Life Stories

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Elaine Lui talks about Listen to the Squawking Chicken, her story of growing up as a second-generation Chinese-Canadian with a… well, to call her a “domineering” mother is a understatement. After all, Lui is 40 now, and much of her daily routine is still set by her mother’s demands. Some people are going to read this memoir, or hear Lui discuss her life, and look at it as emotionally suffocating, but Lui has a nuanced perspective on the situation—seeing the positive benefits of her mother’s insistence on familial piety even as she addresses the frustrations of, say, having adolescent friends be pushed out of her life because they might be bad influences:

“I don’t want to say that my mother’s method was flawed, but I will say that she is flawed. She’s a complicated, often times hypocritical person. But she taught me to be honest and raw. I couldn’t write a book about her teachings without being as honest and raw as possible, and to do that, I had to point out where she failed—not where people had failed her, but where she herself had failed… She has failed at trust, and friendship, which is a cornerstone of trust, and she’s failed at understanding and empathy.

She has her reasons; she was hardened to life by her parents and all the people who’ve disappointed her along the way, but… those excuses only carry so far, and we make our own good choices. And that’s what she taught me—to make good choices. In certain areas, she didn’t make good choices, and in order for me to accurately tell the story, I really had to not be blind and point out the areas where I learned from her by not being like her.”

Listen to Life Stories #77: Elaine Lui (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m joined by Kelly Cogswell, one of the earliest members of the first chapter of the Lesbian Avengers, founded in New York City in 1992. In Eating Fire, she talks about how this activist group sought not only to instigate improved conditions for lesbian women, but to transform the way they viewed themselves—one of the reasons she decided to become involved, she says, was to bring herself to become more comfortable with identifying as a lesbian:

“It was hard to come out. I didn’t have any trouble really accepting that I liked girls, but understanding what society thinks of you once you kind of accept it yourself, and want to publicly be yourself? That’s a different ball game. It’s hard.”

In our conversation, Cogswell and I discuss the issues and campaigns that brought the Lesbian Avengers together, as well as the internal conflicts that derailed the New York chapter’s momentum even as the organization itself was attracting members around the world—and how what was partially intended as a handbook for organizing direct action campaigns using the Avengers’ work as a historical example took on an increasingly personal component. We also talk about what’s changed for lesbians and the rest of the LGBT community in the two decades since the Avengers assembled, and why things like Russia’s homophobic repressions and Alec Baldwin’s insults matter.

Listen to Life Stories #76: Kelly Cogswell (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Rayya Elias tells us about Harley Loco and a life of “hard living, hair, and post-punk, from the Middle East to the Lower East Side.” We start with Elias’s childhood in Syria, then growing up in Detroit in the late 1960s and ’70s when her family came to the United States, and the desires that led her towards New York City. She talked about how she turned to drug use as a way push aside the internal conflicts she was dealing with over her sexuality and her efforts to break away from her past. The drugs, she says, “unlocked me a little bit, helped me move past all of those barriers that I felt contained me. That was my first experience, and it was amazing. Not only was I able to fit in, but I was also able to be comfortable in my own skin, and able to just be freer.” It didn’t stop there:

“When the harder drugs started happening… here in New York, in the art scene, in the music scene, and I was looking up to see who were the people I was mostly attracted to in my life, they were the people that were out there using drugs and still having these lives that were beyond my imagination…They were doing it, and they seemed f’ed up… and [yet] they seemed to be doing a really job at being everything. And I thought, wow, I can do that!”

She couldn’t, though, and she writes about the long downward spiral that followed, and the slow process of turning her life around. We also talk about how she’d originally set out to turn her story into a movie, when the encouragement and generosity of Elizabeth Gilbert steered her towards memoir.

Listen to Life Stories #75: Rayya Elias (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

On this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, my guest is Damian Barr, and we’re talking about Maggie & Me, his story of “coming out and coming of age in 1980s Scotland.” We discussed his complex feelings towards then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher; on the one hand, he admired her messages of individualism and achievement, yet her economic policies had a devastating effect on his family and the community in which they lived—and the government’s condemnation of homosexuality, and even of the “promoting” of homosexuality, intensified the isolation he endured as he struggled to make sense of his identity.

