goes online he's approaching the first anniversary of his return to the stage.

For 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 dealing with the pressures of their careers in the media industry—like, what does and doesn't work for them, and why it might or might not work for someone else suffering from anxiety—and about the battle that was then raging to protect our government health care programs. (A battle that we'll undoubtedly have to fight again before too long.) Sometimes it's hard to believe that it's been nearly six years since I uploaded my first Life Stories interview, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have talked to so many fascinating people about their experiences, and about how they've striven to communicate their experiences to others. There's several more interviews already in the pipeline, and while the schedule has been somewhat erratic at times, I'm hoping to establish a steady rhythm in 2018. I hope you'll continue to join me for those conversations!

Lauren 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 conscious interior voice. There's a lot of personal story packed into Lauren's memoir, and into this conversation. We talk about her frustration at what felt like a parent's attempt to co-opt her "story," about her then-boyfriend's attempt to essentially treat her brain injury as an opportunity to "reboot" their relationship, and about how the injury forced her to fast-track a re-evaluation of her life that had already begun. As she explains, "It's not unusual for someone twenty-seven in New York to say, 'This is not enough for me. Do I take a dramatic turn?'" "I promise you, I did not want to write a memoir. That was not something that I would have wanted—I didn't even like to read memoirs at the time. It is a weird choice to go from I'm struggling to conjugate a verb and to then think, yeah, I'll be a writer, great idea! But also, what else could I do? "I couldn't do anything entirely independently anymore. I mean, lucky for me, my physical self is okay; I didn't lose my ability to walk, I can still dress myself, things like that. But I couldn't manage an independent life. The fact was decided, I was going to be at my parents' house; I'd be with my parents, in my childhood home, for a while: decision made. I was not an actor, I couldn't memorize any more, so: decision made. I couldn't go through a textbook so: decision made, no longer Ph.D. student. "As these things were off the table, so to speak, then it was much easier to say, well, I'm a writer because I'm writing. I don't think that means I assumed this book would ever eventually come out to any kind of general audience. But writing is what made me able to write. The more I could write, the better I could write." And, as her writing improved, Lauren began to learn more about the neuroscience behind her condition, and that education makes its way into the memoir as well. And we discuss how she drew inspiration from the life stories of Helen Keller and... Casanova?

When 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. In The Fact of a Body, Marzano-Lesnevich writes about her efforts not just to confront what had happened to her and her sister, and how her family had suppressed it, but also to understand Rickey Langley—not to sympathize with him, as we discuss in this interview, but to understand what drove him to commit his crimes... and how his attempts to seek help before then had gone unanswered. During our conversation, she also described one of the long-term effects of her grandfather's molestation, how even as an adult her body would sometimes "freeze up" in a dissociative state—and how, since the writing of this memoir, that had stopped. It led us to discuss the clich&@33; about memoir writing, which is that it's supposed to be cathartic, a notion she vigorously challenged. We also talked a lot about the true crime genre, from the reasons writers choose to write about certain crimes to the creative effort that goes into developing a narrative rooted in the bare facts of a case.

As 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 few years earlier. And while he did talk to people that he met along the way, I realized that for the vast majority of his journey, he was out there alone with his own thoughts; as I told him, he could just as easily have gone up to the top of a mountain to meditate, but instead he chose to put one foot in front of the other. Listening to this conversation again a few months later, I was struck by Andrew's thoughtful determination to really listen to others—to meet them with the full force of his empathy, even when (as we discuss) what they're telling him is rooted in prejudice and hate. In a political climate where pundits make a lot of noise about "listening" to "forgotten" Americans, Andrew's story offers a model for genuine conversation.

In 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 around, who agreed to take him on as an apprentice. But then they met, and the agent, having asked Rhodes about his interest in music then inviting him to play his own piano, realized that Rhodes was meant to be a musician. And so he went into training—but, in upending his entire life like this, Rhodes was forced to confront his memories of being repeatedly raped by one of his teachers as a child: Instrumental is a powerful memoir of surviving sexual trauma and coping with mental illness, but it's also a work of fierce advocacy for the power of music—Rhodes hates the term "classical music"—to make a difference in our lives. And so our frank and uncensored conversation takes on everything from what's wrong with today's classical music scene to the consequences of living in a society that makes an admitted serial sexual assaulter its political leader to the legal battle that threatened to keep this book from ever getting published.

Back 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 language helps shape the way we see the world, and how we work to maintain control over that power. (In particular, I'm thinking about how the French government has an académie whose job it is to maintain the purity of the language, coming up with alternatives to pesky English words that threaten to slide into usage.) How, I wondered, had Collins decided to combine her personal narrative with the reportage and research?

When 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, and quickly learned what he was in for in the months ahead. Never Look an American in the Eye is Ndibe's memoir of his first years in the United States, how he gradually acclimated to our climate and our culture—and, too, how he's had to deal with American assumptions about him and his cultural heritage. (For example, although he's an American citizen, who didn't even begin writing fiction until after he'd been in the United States for a while, one of the first editors to see his debut novel on submission rejected it because she didn't see how readers could be interested in an "African writer.") It's all shot through with Ndibe's warm sense of humor, which comes in part from his belief that, as he says, "I've lived a very interesting, rich life in America, [but] it wasn't always like that when it was happening." "When I wasn't getting paid as an editor," he continues, "when I was working for food, it wasn't 'interesting.' When I had to lie about writing a novel, and had to go and write one, it was painful; it was difficult. When I was stopped by the police, it was terrifying. But as I looked back, it struck me that I had a very rich harvest of American narratives—and this is the quintessential immigrant culture in the world. I thought that the ultimate homage I could pay to America for the gifts that it's given me... is to tell my part of this immigrant drama that is America."

