Life Stories

My guest on this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, is Periel Aschenbrand, and one of the things we talk about is how her new book, On My Knees is a more sustained, personal narrative than her 2005 debut, The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own. We learn about the longterm relationship that went into a tailspin as that first book was coming out, and how—after squatting in her dead grandmother’s rent-controlled Manhattan apartment for nearly a year—Aschenbrand eventually found her way to a healthier relationship while visiting family in Israel.

We also talk about the conversations you have with your close friends when your art is to write about your life and what’s happening in it, and where you set the boundaries for what the public gets to see—and about looking at it all through the lens of humor.

Listen to Life Stories #37: Periel Aschenbrand (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.

My guest on this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, is Alysia Abbott, and Fairyland is “a memoir of my father,” in which she writes not just about her life as the daughter of a single gay father but—drawing upon her father’s personal papers—comes to a better self-understanding of his life before her birth and then, following the death of his wife, in the San Francisco of the 1970s and ’80s. She’s then able to share that understanding with us, and the dual perspective, capturing both her incomplete youthful perspective and her later awareness, is powerful stuff.

During the interview, we talked about Fairyland as a facet of queer history, and I mentioned how, in the 1980s time frame she’s writing about, gay people were still, as I put it, “semi-mythical creatures” to much of America; we knew they were said to exist in the big cities, but it’s not like we’d actually ever met any. (Of course, it turned out that we probably did know some gay people but, thanks to a combination of our own naïveté and their discretionary silence, wouldn’t know it until years later.) She discusses how, even in San Francisco, she didn’t have other examples of gay fathers that she could look to and see that she wasn’t alone which, compounded with ordinary teenage resentment of our parents, created a potent emotional whirlpool.

As I was editing this podcast, and coming across that section, I was reminded of a passage in a recent Beatrice post, where Christopher Bram wishes he and other gay novelists had more straight readers: “We have terrific stories to tell—and theyâ€re not only about sex. Theyâ€re about being different and trying to fit in and being misunderstood—stories that anyone can identify with.” Alysia Abbott’s memoir of life with her father is a wonderful story in that mold.

Listen to Life Stories #36: Alysia Abbott (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 interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Andrew McCarthy talks about The Longest Way Home, which recently came out in paperback. In addition to his acting (and directing) career, McCarthy has in recent years carved out a place for himself as a travel writer for magazines and newspapers and, between the time he and his longtime partner decided to get married and the actual ceremony, he had several assignments lined up that took him away from the Manhattan apartment they share… essentially, he writes about how he went up the Amazon, to the peaks of Kilimanjaro and the streets of Baltimore, to confront himself and his fears about commitment.

But it wasn’t exactly a therapeutic journey, as I found out during our conversation:

“Travel is really about the traveler and not the destination… Once I experienced that, I then actively pursued places that were going to help me, that I thought would help me further explore myself, as opposed to just sightseeing. I was never interested in sightseeing. It became my laboratory, or my university, I suppose… It depends on what ‘therapeutic’ means. Therapeutic also means a sense of relief, and it was more challenging myself, forcing myself into uncomfortable scenarios and situations—throwing yourself into a crucible and coming out changed by it. That’s what I was looking for in travel, and whenever I did that, I came back a better version of myself.”

We also talk about—among other things—his Paul Theroux and Anthony Bourdain fandoms, the degree to which he gets recognized around the world, and the challenges he faced early in his writing career with editors who were skeptical about whether “the guy from Pretty in Pink” could write travel features. (He still runs into editors like that, he confides, but these days, with a solid portfolio in hand, he just walks away; it’s their problem, not his.) As The Longest Way Home proves, though, McCarthy knows how to tell a story about something that matters—and that, rather than the mere fact of an exotic location, is what all great travel writing is really about.

Listen to Life Stories #35: Andrew McCarthy (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.

My guest for this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, is Josh Hanagarne, the author of The World’s Strongest Librarian. It’s a fantastic book with a lot of amazing stories bundled into it: Josh has Tourette’s Syndrome, so he writes about dealing with that, but that aspect of his life also overlaps with the story of his withdrawal from the Mormon faith of his childhood and early adult years and the story of how he zeroed in on weightlifting—and, from there, other forms of intense physical training—to cultivate a strong sense of self-control, and of course the story of his work as a public librarian in Salt Lake City. And none of these stories plays out the way you might expect.