We also talked about the abuse that young Barr suffered at the hands of a stepfather who’d already guessed at his gayness before he himself had put a name to it, and that got us talking about whether his parents had known as well:

“I remember the first time that somebody called me a poof, and they said it with such venom… More than that, they knew, they knew something about me that I didn’t know, and that was really disturbing. And I remember thinking, what is this thing that I don’t know, and I ran into the house to my mum and said, ‘Mum, mum, mum!” What is it? ‘Jason (or whatever his name was) just called me a poof! What’s a poof?’ And she didn’t say, That’s not you, or Tell me who this Jason is, or anything else; she just said, Don’t you worry about that—it’s okay.

I think she always knew. When I did come out, she wasn’t surprised. She was upset and sad, and she tried to ground me… My dad said, It’s not true. ‘Well, it is true.’ It’s just not true. Come back to me in a few years. And I went back to him in a few years and said, ‘Still true.’

And, among other things, we talk about how Barr came to write a memoir after making attempts at fiction—and why, once he plunged into nonfiction, he decided not to visit Scotland during the writing, or draw upon his journalistic training to interview the other major figures in that time of his life.

Listen to Life Stories #74: Damian Barr (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

I’ve known Annabelle Gurwitch for years, so I was delighted to have her as a guest on Life Stories to talk about her new collection of personal essays, I See You Made an Effort, when she came to New York on her book tour. It’s a wonderful series of reflections on turning 50, from humorous interludes like accompanying her teenage son to a rock concert to more serious stories like a gathering of women who come together to help a dying friend with an assisted suicide. Annabelle also opens up about her own family past in more detail than she’s ever shared in previous books, and, as she said during our conversation, “Luckily, there’s no money that I can be disinherited from.”

As a friend, I’m hugely biased in Annabelle’s favor, but I loved this book—both as a reading experience and as a dramatic monologue that I saw her workshop earlier this year—and I’m thrilled that it’s become a New York Times bestseller. If you haven’t picked it up yet, I hope this episode will convince you to give it a try.

Listen to Life Stories #73: Annabelle Gurwitch (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, NPR host Ophira Eisenberg talks about Screw Everyone, a personal history of, as the subtitle puts its, “sleeping [her] way to monogamy.” Although her first idea for a book was something radically different:

“In the beginning, I actually wanted to write a memoir about failing—I was going to call it Points for Trying, and it was just going to be stories of failing, whether it was in relationships, or in my years of trying to establish myself as a stand-up comic, or with other jobs, or just sort of with life in general. Because, you know, I’ve tried a lot of things in life, and that means I have failed a lot. So I thought that’d be fun. [My agent] was, like, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Who wants to read a book about failing?’ But what if it’s a really funny book about failing?

She was just, like, ‘Listen, you have all these great relationship stories. Why don’t you develop… Switching the lens a little bit and looking at them through that lens.’ And, you know, as a female writer, and from a marketing point of view, writing a book on relationships and love is an easy angle to sell.”

As we discuss, however, a woman writing about relationships and love in a way that unapologetically embraces casual sex comes with some challenges and pushback. We also talk about how Eisenberg’s upbringing in Canada shaped her “not picky” approach to dating, how the man she married felt about seeing their relationship laid out in print from its very beginnings, and the role the Moth storytelling series played in her literary career. Among other things!

Listen to Life Stories #72: Ophira Eisenberg (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

In this episode of Life Stories, I chat with Katherine Bouton, who draws heavily upon her personal experience of hearing loss in Shouting Won’t Help, a consideration of the hearing loss problems that, at varying levels of severity, affect fifty million Americans. Since the book’s first publication in 2013, Bouton has become a vocal advocate on the subject of hearing loss, a development she explained had much to do with how her life changed while she was working on it:

“I evolved emotionally throughout the whole course of writing this book. I started to write the proposal in 2010… I worked all that year through on the proposal, which became… Initially, it was full of anger and self-pity and fury at everybody who didn’t understand what I was going through, what my hearing loss was like. As I came to the point where I was ready to distribute the proposal, my agent said, ‘This is really great, I think you have a selling proposal here, but you gotta find a happy ending for this.’ So I thought really hard about this. What kind of happy ending is there to hearing loss?