Like 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 for farmers and consumers alike. We also dove into his personal history, including a reflection on how writing about nature typically comes from a leisurely perspective. "It doesn't tend to be the person that's pulling the turnips or plowing the field," Rebanks explained. "It tends to be somebody who somehow has enough time and enough money to wander through it and wonder how beautiful it is... And it's beautiful, and it's special, and it's wonderful writing. But it's not the full story of what happens on the land."

As 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 working as a technology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I 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't actually put everything that's gone wrong behind you.. When I mentioned to Trussoni that her husband's treatment of her read like blatant gaslighting, she told me that she'd never actually heard that term until after she escaped her marriage—to me, that was an important reminder of how easy it can be to find oneself in a relationship this destructive. She also observed that after a childhood shaped by her father's intense PTSD, she was used to and perhaps even attracted to turbulence and drama... and, too, conditioned to sort out her problems on her own, not showing even those closest to her how bad things had gotten and how much she needed help.

Barbara 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 random acts of kindness on the road... and that was something she wasn't entirely prepared for: "To be honest with you, I kinda had a death wish. I didn't care whether I came back. I just wanted to divert my mind from all that was going on in my life. And one of the best ways to divert grief is to focus on something else. I focused on staying alive. It's interesting, because I had a death wish, but I was really searching for a life wish. I mean, the great thing about this trip was all I had to think about was staying upright and getting to the next town I was going to stop at, and looking at every nook and cranny in the road, making sure I didn't hit something. It really healed me, because by the time I got back, I thought I could do anything."

I'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—and, too, how knowing how hard it is to get attention for a good book didn't deter him from writing with an eye to publication. We also talk about his recent efforts converting a 271-page book into a sixty-minute solo theatrical show, as he's recently done for New York City's FRIGID Festival. So there's a lot of stories in the book that aren't in the show—and that, even in a slightly longer conversation than usual, we didn't get a chance to touch upon. You'll just have to read the book to find out about them!

I 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 triumph of wrong over right, of evil over good. Philosophy, I think, offers us a guide to how we can live our lives, how we can best respond to the world around us, by getting in touch with what others have called "the better angels of our nature." Kaag recommends essays by James and Henry David Thoreau as starting points for readers interested in what the American philosophical tradition, with its emphases on pragmatism and renewal, can tell us about how to move forward. And he hints at future writings on his part that might follow in those footsteps: "I think that there are lots of times in the history of philosophy where philosophers have had to stake a great deal on their thoughts, and I think that we might be entering one of these times," he says. "I'm in the process of writing another sort of memoir like this one, but... it will have to be in some ways politically oriented, or socially oriented, because I think it's wholly unacceptable for philosophers to ascend into the ivory tower when things are going really nasty."

Barry 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 together. That led us to the differences between clutter and hoarding, and about how his efforts to create a document of his efforts to finally clear out his apartment sometimes created a "double block," where he wasn't writing and wasn't cleaning. And then I mentioned how Mess foregrounds one of the fundamental qualities of memoir, the way in which it offers the memoirist's life up for judgment, because that's something Yourgrau does himself with practically everyone he encounters in the course of his story.

After 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 well as how he ended up meeting his wife (and not dating her for several months), and what she thought when he told her he was going to write a book about how he was playing the field just before they started seeing each other.

I 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 which deal with personal relationships, some of which tackle the writing process, some of which play directly with her reputation as a "confessional" poet—and about claiming her space as a woman dealing with all the things women have to deal with in literary culture.

In 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 of the months that followed—including her frustration when many of those close to her, unsure of how to address the situation, kept an emotional distance that was, just then, the very last thing she needed.

In 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."

When 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.

Nicole 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 her for years. We talk about why motherhood led her to abandon that strategy, why it was still difficult to fully embrace the situation... and what it's like now that the whole world knows.

As 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 steps, in adulthood, to create a healthier emotional self-identity for herself... a process in which the mushrooms (among other flora) actually do play a meaningful role, as you'll learn during our conversation.

When 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.

Jen 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.)

Some 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... and about why, at 40, she's still doing what her mother tells her to do every day.

Kelly 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.

Rayya 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 development as a memoir writer.

Damian 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.

I'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 hugely biased in her favor, but Annabelle's writing is funny and heartwarming and I'm sure listening to her talk will leave you feeling much the same way.

Ophira 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's nothing to do with the discussion about sex, unless you're hypersensitive to that sort of thing. A word or two you can't say on network TV comes up in conversation, is all.)

Katherine 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--from the factors that contribute to the problem to the costs of dealing with it, and more.

As 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 messages to serve up "relevant" ads and search engines that remember everything you've ever looked up, and what the rest of us can do to minimize our online exposure.

When 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 challenges she's faced... and the milestones she's reached.

When 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 happened when she came to New York City ready to live a purely secular lifestyle.

Subscribe 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 […]

After 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 now, in her new memoir, Glitter and Glue.

In 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 expecting.

When 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 stake when trans people try to tell their stories. (Oh, we talk about the CNN interview... but the points she makes are much broader than that one incident.)

Leah 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 graduate school at Harvard. Cut Me Loose is her story.

Rebecca 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.

In 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.

Scott 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 therapist encouraged him to tackle this topic as a way of proving to himself that he's much more resilient than he gives himself credit for... and whether that worked.

Katie 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.

Gary 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, finally turned himself around... and eventually confronts his hurtful past straight on.

Jonathan Wilson's Kick and Run is a "memoir with soccer ball" that encompasses (among other things) life as a young Jewish boy in 1950s and 1960s London, as a journalist crossing the United States to cover the '94 World Cup for the New Yorker, and as an 50-something man realizing it might be time to hang up the cleats for good. We talk about those things--and about stuff like England's chances in the next World Cup, and why the U.S. team has to pick its home game venues very carefully...