Josh experienced a few instances of Tourette’s-related symptoms while recording this conversation; in many cases, I edited those moments out the same way I excise awkward pauses and “ums” and “you knows” from any other interview. At times, however, just as I can’t always get out every “um,” his vocalizations couldn’t be removed without affecting the clarity of what was being said, so you will hear some unexpected noises during the interview. We actually touched upon this point tangentially during our conversation, when he discusses how he handled his tics in the writing of the memoir, wanting to depict their effects honestly but not wanting them to overwhelm the text—at one point, he essentially says, unless I explicitly say otherwise, just assume any of the tics I’ve mentioned are happening on a regular basis, even if I’m not writing about them.

We also talk about the generosity Seth Godin showed Josh in the early stages of his writing journey, the fan mail he wrote to Cheryl Strayed, and how his library patrons are reacting to his celebrity moment—among plenty of other topics.

Listen to Life Stories #34: Josh Hanagarne (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.

This episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, features Alexandra Aldrich, the author of The Astor Orphan, a look back at the summer she was ten and living with her extended family at Rokeby, an estate in New York’s Dutchess County that’s been in the Astor and Livingston families for the last 11 generations… although, as she vividly recounts, the later generations had very little left of the “Astor fortune” except this sprawling home. It was a weird summer, much of that precipitated by her father, an Ivy League graduate who had no inclination or, really, aptitude for a traditional career—but no longer had the means to be an aristocratic gentleman. Yet, even as he’s scrounging up dented TV dinners from the nearby processing plant to feed young Alexandra, he’s putting his mistress up in another part of the compound…

We talk about that, and about Aldrich’s decision to focus on a very brief portion of what appears to be a remarkable life, and the inspiration she drew from James McBride’s The Color of Water… among a few other topics.

Listen to Life Stories #33: Alexandra Aldrich (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.

I spent a good part of my Memorial Day re-listening to an interview I’d conducted with Dale Maharidge for Life Stories about Bringing Mulligan Home, an account of Maharidge’s father’s experiences in the Pacific theater of the Second World War based on interviews he conducted with the men who served with his father—an attempt to understand his father’s post-war life, and by extension his own early life, by finally getting at what had happened to him overseas. It’s a powerful story on several levels, not least of all for how it became, in Maharidge’s words, a “massive therapeutic session” with “a dozen adopted dads.”

In discussing what his father and his father’s comrades witnessed, this conversation by necessity touches upon some of the worst of war, which some of you might wish to take into consideration before listening. I hope you will listen, though; if you were captivated by the way a previous Life Stories guest, Michael Hainey, used his journalistic skills to get at his family’s buried history, you’ll find Maharidge’s story equally compelling. You’ll also be moved by how Maharidge’s interview subjects knew that speaking up about what happened to them—including the multiple blast concussions that, ultimately, explained Maharidge’s father’s condition—would help the young men and women coming home from today’s conflicts likely to have suffered similar brain injuries.

Listen to Life Stories #32: Dale Maharidge (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 interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I met up with Dave Bry, who, as his subtitle suggests, “grapples with a lifetime of regret, one incident at a time,” in Public Apology—which is, he explains, more than a collection of his columns of the same name at The Awl. Contractually, it had to be 60% all-new material, and that requirement helped him make the transition from a collection of anecdotes where Bry presents himself as the butt of a joke to a life story of substance and consequence.

(Bry cheerfully cops to the “gimmick”-y nature of some of the columns—the notion that the apology is simply the device that enables him to write about a given subject—but here’s the thing: It’s okay to use the tools that are at hand! You’ll also hear about how Bry’s editor, Choire Sicha, recognized the potential book lurking in the column long before Bry himself did…)

Listen to Life Stories #31: Dave Bry (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I had a reunion of sorts with Beverly Donofrio to discuss her third memoir, Astonished. When we met a little over a decade ago, I interviewed her about another memoir, Looking for Mary, which discussed the start of her devotion to the Virgin Mary. This time around, Beverly decided she wanted to enter into a monastic retreat—she had already begun the search for a suitable spiritual community when she became the victim of a serial rapist in the small Mexican city where she lived. So, as we discuss, that rape was not the impetus for her retreat, but it profoundly informed the experience.

We talk about how her time in various monasteries brought about a new understanding of her relationship with Jesus, which has taken on vivid dimensions, and about how she decided to approach the act of spiritual withdrawal:

“When I was going off to the monasteries, I made a promise to myself that I would not be taking notes. I would not be taking notes thinking I’m going to write about this. I knew, since I’m a memoirist, I most likely would, but I did not want to compromise the experience. I wanted it really to truly be just about me being close to God, whatever that meant… It’s kind of like the difference between going on a vacation without a camera and going on a vacation with a camera. I can’t help but write, so I would take notes now and then, but I didn’t really start writing about this… for two and a half, almost three years.”

If you enjoyed the previous Life Stories with former nun Mary Johnson, I think you’ll find my conversation with Beverly equally fascinating. (And if you haven’t heard that other episode yet, I encourage you to check it out!)

Listen to Life Stories #30: Beverly Donofrio (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I meet Mary Johnson, who spent nearly two decades in Mother Teresa’s Missionary of Charity, which she writes about in An Unquenchable Thirst. We talk about the urge to help the poor that drew her to a nun’s life, and whether or not the Missionary gave her the best opportunity to do that; we also discuss the warnings young Mary received against forming “particular friendships” with her fellow sisters, and how those instructions sailed right over her head, leaving her open to be seduced by a manipulative nun later in her career. (I ended up referring to her time with the Missionary as a “career” because I couldn’t think of a better word to describe it…) And we talk about why she decided to leave the order, and what she’s been up to in the years since, including her work as the director of the A Room of Her Own Foundation.

I observed that Johnson had left the order shortly after Christopher Hitchens had published his critique of Mother Teresa and her works, The Missionary Position, and that while she made many of the same points about Mother’s limitations as a social reformer, she also brought a more personal perspective to the subject. She agreed:

“He was right that Mother Teresa took money from anybody—from the Duvaliers, from Castro… She took money from Charles Keating and refused to give to back to the people whom he had cheated to get that large, substantial sum that he donated. Christopher Hitchens had all those facts right, but I don’t think he really understood Mother Teresa’s motivations. He called her a hypocrite, and I don’t think she was. I think she really firmly believed in what she was doing, she was trying her best. She did have limited understanding. She was born in 1910 in Albania; there were a lot of things that she really didn’t grasp. But I never found anything in her that was hypocritical.

“And what was interesting to me about Hitchens was that in 2007—so, ten years after Mother Teresa’s death—he read the letters that she had written to her spiritual directors very early on, letters in which she talks about her doubts, about her soul feeling tormented. Hitchens publicly revised his opinion about Mother Teresa, in that he took back the hypocrite word and said, basically, he thought she was a true believer and she was trying her best and she was… manipulated by the Vatican, was the way he worded it, and I think that was very accurate.”

Listen to Life Stories #29: Mary Johnson (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I talk with Domenica Ruta about With or Without You, in which she describes being raised by a single mom who gave her her first OxyContin pill when she was ten years old, and the full blossoming of her alcoholism in her twenties. We talk about recovery, and the differences between writing drunk and writing sober, and how she found out what her mom—with whom she hasn’t spoken in seven years—thinks of the memoir through the New York Times.

During the conversation, I also made a reference to “the James Frey thing,” which is to say writing a memoir about addiction and recovery in the wake of the A Million Little Pieces controversy, and how enough time has passed that this maybe isn’t as much of an issue as it was in 2006 and immediately after. Ruta had a wonderful response:

“I think for better or for worse, and I think it’s a little of both, he has opened a door for memoirists to really explore what it means to have memory and to retell a story and to do that with craft. Part of the experience of recovery is trying to parse out what of my life is valid, what is invalid? What of my life is an emotional projection, what is real?

“I actually owe a debt, a great debt to James Frey for starting that conversation, as painful as it probably was for him—and I can only imagine—he started a really interesting conversation that I at least was engaged in in my head while I was writing this, which is, you know, when I get to points that I don’t remember clearly, how about I just dive head first into that uncertainty? How about I highlight the gaps in my memory? … I point out the moments when craft is taking over, when I paint something a certain color in the writing of the memoir, because I don’t exactly remember what color it was, but this is the color it needs to be in this truth. I don’t know how he wrote, how people wrote memoirs before that door was opened, so I’m really grateful for that.

Listen to Life Stories #28:: Domenica Ruta (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).