Jennifer Lunden joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her experience with ME/CFS and her new braided memoir American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, writing about trauma, the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences on health, misogyny in medicine, using imagery to ground our readers, how she found the right publisher, and what it takes to be a working, published writer.

Also in this episode:

-capitalism and grind culture

-epigenetics

-destigmatizing ME/CFS and other autoimmune diseases

Books mentioned in this episode:

Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

The Ladies Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramsey

Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss

A Good Country: My LIfe in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America by Sofia Ali-Khan

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Hope in the Dark by  Rebecca Solnit

Jennifer Lunden is the author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. Her writing has been selected for a Pushcart Prize, listed as Notable in Best American Essays, and supported by grants from the Maine Arts Commission, the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Orion, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Longreads, and other journals. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hewnoaks Artist Residency, Hedgebrook, Monson Arts, and the Dora Maar House in the South of France, and was the 2016 recipient of the Bread Loaf - Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction. 

A licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) and former therapist, she provides individual and group supervision to other therapists and has also taught social work online for Simmons University and the University of New England. In 2012 she was named Maine’s Social Worker of the Year for her campaign to prevent cuts to Maine’s Medicaid program. She and her husband live in a little house in Portland, Maine, where they keep several backyard chickens, two cats, and some gloriously untamed gardens. 

Connect with Jennifer:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.lunden

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jleelunden/

Website: https://jenniferlunden.com/

Links for book purchase are on this page: https://jenniferlunden.com/american-breakdown/

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Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa 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 a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot and was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Housatonic Book Awards, and the Book of the Year Awards. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, and her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award. She is creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and lives in Seattle with her family where she is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd

Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/

More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/

Connect with Ronit:

https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

https://twitter.com/RonitPlank

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

Background photo: Canva

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers