Babes in Bookland

What happens when the moments you've spent years avoiding are the very ones you need to face?

This week, my friend Nadia returns to discuss Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, Sarah Polley's 2022 essay collection about the transformative power of returning to the past. We start with Sarah at fifteen, playing Alice on stage with a curving spine, a newly broken heart over her mother's death, and a father whose fascination with Lewis Carroll shaped far more of her childhood than it should have.

Nadia shares her own experience losing her mother to ovarian cancer and the unexpected gift her mother gave the family by facing her death head on. We talk about why we can hold compassion for Sarah's father and still call his parenting a failure, how lawyers can believe women and still warn them not to come forward, and why a NICU nurse's line about martyrs and mothers stopped us both in our tracks.

Then we get to the essay that gives the book its name: a concussion, three lost years, and a doctor who told Sarah to do the opposite of everything she'd been taught. Together we wrestle with the line between knowing your limits and setting them too soon, and why growth almost always lives on the other side of the thing that scares us.

Share this conversation with the friend who has been listening to her body a little too closely and is ready to run towards something.

"So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?" - Sarah Polley | Run Towards the Danger

Books referenced:

Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley

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Xx, Alex

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What does it take to climb back into the cockpit after one of the most traumatic days in our nation's history?

This week we sit down with airline captain Nia Gilliam, author of CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF On September 11th, 2001, Nia was a first officer on the runway at Newark when the South Tower was hit, and her plane became the last to take off from that airport. Her memoir braids that morning with the story of a little girl near O'Hare who watched airplanes and wondered where they were going.

We talk about how a writing class, a documentary interview, and a 2022 breast cancer diagnosis finally pushed her to tell this story, and why she says writing was harder than flying a plane. Nia takes us to space camp in Huntsville, to the funeral she skipped school to attend for pioneering aviator Janet Harmon Bragg, and to the moment she met Stacey Harris, the first living Black woman pilot she had ever seen. We get into the pressure of being the only woman and the only Black person in the room, the marriage and motherhood she stepped into while she was still grieving, and the line from her mom that changed everything: safe can be a place to heal, but it's nowhere to live.

We also talk about Sisters of the Skies, the nonprofit Nia co-founded to increase the number of Black women pilots in professional flight decks, and the joy of being called Captain Mom by her son, who is now a pilot too.

Share this conversation with the friend who put a dream on hold and needs a reminder that she's still cleared for takeoff.

"I wasn't the only one who didn't have tidy solutions for what haunted her.” - Captain Nia Gilliam (excerpt from her memoir, Cleared for Takeoff)

Books referenced:

Cleared for Takeoff by Captain Nia Gilliam

The Body Keeps the Score

Connect with Nia:

https://sistersoftheskies.org

Linked in

@pilotniagilliam

@mypilotsonandfun

Support the show:

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Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

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What happens if we pay attention to our darkest fantasies?

This week Ashley and I sit down with Jessica Knoll, author of Luckiest Girl Alive and Bright Young Women, to talk about Helpless, her newest novel and a sexy, uncomfortable, deeply intelligent erotic thriller. Jessica takes us from the lifeguard chair where she snuck pages of The Hours on rainy afternoons, to the Cosmopolitan offices that taught her to pull stories from the headlines, to the screenwriting professor whose stranger than fiction death became the opening of Helpless. We talk about why she named her daughter after a Final Girl, why she can't stand the do-gooder heroine, how motherhood has made her more private, and how her horny reading era led her to write the book she couldn't find on any shelf.

"That was the first time I realized that not only will wealthy people pay to live like they’re poor, but they’ll call it a vacation too.”

-excerpt from HELPLESS by Jessica Knoll

Connect with Jessica Knoll

@jessicaknollauthor

Books Referenced:

Helpless by Jessica Knoll

Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief by Pauline Boss

Support the show:

Buy us a book

Buy cute merch

on Patreon

Subscribe on Apple

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This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.

Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is reality TV ever really real, and what do  the women who star in it owe us?

