Life Stories

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 chat with Shahan Mufti, who brings his personal family history together with the history of modern Pakistan in The Faithful Scribe. Mufti’s parents met on the day of their arranged wedding, which also happened to be the day India launched an air strike against Pakistan; a few years later, they emigrated to Ohio, where Mufti was born—then came back to their homeland after the Iranian hostage crisis began to stir anti-Islamic sentiment in the U.S.

Mufti would eventually return to pursue an American education; today, as a journalist who describes himself as “100% American and 100% Pakistani,” he regularly travels between the two countries, reporting on events in Pakistan for Western media outlets. We talked about his family, and about how he sees Pakistan as the central battlefield in a war between Islamic tradition and Western modernity…even though it’s the first nation to make an explicit attempt to find the common ground between the two at a constitutional level.

Listen to Life Stories #47: Shahan Mufti (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, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Victoria Loustalot opens up about This Is How You Say Goodbye, in which she looks back at her childhood memories of her father—who came out as both gay and HIV-positive when she was four years old—and her attempts as an adult, years after his death, to understand his life better. Loustalot and I spoke shortly after she’d done an event with Alysia Abbott, another Life Stories guest who’s written about having a HIV+ father, and so we discussed why stories like theirs (there’s also the recent memoir by Marco Roth) are appearing with greater frequency now. I also asked her about the alleged “cathartic” aspects of memoir writing:

“Memoir is not an autobiography, it’s not your life story. Memoir is memory, and to me, it’s… If you’re writing a memoir, it’s a reflection on a period of time. Just that memory, just that time, nothing else. And it can’t be too raw. You have to be ready to talk about that memory, and I think sometimes people try to start memoirs before they’re really ready. I don’t think the memoir can do the work of the healing; I think you have to be well on your way to healing… or at least have sort of a solid foundation, that you’ve taken care of some of the superficial emotional heartache of the issue, because when you do sit down to write a memoir, it brings up all these other things that you never even considered.”

Writing This Is How You Say Goodbye “both deepened the loss and set it free,” Loustalot added. “It deepened the loss because I got to know my father better through this book, and I also got to know the people who loved him better, and so getting to know him better, I loved him even more.” Yet that same process also reinforced his absence in her life… and, ultimately, instilled in her a fierce rejection of the sort of secrets that shaped her parents’ early marriage.

Listen to Life Stories #46: Victoria Loustalot (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!)

“The relationship between the teller and the tale is the tale in memoir,” Dani Shapiro proposes in this week’s episode of Life Stories, a podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir. The book that prompted our discussion, Still Writing, isn’t exactly a memoir, although Shapiro does draw extensively upon her own life in her examination of the writer’s life. At the same time, this isn’t a how-to book—you could call it a creative writing handbook, I suppose, but if so it’s about a particular distillation of advice and experience, or advice refined by experience…

Among the topics we touch upon as we talk: How equipped the publishing industry is (or isn’t) to handle an author’s decision to veer away from her expected literary trajectory, whether Shapiro started publishing too early, the metaphor of the memoirist picking at the scars of the memories that cut the deepest, and what Shapiro has learned from her yoga practice that she brings to the daily discipline of writing.

Listen to Life Stories #45: Dani Shapiro (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 reviewing the podcast there!)

Two years ago, I met Jesmyn Ward just after she’d won the National Book Award for her second novel, Salvage the Bones. Up until then, she and her publisher had had a hard time getting the mainstream literary media to take a look at her work—a situation that’s happily improved for her new memoir, Men We Reaped.

In this episode of Life Stories, we talk about why Ward says writing this memoir, which is not just about her life but about the deaths of five young men in the poverty-stricken Mississippi community where she grew up, was the hardest thing she’s ever done, and how one of the greatest opportunities of her life—when one of the men for whom Ward’s mother worked as a maid agreed to pay her tuition at a good private school, setting her on the path to college—also put her in the direct path of some of the worst, most overt racism she’s ever faced (although perhaps not, she observes, as insidious as the systematic racism her brother dealt with in the public school system). And she explains why she hopes her infant daughter will find the world improved when she comes of age…

(Note: When Ward discusses the racism of her high school classmates, she does so with total frankness. I have chosen not to censor her use of a certain word, because it accurately reflects the ugliness and hatred directed at her. I expect hearing that word will offend some of you, but the world Ward describes is real, and ignoring it isn’t going to make it disappear.)

Listen to Life Stories #44: Jesmyn Ward (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.

For this episode of Life Stories, I met Phyllis Chesler to discuss her new memoir, An American Bride in Kabul, which recounts how, after marrying her first husband in the early 1960s, she flew with him to meet his family in Afghanistan, where she was ordered to surrender her passport and forced into purdah under her mother-in-law’s murderous supervision. The months Chesler spent in this state of captivity before she was finally sent back to the United States—near the brink of death—are, she says, a foundational core of her subsequent feminist activism.

