Karen DeBonis joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the obstacles and medical gaslighting she faced trying to uncover what ailed her son, postpartum depression, writing about difficult motherhoods, learning how to deal with conflict, sharing our pages with partners, promoting our work, a happy social media story, how she overcome her people pleasing ways to become a warrior mom and her new memoir Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived.

Also in this episode:

-Munchausen by Proxy

-marketing angles and memoir

-highlighting our patterns in memoir

Books mentioned in this episode:

Raising a Rare Girl by Heather Lanier

Motherhood Exaggerated by Judith Hannan

The Opposite of Certainty by Janine Urbaniak Reid

Karen DeBonis writes about motherhood, people-pleasing, and personal growth, inspired by the experience of raising her son, Matthew. Her debut memoir Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived was released by Apprentice House Press in May 2023. Karen’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Huff Post, Today.com, Newsweek.com, and others. A happy empty-nester, Karen lives in upstate New York with her husband of forty years. 

Connect with Karen:

Website: www.karendebonis.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karen.debonis.3

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KarenDeBonis

IG: https://www.instagram.com/karendeboniswriter/

Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karendebonis/

Amazon purchase link: https://www.amazon.com/Growth-Mother-Brain-Tumor-Survived/dp/1627204350/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1672427791&sr=8-1

Bookshop purchase link: https://bookshop.org/p/books/growth-a-mother-her-son-and-the-brain-tumor-they-survived-karen-debonis/19468474?ean=9781627204354

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, 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 lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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Follow Ronit:

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

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Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers