Life Stories

In this episode of Life Stories, I chat with Jonathan Wilson about Kick and Run, a “memoir with soccer ball” that begins with his growing up in midcentury London to his life as a father, fiction writer and now memoirist in the United States—with football serving as the common element throughout. So we talk about everything from the unsupervised games of his childhood to his arrival in New York City in 1976 (when Americans didn’t yet know much about the sport) to covering the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker to coaching his own children’s youthful soccer matches.

Oh! And we had this conversation before the group stages for the 2014 World Cup were announced, but I suspect that if we were to talk now he’d be just as pessimistic about England’s chances in Brazil—and maybe even just as politely encouraging about the American team—as he was then. (There’s also a point where, discussing how other international teams often draw more fans to matches than the U.S. squad, I suggest it would be silly for the U.S. to play Portugal at Fenway Park; I realized much later I must have been subconsciously thinking of a Celtic-Sporting friendly that actually did take place there.)

This is the final episode of Life Stories for 2013, and a lot has happened with the podcast these last twelve months! It’s a fantastic opportunity, getting to talk to so many memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, and I’m looking forward to what 2014 has in store. Thanks for listening!

Listen to Life Stories #57: Jonathan Wilson (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 meet up with Beth Lisick, a writer I’ve been a fan of for nearly twenty years since she was doing spoken word performances in clubs in San Francisco. There’s some scenes from that part of her life that make it into Yokohama Threeway and Other Small Shames, but the book also reached back to her early childhood and to fairly recent events—it’s not a conventional memoir so much as a collection of fragmentary moments of embarrassment and mortification and humiliation. Here’s what she told me about how it came together, after she’d become frustrated with the autobiographical writing she’d been doing for mainstream publishers over much of the last decade:

“I was really tired of trying to write about myself in this way where I was creating a character, and I had to make that character funny, yet smart, yet accessible, yet a little bit crazy… suitable for editors at a big publishing house to say, ‘Oh, this is relatable! You seem so nice and a little messed up, a little bit quirky…’ I didn’t like having to present myself in this way that I felt pressured to, so I decided to start writing this novel, and after I began the novel, I thought, okay, I’m never writing about myself again.

And then I remembered: God, I have so many amazing stories that are just little vignettes, little moments really, that aren’t… that never found themselves into essays or big stories, and so it was almost like, for me, the nail in the coffin of autobiographical work, that I was just like, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to come up with everything I can think of about my life that is funny, interesting, weird, terrible and put it in this book and then move on.”

She describes the reaction from her previous publisher: “Oh, you know, I think what we really need is just ten longer, funny essays and if you want to do that, we’d love to publish it.” But she felt that this way the way this book needed to be written, which is why it ended up at the indie publishing house City Lights. We get into some more details of the frustrations she felt with those earlier autobiographical personas (especially the molds that other people wanted to cast her into), then talk about things like the tensions between creative freedom and financial success and what it’s like to define yourself by your failures. Among other topics.

There was a moment earlier this year, in my conversation with Dani Shapiro, where we discussed the idea of memoir as picking at the deepest wounds, and I think you can apply that metaphor to Yokohama Threeway—except that Beth is paying attention to a broad series of cuts and scrapes, leaving any larger narrative unspoken. It’s not quite poetry, but it’s more than simple prose, and its intimacy sneaks up on you.

Listen to Life Stories #56: Beth Lisick (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!)

Life Stories is a podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir. This week’s guest, Nancy K. Miller, teaches classes on memoir as a professor of English and comparative literature at CUNY, so one of the things I made sure to ask her was whether that made it any easier to tackle her own life writing, as seen in Breathless: An American Girl in Paris. “Not really,” she told me, but she also mentioned that her awareness of what literary theorists call “the autobiographical pact” strengthened her own resolve to be truthful in telling her story, even when adding stylistic embellishments.

Mostly, though, we talked about the story she tells of a young woman in the 1960s, fresh out of college, inspired by Jean Seberg in Godard’s Breathless to go to Paris where she attempted to become, as she puts it, someone other than her parents’ daughter—only to find that the more she tries to break that orbit, the tighter she gets locked into it. That eventually led her into a marriage which, I observed, she eventually set about undermining with a fascinating precision through an extramarital affair. Her response was intriguing:

“I know this might seem impossible, but… I had never been in therapy, I didn’t know anyone in therapy, I’d almost say I didn’t know I had an unconscious–and the concept of self-sabotage was not available to me. What I think happened was, because I really was not on to myself, I just kept going along with a certain amount of unhappiness and frustration with no language for it, and I also had no vision, because I was so invested in the idea that I was going to remain in Paris and remain in this situation that I couldn’t see a way out. I didn’t even know I would approach the idea of there being a problem, say, in my marriage because my ex was not someone you could even talk to… talk with about these things, because he didn’t have an unconscious either, as far as I could tell.”