This is a story about which many readers may feel ambivalent, once they learn that Chesler continued to maintain a relationship with her ex-husband after her escape and their divorce, once he and his second wife fled to the United States following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. How, one may wonder, does a woman continue to regard her “jailer” favorably as a romantic dreamer, despite his misogynistic and anti-Semitic behavior? Chesler doesn’t shy away from such challenges during our conversation, explaining why she refuses to see herself as a victim—and how her experiences have taught her something about the threat to women in the Islamic world that, she believes, other feminists have yet to fully recognize.

Listen to Life Stories #43: Phyllis Chesler (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.

In this episode of Life Stories, I chat with jazz musician Gary Burton about Learning to Listen. Introduced to the vibraphone at the age of six, Burton was already playing professionally by the time he left high school for the Berklee School of Music–with a record deal from RCA covering his tuition and living expenses. We talk about a professional career that’s spanned a half-century–from a sideman to George Shearing and then Stan Getz to leading his own combos, not to mention a classic duet album with Chick Corea. (In fact, this interview was recorded live at the Blue Note—the dressing room, but still!)

We talk about the changes he’s seen in the music industry and the jazz world, and about his status as one of the first “out” gay musicians in jazz… a status that was inadvertently accelerated during his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross. (And, as he notes during our conversation, over the last 19 years it hasn’t done the slightest damage to his ability to get gigs.)

Listen to Life Stories #42: Gary Burton (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.

In this episode of Life Stories, David Schickler guides us through The Dark Path, his memoir about struggling, in his late teens and early twenties, with the belief that he might be called to the Catholic priesthood—a belief that was hard to reconcile with his sexual appetites (and his desire for one woman in particular). We talk about why he’s decided to tell this story now, twenty years later, and about the issues he has with “super-shiny” religious pop culture, and how he’s negotiated for himself the balance between his faith and the dark subject matter he explores in his fiction and television work; he also talks about those years when he desperately hoped for a sign from God as to what direction his life should take:

“Certainly the Catholic Church would never say, ‘Guess what? Each of you is going to hear from God literally once in your life,’ but that’s how I felt as a child, especially looking at the Bible—I felt like, well, Moses, a lot of these guys, heard the voice of God one time, and then they knew; they knew what they were going to be. That’s sort of what I craved and, to a certain extent, in my prayer, in various different ways, I was looking for… if not literally hearing God’s voice, some kind of a sign, some sort of a shove toward a path or a vocation.”

Things didn’t work out quite that way, as you’ll hear…

Listen to Life Stories #41: David Schickler (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.

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Jessica Dorfman Jones opens up about Klonopin Lunch, a memoir about how, after “leading a life of should” for about three decades, she blew apart her “perfect-on-paper” marriage for an affair with the guy who showed up to teach her how to play guitar. We discussed her willingness to focus on the period during which that affair (and the attendant carousing and drug use) took place, without the pendulum swing back—in effect, casting herself as the villain of her own story.

And yet, as she explains, her recklessness and selfishness also brought about a “self-immolation” out of which she emerged realizing that instead of all the things she’d been doing to earn a living before, what she really wanted to do was write—and we talk about the book she’s working on now, which stems out of women’s reactions to the self-disclosures in this memoir.

Listen to Life Stories #40: Jessica Dorfman Jones (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.

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 spoke to MK Asante about Buck, his account of his teenage years in “Killadelphia, Pistolvania,” and how he pivoted from the life of an adolescent drug dealer to a career as a poet, filmmaker, and now memoirist. One of the first things we discussed is the freshness of the book’s voice; Buck doesn’t feel like a 30-year-old man trying to recapture his 15-year-old voice, but like an authentic 15-year-old talking about life on the edge. Here’s what he told me about that:

“I had to rediscover [that voice], unearth it, to write this book, because that’s one of the things I didn’t want to do when I wrote this memoir… I didn’t want to write a book that was an older guy reminiscing about his childhood or reflecting back on it. I wanted to write it in the present tense. I wanted you to feel what I felt when I felt it, how I felt it. I wanted you to have the epiphanies when I had the epiphanies, I wanted you to fall when I fell… and so the only way to do that, in my mind, was to write it in the first person present tense… Once I found that voice again, it really just flowed.”

We also talk about, among other things, using his mother’s journal’s in the memoir, growing up at the forefront of the Afrocentric movement in the 1980s and ’90s, and the influences of the Beats and hip-hop on Asante’s writing… in all its various forms.

Listen to Life Stories #39: MK Asante (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.

After a summer hiatus, Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, returns! In this episode, I chat with Marco Roth about The Scientists. Roth grew up believing that his father had become HIV-positive in the early ’80s through an accident in the medical research lab where he worked; after his father’s death, his aunt wrote a memoir in which she speculated that he might have contracted the disease “in the more usual way.” We talked about his desire to exact literary “revenge” for creating a version of his father so at odds with his memories… and what he learned along the way to writing that book.

Listen to Life Stories #38: Marco Roth (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.