Life Stories

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m talking with Arlo Crawford about A Farm Dies Once a Year, the story of how he quit his job at 31 and moved back to his parents’ organic farm in Pennsylvania, his girlfriend Sarah soon to follow. As we discuss during our conversation, it’s not a permanent move—Crawford couldn’t wait to get off the farm when he was growing up, and though he gained a new respect for his parents’ accomplishment, it’s not the direction he wants to take… nor would Sarah (now his wife) be inclined to follow if it were. I’d also wondered if there were any other books about farming or farm life that had been models for him; he told me about explicitly not wanting to do another story about the vital role farms play in our modern world (“Deeply Rooted,” as he jokingly refers to them), citing writers like William Maxwell and Geoff Dyer instead:

“When I think about the writing that I want to do, it has that edge, it has that irony. That’s the sort of writing that I think I want to produce. And then I sat down to write this book, and it sort of ended up being the exact opposite book than I had in my mind when I started… There’s not a lot of irony in it, for better or worse, and I was surprised about that… The writers that I start with, and I really love and appreciate, is not necessarily what I end up producing myself.”

Listen to Life Stories #67: Arlo Crawford (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!)

It’s been a few weeks since I posted a new episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir—I’ve been settling into a new job—but I’ve been conducting interviews this whole time, and I’m looking forward to presenting them to you in the weeks ahead. First up: Kelly Corrigan talks about Glitter and Glue, in which she recalls a post-college trip to Australia in the early 1990s that compelled her to begin reevaluating the mother she’d just spent her adolescence rebelling against…a process that would continue up to the present day. But as Corrigan explained during our conversation:

“I still don’t totally get her, and we still aren’t natural best friends that sit around and just gab all day. I often feel confounded by her. But I don’t care anymore. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. I’m not trying to change her anymore. I don’t want her to be more outgoing, or more spendy, or more liberal, or more like me. I think that the way she is is fine, and she has every right to be that way.”

Find out what happened in Australia twenty years ago, what prompted Corrigan to write about it now, and how she’s been recreating her mother’s role as the family “glue” with her own children… and more, in this episode of Life Stories

Listen to Life Stories #66: Kelly Corrigan (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!)

If you enjoyed last month’s interview with David Stuart MacLean about his recovery from amnesia, you’ll definitely want to give this week’s episode of Life Stories a listen. Like MacLean, Su Meck suffers from amnesia, and has lost the memories of her first two decades (and then some); she writes about the experience of rebuilding her life in I Forgot to Remember. It’s definitely not a smooth path, and Meck talks frankly about the emotional toll not just on herself, but on her family—and yet, even as her husband was “coping” in the worst ways possible, her young children more than rose to the occasion, becoming her guardians even more, she says, than she was theirs. When her college graduation a few years ago became the catalyst for a Washington Post story, Meck says people immediately started approaching her, wanting her to tell her life story… but while she’s delivered an inspirational memoir, it’s not the heartwarming version they probably had in mind.

Listen to Life Stories #65: Su Meck (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 recorded this episode of Life Stories with Janet Mock the morning after a particularly contentious interview with Piers Morgan, who just couldn’t seem to wrap his head around why it might be offensive to refer to a transgender woman as having been “born a boy.” So one of the first things we did in that conversation was to reframe the issue, discussing what it’s like to have a self-identity that’s so thoroughly contradicted by what the rest of the world expects you to be. The story Mock tells in Redefining Realness isn’t about “becoming” a woman, or “transitioning” into womanhood, but about the struggle to live her life on her own terms, to be the person she knew herself to be.

You can read some of the highlights from our conversation in this Buzzfeed Books feature on Mock—as always, please show your friends that URL, because it ultimately leads to more Life Stories episodes—but I really hope you’ll give this interview a listen. And if you’ve heard the previous episode with Leah Vincent, I think you’ll recognize some common ground in their stories; these two remarkable young women have overcome childhood environments that seemed bent upon preventing them from expressing their true identities, and they’ve fought back hard against that and come out victorious, but at a powerful emotional cost.

Listen to Life Stories #64: Janet Mock (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!)

My guest for this episode of Life Stories, Leah Vincent, grew up in Pittsburgh’s Yeshivish community, an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism that keeps women in strictly regimented subservient roles, impressing upon them from the early age the importance of modesty. In her memoir, Cut Me Loose, Vincent writes about how her family essentially wrote her off as a lost cause during her adolescence, basically because she had exchanged letters with a boy—something that, as I observed during our conversation, barely even registers on the scale of normal teenage rebellion. Here’s her take on how her parents’ beliefs affected her, through not only their actions but her own state of mind:

“Adolescence is so bewildering in the best of circumstances. When I think about my life, so much has changed since the time I write about in the book, some of it’s hard for me to remember, but I can remember so vividly what it felt like to be 14 and to feel so physically alive in my body, and realize that I had to keep it all at bay. I was a regular hormonal teenager and I just felt terrified by myself; I felt betrayed by myself, that my body had developed—I was disgusted by it.

I know that a lot of teenagers who grew up in circumstances that aren’t open face this kind of dilemma also, where you aren’t prepared for this crazy thing that happens to you, and it can be really overwhelming to know how to navigate waking up one day and realizing that you’re different than the person you were your whole childhood. And if the adults in your life aren’t encouraging of your development, emotionally, physically, whatever’s going on for you, it can be incredibly unbalancing and frightening.”