We also talk about how she initially rejected the advice from the therapist she shared this story with as it was happening, and how the blossoming of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s ultimately helped her turn her life around once she stopped worrying about who she was supposed to be and began to contemplate what she could do. Longtime listeners might recall an earlier interview with Jessica Dorfman Jones about the slow destruction of her own marriage and the early glimpses of her life afterwards, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition here, I think—so if you haven’t heard that episode before, I’d encourage to seek it out.

Listen to Life Stories #55: Nancy K. Miller (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!)

Life Stories is a podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir. In this episode, you’ll meet Josh Ruxin, an international aid worker who moved to Rwanda eight years ago to set up a community-based program that would be a model for that nation’s economic recovery. The project was supposed to last two years, but he and his wife are still there—in fact, they’ve opened a restaurant that’s become one of the main attractions of the capital city of Kigali. In A Thousand Hills to Heaven, Ruxin tells the story of what drew him to Rwanda. In our conversation, we discussed his motivations for writing a memoir, which include setting down what he’s learned about creating economic aid programs that can lead to true self-sufficiency:

“On one hand, there are those who believe that if we just do more aid, more big aid, it’s going to solve everything in spite of evidence that most big aid actually hasn’t had much impact over the years. Then on the other side, you’ve got people who say all aid is bad and we just shouldn’t be doing it. And I came to realize, working with the government of Rwanda and of course working in the restaurant, that there is this middle ground–that, actually, there’s a lot we could be doing with aid that could be wildly effective and sustainable, and there’s a lot of lessons that can be learned from the private sector that should be applied through aid programs in order to make both public programs [and] the private sector thrive.”

We also talk about, among other things, the ways that contemporary Rwanda bears the memories of the brutal 1994 genocides—and the effort it’s making to become a different, better nation—and how his wife’s original idea for opening a coffee shop became a much bigger operation that either of them had anticipated. For those of you who’ve been listening to Life Stories for a while, if you enjoyed the interview with international relief worker Jessica Alexander, you’ll also appreciate Ruxin’s perspective on relief efforts in Africa—and, I later found out, the two of them actually come from the same town in Connecticut, and although they didn’t cross paths back then due to age differences, their fathers, both doctors, do know each other. Small world!

Listen to Life Stories #54: Josh Ruxin (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 series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m joined by Wendy Welch, the co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine, a used bookstore and café in southwestern Virginia. Her memoir about opening that store, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, recently came out in paperback, and I asked her about whether she’d been able to forge connections with other bookstore owners during the previous year, when it was a hardcover release. First, she told me about a road trip she and her husband undertook even before the book had come out:

“We went to 42 small towns, looking for bookstores, just looking for bookstores in small towns across America—out to Kansas and back up. It was fairly amazing; we found that about 18 of those small towns were thriving… We started just looking for bookstores, and then we started looking at the small towns themselves… We met a lot of bookstore owners and a lot of small business owners on that trip. Some of them we went back to and visited after the book came out or they were very gracious about promoting it.

“But the big thing was, in the year since then… a lot of people came to the bookstore to visit. Other bookstore owners, but also just people—girlfriend posses, reading clubs, writing clubs—they just wanted to see the bookstore, our bookstore. And they would come and tell us the loveliest stories about their bookstores back in their hometown, then when they went home, they would connect us. So there’s a lot of Facebook friends and there’s actually a support group we started on Facebook for some small bookstores across the midwest.

“We call it the second round of community… We knew that in our community, we were making a community around the bookstore, but that second round of readers and writers and bookstore owners across America and even in some other countries… That’s been absolutely lovely.”

We also talk about, among other things, some of the initial obstacles they faced in trying to start a business in a small community, and about how Wendy’s memoir started out as a record that she set down for herself, in order to make sense of everything that had happened during those early struggles. If you enjoyed the recent Life Stories episode where Ellen Stimson talked about trying to run a general store in rural Vermont, I think you’ll get a big kick out of my conversation with Wendy—and if you haven’t heard that one yet, you might circle back to it after you finish this one!

Listen to Life Stories #53: Wendy Welch (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 brings together two women whose food-inflected memoirs took their titles from the same Julia Child classic: Ann Mah writes about her excursions to find the great regional dishes of France in Mastering the Art of French Eating, while Anya von Bremzen combines the history of her family in the Soviet Union with an exploration of the complex interplay between the party line on Soviet cuisine and the realities of what people ate in Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.

