Bee Wilson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the evolution of our narratives, how each book teaches you how to write it, approaching memoir from many different angles, how there’s no predetermined idea of what a memoir needs to be, writing about divorce and her husband leaving at the end of the first lockdown in the UK, the emotional life of kitchen objects, not being afraid to tell our truth, cooking as salve, obligations to our reader and our lives, growing comfortable with the idea of writing about ourselves, how the particular becomes universal, piecing strands together, creating necessary boundaries, writing closer to the bone, and her new memoir about moving on The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love Loss and Kitchen Objects. 

Info/Registration for Ronit’s 10-Week Memoir Class Memoir Writing: Finding Your Story https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story

Also in this episode:

-cooking as a salve

-choosing what we share 

-the ethics of memoir writing

Books mentioned in this episode: 

-Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

-The Kitchen Congregation: A Daughter’s Story of Wives and Women Friends  by Nora Seaton

-Work by Guy de Mauppassant

-Work by Anton Checkov

Bee Wilson is a food writer and the author of 8 books on food-related topics. Her latest book, The Heart-Shaped Tin, is an exploration of the emotional stories behind kitchen objects, told partly through memoir. Her previous books include The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen and Consider the Fork. She writes for a wide range of publications in the U.K. and U.S. including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She is the co-founder of TastEd, a charity aimed at bringing the joy of vegetables and fruits to children.

Connect with Bee:

Website: https://www.beewilson.com/

@kitchenbee on Instagram and Substack

Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Shaped-Tin-Love-Kitchen-Objects/dp/132407924X

Get the book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-heart-shaped-tin-bee-wilson/1146855283

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 

She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

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