As we discuss, things got much worse before they got better, and she’s still dealing with the emotional consequences to this day—but she’s also able to help others who face the same crises she’s dealt with, through her work with Footsteps, a non-profit organization offering resources to those trying to transition from an ultra-religious environment into mainstream society.

Listen to Life Stories #63: Leah Vincent (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!)

This episode of Life Stories, offers a slight change of pace, as Rebecca Mead‘s My Life in Middlemarch is more than a memoir. In addition to discussing what she’s taken from her various readings of George Eliot’s novel over the course of her adult life, Mead also offers a biographical appreciation of Eliot and a touch of literary criticism. It’s still a profoundly personal book, though, and that comes through in our conversation—highlights of which you can read at Buzzfeed Books.

(If you do mention this episode to friends, be sure to send them the Buzzfeed link; the more traffic they see, the more episodes they’re likely to sponsor… which works out great for all of us!)

Listen to Life Stories #62: Rebecca Mead (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, David Stuart MacLean and I discuss The Answer to the Riddle Is Me, a “memoir of amnesia” that begins with a cold open as MacLean snaps into consciousness with no idea where he is… or even who he is. His condition turns out to have been a particularly strong adverse reaction to the anti-malarial drug Lariam, but having an explanation didn’t make the task of rebuilding his identity any easier. One of the things we discussed is how, though he has a rough sense of life before his amnesia, some memories are lost forever—but then, as he’s discovered, even those of us who haven’t suffered amnesia can forget many of the details of our own lives:

“It’s one of those things that almost becomes an existential question: How do I know what I don’t know? So people will say, do you have all your memory back? And I’m like, I have no idea. I have a pretty good sense of who I am now. I still have people who I bump into who I can’t place who are from before that time, but I’m not sure if that would be normal anyway. I’ve spent time in my home town talking to people for an hour, and not know who they are. I’m not sure if that would be true usually.”

Listen to Life Stories #61: David Stuart MacLean (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!)

This episode of Life Stories is a slight deviation from the usual format of talking to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, in that Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety isn’t, strictly speaking a memoir. But one of the first things we discuss is how, once Stossel started telling people that he was writing a medical and cultural history of the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders framed by his own experiences, they became much more intrigued by the topic. And the finished book is thoroughly suffused with Stossel’s life story, as he lays bare his worst phobias, the effect that they’ve had on his life, and the ways that he and his therapists have sought to bring them under control over the decades.

We met just a few days after Michael Bay’s walk-off in the middle of a trade show presentation when the teleprompter went off track—to Stossel, it sounded like a nightmare he’s lived through before, when his anxiety gets so amped up he just have to leave. The fear associated with public speaking is so great that, as he writes, he has to begin bracing himself hours ahead of time with a regimen of pills and scotch or vodka—not, he concedes, a solution he’d recommend to anyone, but one that enables him to function. Recently, though, he contemplated a change:

“My plan all along has been to do my pre-game regimen, as it were, to make sure I’m appropriately medicated. But, given the topic of the book, at some point I probably oughta try doing it, in effect, pharmacologically naked… to not take anti-anxiety medications, not take a shot of alcohol beforehand. With the thing being, maybe I’ll manage it just fine, and that would be great for me, and people may then wonder, ‘Wait, you don’t seem that anxious,’ which is what they say all the time, or maybe I’ll have a visible manifestation of my anxiety, in which case what I hope I’ll be able to do is say, ‘Well, at least you’re getting your money’s worth, ’cause you can see, this is what it’s like.'”

Listen to Life Stories #60: Scott Stossel (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!)

This episode of Life Stories features Katie Heaney, the author of Never Have I Ever, in which she describes, as the subtitle says, “my life (so far) without a date.” Over the course of our conversation, we talk about how that’s become the case, push back against the cultural stereotypes of women who are virgins in their twenties, and discuss why it’s offensive to assume that a woman who expresses a lack of interest in dating men at a given moment must be a lesbian. Heaney also explains what she means when she says she’s gotten really good at being single:

“I think that that means being patient and not ever feeling like… I mean, I shouldn’t say not ever, because I don’t want to present the idea that I never have insecurities or doubts about the way that I have lived my life so far. But almost never feeling like I should just suck it up and date someone who I’m not even that interested in just to do it. You know, I have insecurities about how I interact with guys and how all that stuff goes, but I don’t really have many insecurities about myself as a person, and I really think that being single helps with that… I wouldn’t advise anyone to just break up with whoever they’re dating just so they can take some time and figure that out, but I think it’s so important for—especially young women—to have some point in their young lives where they are alone and not super actively working on dating someone, because it’s so instructive in telling you what you want to do with your life and what else you want to have besides the guy that’s supposed to be the only thing that we care about.

(Plus: The importance of her friendships with other women, how that influences her reaction to HBO’s Girls…and why she recommends Rebecca Harrington’s novel Penelope.)

Listen to Life Stories #59: Katie Heaney (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!)

Welcome to the first Life Stories of 2014! In this episode, I talk to Gary Shteyngart about Little Failure, his memoir of emigrating to the United States from the Soviet Union as a young child, and the ways he screwed up his life until he turned things around in his late 20s. As we discuss, he’s mined his life for his fiction before, from The Russian Debutante’s Handbook to Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, but this time around he’s confronting it head on, and I can tell you the results are entertaining and illuminating—already, the bar for memoir has been set high this year!

You can read excerpts from the interview at Buzzfeed—the first in what I hope will be a series of appearances for this podcast there. That depends to some extent on how popular it proves, so if you enjoy this episode, and want to tell your friends about it, please consider showing them the Buzzfeed link! Thanks.

Listen to Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart (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!)