This week, Brett joins me for a bonus episode on Lisa Rinna's memoir, You Better Believe I'm Gonna Talk About It, a quick, entertaining listen that we both enjoyed without ever feeling blown away by it. We talk about why this book landed as more filtered than the Lisa Rinna we know from television, and what that says about why she wrote it now.

From there we get into the parts that stuck with us. Lisa's advocacy for older women not stepping aside for the next generation, her honesty about nearly going broke while living a very public Hollywood life, and the story of her father's death by assisted suicide and her mother's survival of a violent kidnapping decades earlier, a story Lisa doesn't fully connect back to her own parenting. We spend real time on the Kathy Hilton drama, the question of whether Bravo protected Kathy at Lisa's expense, and why Lisa stops short of saying outright what she says she witnessed. We also talk about her conflicting statements around disordered eating, her daughter's eating disorder, and what it means to take real accountability in a memoir versus performing it.

We close out asking the bigger question this book keeps raising for us: when a memoir reads like a comeback attempt versus one written by someone who's truly done with Hollywood's opinion of them, and why that difference matters so much for how honest the book ends up being. Please note that this conversation includes discussion of disordered eating, assisted suicide, and a serious violent crime.

Share this conversation with the friend who knows all about Puppygate. Subscribe on Patreon or Apple Podcasts to access the full episode.

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What did the Spice Girls teach you about being a girl, and what did it cost the women who taught it?

This week, Page joins me to talk about Melanie Chisholm's memoir The Sporty One: My Life as a Spice Girl, a long, diary-like book that doubles as Mel C's thank-you to the people who carried her along the way and her chance to reclaim her own story. We start with why the group meant so much to us growing up, from our favorite songs and favorite Spice Girls to the way five distinct personalities showed a generation of girls they could be more than one thing.

From there, we follow Mel C from a working class childhood and a lonely stretch of neglect to a dance school in London, a flyer that changed everything, and a band that first called itself Touch. We talk about Michelle, the almost Spice Girl, Emma's arrival, and the moment the group decided to write their own music instead of accepting a man's version of what young women wanted to say. We also get into the Spice names, which were handed to them rather than chosen, and why Scary Spice gave us pause.

We also talk about the harder parts of the book, including the comment about her thighs that sent Mel C spiraling, the culture of thinness the group both absorbed and promoted, and a management style of divide and rule that pulled apart a band singing about friendship. Mel C writes openly about disordered eating, depression, and the long road to getting help, and we talk about why asking for help is so hard for so many of us. Along the way, we swap stories about work ethic, imposter syndrome, working mom guilt, and more.

Please note that this conversation includes discussion of childhood neglect, disordered eating, and depression.

We came away from this book with a lot of love for a woman we thought we already knew, and a reminder to applaud ourselves more. Share this conversation with the friend who still knows every word to "Wannabe."

"As far back as I can remember, I set my sights on being someone. Someone that mattered. Something that stood out. I wanted, neededattention and I worked out at a very young age thatthe stage was the place to get that. But the attention and adoration came at a price. I got everything I wanted but I had never felt so lonely. I became ill- physically, mentally, and emotionally. But I survived.” - Melanie Chisholm aka Sporty Spice (excerpt from her memoir, The Sporty One)

Books referenced:

The Sporty One: My Life as a Spice Girl by Melanie Chisholm

Support the show:

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 Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who was the first female politician you ever became aware of?

My friend Ashley encouraged me to pick up Kamala Harris' 107 Days-- despite knowing how it all ended, because it's important to read Kamala's account on her own terms.

We talk through the emotional whiplash of 2024, from the moment Biden dropped out of the race to Election Night itself, and the ways Harris was sidelined by the Biden administration long before she became the nominee. We get into the details that surprised us most, from the Fourth of July confrontation at the White House to a small, telling moment involving a birthday gift from her husband Doug Emhoff, and why we think Kamala's candor about the Bidens matters even when she stays gracious about it on the page.

