Life Stories

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I chat with memoir writers about their lives and about the art of writing memoir, my guest is Susannah Cahalan, and her book is Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. I first met Susannah at BookExpo America, as part of a panel of buzz authors I moderated—right away, I knew I’d be getting into a fuller conversation as her memoir neared its publication date, and here we are.

I don’t think it’s giving too much away to tell you that Cahalan was afflicted by an extremely rare disease, anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis, in 2009—and that the outward symptoms of this autoimmune disorder were essentially indistinguishable from a mental breakdown, putting the young journalist in a life-threatening situation until one of the handful of doctors who even knew of this disorder’s existence came to evaluate her. Cahalan herself was out of it through the worst of her ordeal, so she went over her medical records, then interviewed her doctors, along with family and friends, to piece together, step by excruciating step, the story of how she nearly died, and then slowly began to make her way back to health.

Listen to Life Stories #17: Susannah Cahalan (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, a series of podcast interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I met with two writers who discuss their adult elationships with their mothers during health crises. In All Gone, New York Times journalist Alex Witchel talks about coping with her mother’s diagnosis of dementia—especially helping her through the medical appointments—as well as the effort to hold on to the memories of the bond that they once shared, in which the family recipes play a significant role. Will Schwalbe, the former editor in chief at Hyperion Books (and founder of Cookstr.com), was also by his mother’s side as she underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer; The End of Your Life Book Club recounts the conversations they had about the books they were reading, and how those conversations strengthened the emotional bond between them in the months before his mother’s death.

In this conversation, we touch upon a variety of subjects, from the differences in coping with a loved one’s death from cancer and coping with a decline brought on by dementia to the ways in which a great editor can help a memoirist draw out the most essential elements of his or her story. Although Alex and Will have had two very different sets of experiences, the core emotional truths in each of their stories speak to a situation that many of us face as we (and our parents) grow older, and the ways in which they’ve chosen to share those stories with us are inspiring.

Listen to Life Stories #16: Alex Witchel & Will Schwalbe (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

For this episode of Life Stories, a series of podcast interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I met up with Gideon Lewis-Kraus to discuss A Sense of Direction, his account of pilgrimages that took him across Spain, around the Japanese island of Shikoku, and finally to a Hasidic religious festival in Ukraine. His father and brother accompanied him on that last trip, and it becomes an opportunity for them to address, as a family, conflicts that extend decades back. As he told me, that last trip turned out to hold a key that unlocked the final version of the book:

“My first drafts of the Spain chapter and the Japan chapter had almost nothing personal. It was really just straight travel. I did not set out to write a memoir. And then I went on this trip with my dad and obviously this was incredibly personal… When I first sent that material to my editor, she said, ‘This is really tremendous material, but this book cannot just swerve into memoir two-thirds of the way through. The challenge for you now is to find a way to draw all of this stuff back through the whole book so that we are prepared for the fact that, ultimately, the book comes to all these conversations with your dad about your family.’

My reaction, at first, I was sort of defensive, probably because I didn’t want to do all that work, was, ‘Well, the stuff that was going on on the Camino and in Japan had nothing do with my dad, so I don’t know how I’m going to draw all this stuff back when it was totally irrelevant.’ And my editor, who’s an incredibly smart woman, said, ‘I doubt that. Why don’t you go back and look at the emails you were writing at the time, and really think about this again?’ Then I went back and saw, oh! Actually, I don’t think it was a coincidence that I talked to my dad for the first time in two years while I was on the Camino… None of that stuff had been in it originally, and… the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized, this whole experience on the Camino had so much to do with my relationship with my dad, and it was completely unclear to me at the time, completely unclear to me immediately afterward, and it really took the two years of writing this book to realize how much of that experience had really been about my dad all along.”

Listen to Life Stories #15: Gideon Lewis-Kraus (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, a series of podcast interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m talking with Anthony Swofford about Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails, a multi-faceted memoir that reveals the downward spiral he went through after the success of his first memoir, Jarhead, and digs into his efforts to repair his relationship with his father—and to say that process doesn’t go smoothly would be a severe understatment.

