May 05, 2026

239. Letting Our Inner Selves Be Cared For featuring Jacque Gorelick

35 minutes

Jacque Gorelick joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up missing a mother, surviving a fractured family and worrying you’re broken in unfixable ways, how her husband's medical crisis upended her life as a new mother, letting our inner selves be cared for, protecting a space where a mother should be, owning our story, gathering all the pieces for structure, weaving in backstory to strengthen the stakes, including letters and managing time in memoir, telling the truth as we know it, taking risks, how we’re never finished, and her new memoir Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home.

Ronit’s in-person Fall Workshop - Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story

Also in this episode:

-coping strategies

-letting our guard down

-being once mothered, motherless, and unmothered

Books mentioned in this episode:

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Fast Draft Your Memoir by Rachael Herron

Jacque’s essays about family, motherhood, estrangement, education, and health have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y, Healthy Women, The Washington Post, HuffPost and more.

After spending her fractured childhood in search of home and belonging, Jacque spent her adult life working with children and families. She has a degree in psychology and a graduate degree in education with an emphasis in early childhood development. She has always been fascinated with how family shapes and defines us, and how we ultimately choose to define it for ourselves.

A California native, Jacque has lived all over the West Coast from Santa Barbara to Alaska. Now firmly rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives beside a creek under redwood trees with her husband, two boys, and a mélange of rescues. To find out more about Jacque and her work visit her website at jacquegorelick.com.

Connect with Jacque:

Website: https://www.jacquegorelick.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacque.gorelick/

IG @jacgorelick: https://www.instagram.com/jacgorelick/

Threads @jacgorelick: https://www.threads.com/@jacgorelick

Substack: Heartmatters https://jacquegorelickheartmatters.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

Purchase book via Bookshop:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/map-of-a-heart-a-memoir-of-love-loss-and-finding-the-way-home-jacque-gorelick/9daeff1a91645131?ean=9783988322265&next=t

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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.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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