How I Wrote This

Julia Franck was born in 1970 in East Berlin in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), a part of Germany that, at the time, was behind the Iron Curtain. As a child, she fled with her mother to the West and lived for nine months in a refugee camp, where they were interrogated by agents of the secret police. Five years later, when she was just thirteen, she left her mother’s home and returned to Berlin, this time living on the Western side with friends. 

Julia is the daughter of an actress and granddaughter of a sculptor whose family history has provided the backdrop for some of her most powerful books. The Blind Side of the Heart (called the Blindness of the Heart in the US), tells the story of a woman who abandons her son on a railway platform in 1945 after surviving the horrors of the Second World War. It was a story based on her own father’s childhood, a man she only met at the age of fourteen. The novel won the German Book Prize, the highest honour for literature in Germany, and went on to sell over a million copies. Two more of her books have been translated into English: Back to Back, based on her uncle’s life at the time when the Berlin Wall was being built; and West, which was adapted for the screen.

Julia’s recommended reads:

Herta Müller 

Judith Hermann

Katja Oskamp

Dana Vowinckel

How I Wrote This is presented by KnockAbout Media. Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

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Michelle Syba talks with Pamela about speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and why she is surprised that Richard Dawkins is surprised at the tenacity of religion.

Michelle became a lapsed Pentecostal before she got her PhD from Harvard in English and began teaching literature and religion in the college’s creative writing program. She left the faith not because she disagreed with the doctrine but because she felt herself more moved by Middlemarch than the Bible. In 2018, after attending one of the Banff Centre’s writing workshops, she started working on the stories that became the collection called End Times.

Listen to our conversation to hear how Michelle wrote this book while grappling with a culture she still didn’t fully understand.

An introduction to Season 3 of the podcast, this time featuring authors based in Brooklyn, New York, USA

Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast

Promotional support from the Quebec Writers’ Federation

Adelle Waldman is the author of two novels: Help Wanted, published in 2024, and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. which was named one of the year’s best books in 2013 by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and others. In this illuminating conversation that took place shortly after the US election, Adelle talks about the job she took at a big box store before writing a book about the exploitation of low wage workers; the US legislative proposal she recently drafted for a policy thinktank; and her love of expansive, psychological nineteenth century novels, especially those written by Jane Austin.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1977, Adelle attended Brown University in Rhode Island, worked as a reporter in Connecticut and Ohio, and wrote her breakout novel after moving to Brooklyn with her husband. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. She joined Pamela in the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley and presented by KnockAbout Media. Original music track “Attention to Details” by Tyler K. Rauman. You can listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio and follow us on Instagram @howiwrotethisthepodcast

Joseph O’Neill has written a family history and five novels including This is the Life, The Breezes, Netherland (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Dog (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and most recently, Godwin. He also writes political reviews and essays as well as short stories, several of which have been published in The New Yorker and included as part of his 2018 collection, Good Trouble.

Born in Ireland, Joe moved around as a child, living in Mozambique, Turkey and Iran until his parents settled in the Netherlands. In 1998, he moved to the US after earning his law degree at Cambridge and working as a barrister in the UK. Since 2011, he has been a distinguished visiting professor of Written Arts at Bard College. 

In this conversation, Joe talks about his love of language and sport, his interest in the American bourgeoisie, and how the damaged masculine specimen depicted in his latest novel, Godwin, became such an important political figure. He joined Pamela in the Brooklyn studio shortly after the US election.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley and presented by KnockAbout Media. Original music track “Attention to Details” by Tyler K. Rauman. You can listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hilary Leichter is the author of two novels and a lecturer at Columbia University. In this bonus content, listen to her reading from her latest, Terrace Stories.

For an in-depth conversation with Hilary, see Episode 3.

Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast

Hilary Leichter’s debut novel Temporary, tells the story of a woman’s adventures in the gig economy,  something with which she has years of experience. Now a lecturer at Columbia University, she talks about the precariousness of temp work, the desire for permanence, and how time is an engine that drives fiction. In Terrace Story, her most recent novel, she returns to time in a story of three generations, expanding spaces, a fable, extinction, and the way we so often fear the wrong thing.  

Hilary grew up in New Jersey and settled in New York, where she initially hoped to be an actress. Not until grad school did she realize she preferred creation to interpretation, and began publishing short stories in outlets like  n+1, The New York Times and The New Yorker. In 2020, her novel Temporary was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Prize. Terrace Story, her most recent novel, was named a best book of 2023 by Time Magazine, The New Yorker, and the LA Times. 

Just doors away from the apartment where she lived while writing Terrace Story, Hilary joined Pamela in the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio for this conversation.

Novels on Hilary’s time travel syllabus include:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks

Kindred by Octavia Butler

They Will Drown in Their Mother’s Tears by Johannes Anyuru

The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley and presented by KnockAbout Media. Original music track “Attention to Details” by Tyler K. Rauman. You can listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com