I was particularly drawn to talking with Swofford because he and I were born less than a month apart, both the sons of Vietnam veterans—and, because my own father died when I was a freshman in college, I feel like Swofford’s accounts of his arguments with his father are like a glimpse into an funhouse version of an alternate universe where I would have been able, in my thirties, to have those conversations, to deal with certain issues differently than I’ve done. (I mean, I feel reasonably well-adjusted; I’m just saying it would’ve been something to be able to have certain conversations somewhere other than inside my head.)

We also discussed what it was like, right after his first book came out, when Swofford experienced the pressure to be “that Jarhead guy,” and his decision not to go back to the Gulf to cover the second war in Iraq. And quite a few other topics besides!

Listen to Life Stories #14: Anthony Swofford (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

My guest for this episode of Life Stories, a series of podcast interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, is Steven Rinella, and we’re talking about Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter. Steve’s books draw upon personal experience, but he’s not just setting out to tell his own story:

“You mentioned talking to memoirists, and… I never, ever think of that word. Everything I do turns out to be personal or have memoir elements, but I sit down and think, ‘I’m going to write a book about buffalo,’ or ‘I’m going to write a book about the history of human hunting,’ and in the end it just… I creep in. I don’t have a lot of self-restraint, so I always find my way into things. Honest, starting this book? I wanted to write a treatise on the meaning and history of hunting, and then once I got into it I realized the best way to do this would be to talk about myself… It just comes out.”

The result is a highly personal book in which Steve continues to reflect on his relationship to nature and the food he and his family consume (he’s strictly a sustenance hunter; everything he kills, he eats or prepares for others). During our conversation, we touched upon—among several other topics—the development of Steve’s hunting ethics when he was growing up in Michigan, what his brothers (with whom he’s spent his entire life hunting) think of his work as a writer and television presenter, and his thoughts on when he’ll introduce his own son to hunting. Oh, and what he’d ask Ted Nugent if he ever gets the chance to talk to him…

Listen to Life Stories #13: Steven Rinella (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, my podcast series of interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I chat with Daniel Smith about Monkey Mind, his “memoir of anxiety.” Naturally, we plunge right into talking about anxiety—one of the particularly interesting things that came up during our conversation was when he explained that he didn’t become anxious revisiting many of the traumatic experiences that defined his early life; the anxiety he felt tended to be more about the frustrations of writing itself.

We also talked about the therapeutic techniques that have proven successful for him, which focus on a mindful awareness of what’s going on in his head when anxiety strikes, and about the surprising role that Botox plays in alleviating one of his worst physical symptoms.

We discussed the importance of building up new patterns of thought that allow anxiety sufferers to keep things in check, because if you don’t, anxiety is really good at biding its time and waiting for the opening to strike. As it happens, Smith wrote an essay for the New York Times earlier this week along a similar theme, inspired by a comment his brother made, which gets reframed as: “Don’t be an idiot.” Specifically, don’t be “an impractical and unreasonable person, a person who tends to forget all the important lessons, essentially a fool, one who willfully ignores all that he has learned about how to come to his own aid.” He mentions the things that have worked for him, acknowledges alternatives that might work for other people, but, ultimately, “Iâ€m not sure it matters what a person chooses—so long as he chooses and keeps choosing.” It’s a tenaciously optimistic mindset that you can feel in every moment of our conversation.

Listen to Life Stories #12: Daniel Smith (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this installment of Life Stories, a Beatrice podcast series of interviews with memoirists about their lives and the art of memoir writing, Alyssa Harad discusses Coming to My Senses, the story of how she developed a love for perfume in her mid-30s and the personal transformation that came with it. Interestingly, as she reveals in the interview, she didn’t set out to write a memoir at first—the original plan was that she’d be editing an anthology of some of her favorite writing from the various perfume fan blogs that fueled her own passion for scents. For various reasons, that project didn’t pan out, but the responses to her own writing in the proposal was encouraging enough that she began to tell her own story…