But, actually, there is. I realized I had become much, much closer to my friends. I held everybody at bay for a long time because I couldn’t hear them, and I didn’t want to talk about it. Once I started to talk about it, my friendships just became much more intimate… My relationships with my family—my husband, my two now-grown children—had been very frayed by the fact that I couldn’t hear them and I was angry all the time. So as I put the book together, and over the next year and a half as I was writing it, I was also learning to hear better [with a cochlear implant]… So I was relearning to hear at the same time that I was learning to deal with my hearing loss, and I learned a lot about how many mistakes I had made and how bad it is for your own psyche and your physical and social and emotional well-being to deny hearing loss.”

Listen to Life Stories #71: Katherine Bouton (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

Most of the time, Life Stories features interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, but this episode with Julia Angwin is slightly different. Her book, Dragnet Nation, isn’t a memoir exactly—more a combination of reportage and personal experience, as Angwin discusses how much of our day-to-day online activity can be seen by other people, including governments and corporations, and what she did to erase as much of her digital footprint as she could. Naturally, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA entered into our discussion:

“When Snowden came out, more than anything, it was really reassuring to me. Because all the things that he proved—the Verizon phone database, the PRISM program—were things that were basically known but not known, if that makes sense. So people who follow these issues… there had been enough hints and leaks and tips that these were going on that we all believed it was going on, but we felt like we were completely paranoid and crazy. So when he came with this, I thought, ‘Oh, thank God I’m not crazy, right? This is actually happening.’ So it was really helpful for me, for the book, because I had already chosen my topic… but, boy, did he reveal a lot more dragnets that we didn’t know about before.”

Listen to Life Stories #70: Julia Angwin (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Misty Copeland, a principal soloist with the American Ballet Theater, talks about Life in Motion, her story of how, in the midst of a chaotic home life in 1990s southern California, she was guided (not altogether willingly at first) into ballet training and discovered a true aptitude for dance. Despite the emotional turbulence of Copeland’s teenage years, as her mother and her ballet mentor fought over their competing visions of what was best for her, she persevered, and has become one of a handful of African-American principal soloists in ABT’s history.

One of the things we discussed was the hurdles that African-American dancers can face in being considered for the iconic roles of classical ballet, and how Copeland has made notable progress on that front, including a starring performance in Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite in 2012. It’s a problem similar to that actors of color deal with when casting directors simply “don’t see them” for characters who are thought of as “white” by default, and Copeland talked about how she worked up the courage to resist being pigeonholed in ways that would keep her out of the great ballerina roles:

“When you’re in a company as large as American Ballet Theater, with eighty dancers… You don’t come into a company as a young dancer and get a shot to do a leading classical role immediately. An easier way to break you into doing leading roles is to go the contemporary route. So that’s where I was pushed immediately, and they saw that I was really good at it, so I felt like I was being put in this position that I didn’t want to get stuck in. I saw myself as a ballerina, always, and it took me years to be able to say to the artistic staff, ‘Remember I’m a ballerina?’ I trained as a classical dancer; I didn’t train in any other form of dance. It took a lot for me to say that, but I’m happy I did.”

Listen to Life Stories #69: Misty Copeland (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, my friend Megan Hustad discusses More Than Conquerors, in which she recalls growing up in the Caribbean and the Netherlands as the younger daughter of Christian missionaries, how she deliberately chose to embrace a more secular path in her early adulthood, and the middle ground she occupies these days. One of the things we discussed is how she wrote the book to counter the stereotypical reactions some people had upon learning of her evangelical childhood:

“As someone who was raised by people whose faith and spiritual practice leads them to characteristics and ways of being, ways of treating people, that are for the most part pretty admirable, like my parents, like my grandparents… I wanted to honor that. If the only Christians you know of are on TV, or you read about them in the news, or you think somehow that Sarah Palin is a good representative of what a Christian mindset is, then you have no idea. And I wanted to show these people who, by and large, were gracious, who believed in forgiveness, who were generous even in situations in which a purely secular materialist mindset would tell them they would be stupid to be generous, that they should have just tried to preserve what was theirs… and open-mindededness, too. I had fun doing it.”

Our conversation is deeply personal, with a touch of cultural speculation—much like More Than Conquerors itself. I’m biased in favor of my friend, as you might expect, but it’s shaping up to be one of my favorite memoirs so far this year, one that I think will surprise and delight a lot of readers.

Listen to Life Stories #68: Megan Hustad (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)