From there, the conversation widens into the double standards women in politics face, the King's College London study on Gen Z men's views on marriage and gender roles, the role legacy media played (or didn't) in the campaign, and the case for and against the electoral college. We also dig into Tim Walz, the white working class voters both parties have left behind, and why Alex closed the book with a sense of hope while Ashley... didn't.

This episode is about why women's accounts of their own history matter, especially now, while attempts to rewrite that history are already underway.

“Throughout my career I’ve maintained that people in positions of power must be required to ask of themselves: Who am I not hearing from? Then make it their business to seek those folks out.”

― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

Support the show:

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 Xx, Alex

Share this conversation with a friend who needs to reread this book, or finally pick it up for the first time.

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Do you ever look back at everything you did to seem cool growing up and just have to laugh?

This week I sit down with Maeve Dunigan, author of Read This to Look Cool, a memoir told in essays that had us laughing out loud on one page and completely choked up on the next. Maeve got her start writing sketch comedy in college before publishing satire in the New Yorker, and she brings that same sharp, funny voice to essays covering everything from straightening her hair within an inch of its life to a ruptured appendix at McDonald's to her deep, unwavering love of One Direction. We talked about the sad clown theory of comedy, why she considers chronic lateness a personality flaw, and how she learned that the version of herself she was always trying to be is usually just who she is when she stops trying. We also got the scoop on her already finished second book, a satirical murder mystery about a boy band trapped in a hotel with a killer in their midst. This one made us laugh so much we almost forgot how much heart it has too.

Share this conversation with the friend who was also burning her hair with a straightener in high school.

"I’m trying not to let my insecurity muffle my curiosity." - Maeve Dunigan's essay collection READ THIS TO LOOK COOL

Connect with Maeve Dunigan:

https://www.maevedunigan.com

@maevedunigan

Books Referenced:

READ THIS TO LOOK COOL by Maeve Dunigan

Support the show:

Buy us a book

Buy cute merch

on Patreon

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This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.

 Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do you do when the person who destroyed your family is also, undeniably, a human being?

That's the question at the center of Nadia Bowers's Dear Dealer, and it's the question we sit with for this entire conversation. Nadia's sister Sasha died in 2015 after taking drugs laced with fentanyl, and rather than write a simple story of a villain and a victim, Nadia spent nearly a decade writing directly to the man who sold them to her. We talk about the letter that became a This American Life episode in 2018, the moment a producer emailed her that JJ Abrams wanted to option it as a film, and the year she spent unweaving a seven hundred page draft written entirely as letters before finding the structure that let the book breathe. Nadia talks about reading Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett's memoir about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, years before Sasha died, and tucking away the idea that grief could be written about honestly and lovingly at once. We get into the specific stigma that surrounds women and addiction, the friend whose book on losing loved ones to the opioid crisis helped Nadia think about radical acceptance, and the moment her husband suggested her sister might have been closer to the dealer's side of the story than either of them wanted to admit.

This is a conversation about what we owe the dead, what we owe ourselves, and how you write your way into forgiveness without forcing it. Share this conversation with anyone who has ever loved someone impossible to hold onto.

"I think maybe grief doesn't grow up, doesn't wither. It stays stubborn and young, rooted in the moment it was born." - Nadia Bowers, Dear Dealer

Books referenced:

Dear Dealer by Nadia Bowers

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love and Loss by Stephanie Wittels Wachs

Support the show:

Buy us a book

Buy cute merch

on Patreon

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 Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it take to reclaim a woman's story when history itself was written by people who had every reason to erase her?

That's the question at the center of our conversation with Ariel Lawhon, bestselling author of The Frozen River and her newest novel, The Pirate Queen, about the real life Irish chieftain Grace O'Malley. We talk about why Grace doesn't appear anywhere in official Irish history, and how the only record of her survives in the snide, grudging English state papers written by the empire that feared her. Ariel explains that she's drawn again and again to subversive women because women have always had to be subversive, and because for most of history, only the literate got remembered, which meant most women simply didn't. From Nancy Wake to Martha Ballard to Grace herself, she talks about borrowing personality and instinct from the women in her own life to fill in the gaps history left behind, sometimes literally turning a character into her own mother.