Two very different projects—but as you’ll learn over the course of our conversation, Mah and von Bremzen do share some common ground, from their mutual backgrounds in travel and food journalism to the roles that family and memory play in each of their stories. And, perhaps most importantly, the realization that a great dish isn’t necessarily defined by its ingredients, but by the experience of preparing and enjoying it with others. (You’ll also learn about the distinctive aroma of andouillette, and the favorite dish of Joseph Stalin… both of which, I have to confess, sounded delicious!)

Listen to Life Stories #52: Ann Mah & Anya von Bremzen (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 series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Ellen Stimson and I discuss Mud Season—the story of, as the subtitle says, “how one woman’s dream of moving to Vermont, raising children, chickens and sheep, and running the old country store pretty much led to one calamity after another.” And, as I say at the start of our conversation, this memoir does exactly what it says on the cover.

But Stimson got through all those calamities—including getting in way over her head with the whole country store thing—and, when I got to a point where I could ask what she’d tell other people who, like her and her family, decide they want to make a drastic change in their lives, to do something other than what they’re doing, in a place other than where they are now, her response was clear: “Do it.” (That’s not to say she wouldn’t do things differently if she had a second chance, and we talk about that, too…) Stimson’s life story is a great example of recovering from our mistakes and setbacks and eventually find our way to an ideal path.

Listen to Life Stories #51: Ellen Stimson (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also 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!)

Though billed as a “spiritual autobiography,” Richard Rodriguez’s Darling might more accurately be described as a collection of essays that combine autobiographical elements with contemplation of a set of major religious concepts—from the ways in which 9/11 created in Rodriguez an awareness of the common ground shared by the three “desert religions” (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) to a nuanced unpacking of his friendship with one woman that leads to a new understanding of his relationship as a gay man to straight women and, through them, to the feminist movement and to the Catholic Church in which he remains a faithful member. Once you’ve joined me for a half-hour or so in conversation with Rodriguez, I hope you’ll be inspired to spend more time with him through the printed page.

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Rodriguez and I discuss how he began weaving his personal experiences into his discussions of public issues, what he’s taken from Pope Francis’s first few months in the Vatican, and about his concerns over how his literary style will go over with readers in an age of increasingly short attention spans. That may not be a completely unjustified fear, but I think there’s always going to be an audience for nuanced explorations of how we make sense of, and forge our identities in, the world around us, and Darling is a stirring example of this genre.

Listen to Life Stories #50: Richard Rodriguez (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also 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 Chasing Chaos, Jessica Alexander writes about her experiences as a humanitarian aid worker in places like Rwanda, Darfur, and Haiti—and how she and her coworkers coped with what they were facing in those situations, as well as the emotional and psychological difficulties she faced when she came back to the United States. We talk about that in this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where memoir writers discuss their lives and the art of writing memoir, but we also talk about what she’s observed about the humanitarian aid process and how the resources we send to areas struck by war, famine or natural disaster might be better allocated.

Alexander’s working from New York City these days—and her work includes teaching the next generation of international relief workers; that’s one of the reasons she wrote Chasing Chaos, to provide a ground-level testament to what the life is really like. At some point in your life, she says, you have to assess your priorities: Do you want to focus on the excitement of moving from one hotspot to the next, or concentrate on nurturing stable emotional connections with those closest to you? And yet, she confesses, the urge to jump on a plane and go to the next big assignment can always flare up…

Listen to Life Stories #49: Jessica Alexander (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also 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 reunited with an old friend, Patty Chang Anker, to talk about her memoir, Some Nerve, in which she recounts her effort to face some of her most basic fears—and to reach out to other people who are confronting fears of their own. It didn’t get off to such a great start—confronting her terror of swimming in the open water, she got slammed by an ocean wave and broke a foot—but eventually she found herself surfing on Lake Michigan in the winter and getting in a car with a woman who hadn’t driven in 20 years since she got into an accident her second time behind the wheel.

As I mentioned, Patty’s an old friend, who I met back when she was a book publicist, and so we talked a bit about how, after years of helping other writers face the media and the public, she’s on the other side of the fence now:

“It takes a lot of courage to go out there and feel like you have a story that is worth people’s time, that you feel like you want to take up their valuable time and share a piece of yourself with them, come what may—whether they like it or not. I think most of us don’t want to feel criticized; we want to be embraced and accepted, and when you put yourself out there, you never know exactly what’s going to happen.

“I have always felt passionate about the importance of storytelling, and the importance of connecting with people and sharing ideas. I just feel like we’re put on this earth to connect with each other. Writing is one way of doing it, and speaking is a way of doing it. I just feel like there’s so much competition now for people’s attention that you can’t just rely on your written words alone to reach people. If you have an opportunity to do a radio show, or to stand up and talk to people in your workplace or your church or a bookstore, you should take it, because otherwise you’re choosing to be smaller with your message rather than reaching people.”

Listen to Life Stories #48: Patty Chang Anker (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also 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!)