One of the many interesting aspects to this memoir is the education Harad goes through on her path to becoming a perfume connoisseur—it reminded me in some ways of a conversation I’d had a few years back with Barry Smith, the editor of a collection of essays about wine and philosophy. We’d talked about sense memories, and the ability to separate out multiple “notes” from a sensory experience, and the capacity of language to represent that experience and its components—all of which is relevant to our ability to describe what we experience when we smell a particular perfume. And then there’s the question of how we cultivate our ability to perceive and describe such experiences; as Harad writes, when she first started proffering scents for her husband to sample, they either smelled like vanilla (which he liked) or powder (which he didn’t). And I’ll confess that I’m not quite so much better…although, with a little help from Mrs. Beatrice, I am learning.

(Mrs. Beatrice, by the way, was very impressed with Harad’s mental catalogue of perfumes; she’d given me a few favorite notes to mention, and Harad very quickly came up with matching scents—at least one of which, when found at a store the next day, was judged as excellent indeed.)

Listen to Life Stories #11: Alyssa Harad (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this installment of Life Stories, a Beatrice podcast series of interviews with memoirists about their lives and the art of memoir writing, I chat with Cris Beam, the author of Mother, Stranger, a long essay published digitally by The Atavist, which specializes in long-form narrative nonfiction. As such, some time in our conversation is spent talking about the technological innovations available to Beam in presenting her autobiographical story—from supplementary audio and video to a timeline which puts the events she writes about, after learning from a stranger about her mother’s death spurred her to revisit the memories of her childhood years, into a chronological order, allowing readers to absorb the material from another perspective.

But we also discuss things that all memoir writers have to face, such as telling the story of your relationships when the other people involved make it clear they don’t want to be included, how to communicate a memory or an experience when you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate what has happened, and the fact that finding the answers to questions about your past doesn’t always bring closure and healing…

Cris Beam is the author of Transparent, a journalistic portrait of the transgendered teens she worked with at a Los Angeles support center, and the YA novel I Am J. Her next book, Falls The Shadow: The Crisis of American Foster Care, will be published in 2013.

Listen to Life Stories #10: Cris Beam (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

(On a technical note: This is my first “field recording” for Life Stories, in that we conducted the interview in the back corner of a downtown restaurant. I was quite pleased to learn, through trial and error, that the Audacity sound editing software was able to strip away the greater portion of the background noise, but you will still hear the occasional clang or other such noises—yet not so many, I hope, as to distract from Beam’s personal and professional revelations.)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an installment of Life Stories, the podcast series of interviews with memoir writers about their memoirs and the art of writing about your life. Here’s a conversation with Gary Marcus about Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. Marcus, a psychology professor specializing in language and cognitive development, was 38 years old when he decided to ignore all the previous life experience that suggested he had no talent for playing music and start studying the guitar. It turns out he’s not so bad, after all—and his professional training has led him to some interesting ideas about how we pick up new skills such as learning to play a musical instrument. Strictly speaking, Guitar Zero is only partially a memoir; it’s also got a fair amount of science and interviews with expert guitarists like Pat Metheny.

Listen to Life Stories #9: Gary Marcus (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this installment of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of memoir, my guest is Sandra Beasley, who has actually been featured at Beatrice before—in 2010, her poem “Making the Crane” appeared on the site as a way of introducing readers to her collection I Was the Jukebox. Now we’re talking about Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl, which combines the story of her own life experiences dealing with severe food allergies and a broader medical and cultural overview of what we know about allergies and how we deal with them as a society.

“Food isn’t just sustenance; it’s a way that we bond. And so if you think of all of the times in childhood, all the celebratory events, all the school-organized things—I mean, even the little things, like every month I would win the contest for reading the most books in my class, and my reward was a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. And, you know, in four years of elementary school, nobody ever thought to say, ‘Maybe the girl who’s allergic to pizza, that’s not the best reward…’ Food gets used in all of these different ways, and even now as a grownup, things like traveling on my own, things like dating, things like possibly thinking about having my own children or babysitting my friends’ small kids… it’s all affected by food.”

Listen to Life Stories #8: Sandra Beasley (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).