We get into her process too, how she became a devoted plotter out of necessity after having four sons in five years and learning to write in stolen thirty minute increments, and how she still treats a deadline with the gravity of its original meaning, a line you did not want to cross on a battlefield. There's a genuinely magical detour into the children's book she read in an abandoned two room schoolhouse in New Mexico decades later and found sitting in a pile on the floor, the exact copy, waiting for her. And we spend real time on the moment in The Frozen River that readers talk about most, when Martha Ballard delivers her own kind of justice, and what it means that women are so often expected to pull their punches in fiction the way men never are. Ariel and I talk about intuition, the knowing, and trusting it, sometimes because it's the thing that keeps you alive.

Share this conversation with the woman in your life who needs a reminder that the world has always underestimated women like Grace O'Malley, but Grace still soared.

“Because men will never respect you if you try to be like them.” Gráinne lifts her head and meets her mother’s gaze. “Then how will they respect me?” “They won’t,” Maeve says with a shrug. Then she takes her daughter’s face in her hands and brings it close. Until their noses touch and their breath mingles. “Not unless you make them.”

-excerpt from THE PIRATE QUEEN by Ariel Lawhon

Connect with Ariel Lawhon:

@Ariel.lawhon

Books Referenced:

THE PIRATE QUEEN by Ariel Lawhon

THE FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon

CODE NAME HÉLÈNE by Ariel Lawhon

FLIGHT OF DREAMS by Ariel Lawhon

WAIT FOR ME, WATCH FOR ME, EULA BEE by Patricia Beatty

CHRONICLES OF NARNIA by C.S. Lewis

THE HOBBIT by J.R.R. Tolken

LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolken

WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams

BARRIERS TO ENTRY by Ariel Lawhon (short story)

Support the show:

Buy us a book

Buy cute merch

on Patreon

Subscribe on Apple

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This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.

 Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it cost to love a place and a faith that shaped you, even after they've hurt you?

This week I sit down with Emilee Hackney, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir All That's Unseen, to talk about growing up in Tazewell, Virginia, and the long, winding path that took her from a Pentecostal church pew to Harvard Yard to a bestseller list.

We talk about the church she grew up in from age five, the engagement she entered as a teenager, and the slow, painful process of questioning beliefs she'd never been taught to question until she left home for Harvard. Emilee is remarkably generous about her younger self throughout our conversation, and that same compassion runs through every page of her book. We get into the isolation she felt as an Appalachian student surrounded by people who saw her as, in her words, an exotic creature from a shameful corner of the country, and how spite became an unlikely motivator for her education.

Of course... politics come up too. Emilee doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable truths in her research, from Trump's proposed defunding of the Appalachian Regional Commission to his rollback of coal dust health protections, even as she pushed back against easy judgments of the people who voted for him anyway. We talk about fear as a political currency, about algorithms that feed conservatism to anyone who engages with Appalachian content, and about the quiet apathy Emilee believes both parties have shown her home region for generations.

We end with hope, opossums, and the strange, permanent tension of loving a place you can never quite be happy in or without. This is a memoir about reckoning with faith, class, and identity, and Emilee brought every bit of that nuance into our conversation.

Share this conversation with anyone who grew up somewhere they had complicated feelings about leaving.

"A personal essay, as it turned out, was about more than the people and places I knew. It was about how those people and places affected me: how I saw them, how I interpreted them, how I understood them in my greater understanding of the world." - Emilee Hackney's memoir ALL THAT'S UNSEEN

Connect with Emilee Hackney:

@emileehackney

Books Referenced:

ALL THAT'S UNSEEN by Emilee Hackney

STOLEN PRIDE by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Support the show:

Buy us a book

Buy cute merch

on Patreon

Subscribe on Apple

Subscribe on Substack

This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.

 Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.