This week’s Memoir Nation is the last of our summer best-of round-up episodes. We chose to pair Victoria Chang and Carvell Wallace because these were two of our most heartfelt guests who delved deeply and honestly into some of memoir’s deepest emotions: shame; love; anger; happiness; and more. These interviews were a couple that most touched us for Chang and Wallace’s articulation of process, making connections, and staying with the emotions that move you. We hope you enjoy and Memoir Nation will be back next week with a new season and a new episode. We can’t wait!

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. Some of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has written several children’s books as well. She has received multiple fellowships and prizes and is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

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In this week’s summer celebration of the best of Write-minded and Memoir Nation, we’re partnering Amanda Knox and Lidia Yuknavitch, both of whom speak compellingly on what it means to reclaim your story. Whether you’ve been victimized in some way, as Knox was; or whether you’re ready to take back a particular story in your life, to cast yourself as the hero or heroine of your own narrative, as Yuknavitch has, these two guests will light the way. They show not just that reclaiming is a choice, but also how to do it in life and on the page. Such inspiring guests and role models for memoirists—and humans—everywhere.

Amanda Knox is an author, journalist, and podcast host whose work explores criminal justice, media ethics, and the human experience. She is the author of two memoirs—Waiting to Be Heard and Free: My Search for Meaning—and co-hosts the podcast, Labyrinths.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of two memoirs, The Chronology of Water and Reading the Waves; four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction; and the critically acclaimed collection of short fiction, Verge.The Misfit's Manifesto, based on her popular 2016 TED Talk, “The Beauty of Being a Misfit,” was published by TED Books.

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This week we continue our August celebration of our favorite interviews and themes—and this week we’re going back to two authors who inspired us so much for their advocacy, their championing of non-mainstream characters, and their commitment to the hard work of speaking truth to power. Both of these heartfelt, brave authors had a lot to say about the kinds of characters they want to see in books, why representation matters, and how standing up for what they believe in isn’t so much a choice as a way of being in the world. Very inspiring to bring Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lee Wind’s voices together in this week’s round-up.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall is the author Also an Octopus, illustrated by Benji Davies, The Mermaid, The Witch and The Sea, Squad, illustrated by Lisa Sterle, and Love in the Library illustrated by Yas Imamura with more books forthcoming. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband, son, and their objectively perfect dog.

Lee Wind is a storyteller out to engage, empower, and hold safe space for communities. He is the Chief Content Creator for the Independent Book Publishers Association and the author of multiple books, including the nonfiction titles No Way, They Were Gay? and The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie, the novels Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill and A Different Kind of Brave, and social justice and Queer-history themed picture books. Lee’s popular blog is I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell Do I Read?

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This week marks the beginning of our August round-ups where we choose our favorite episodes from the prior year as we gear up for our new season. We’re revisiting two of our personal favorite authors and subjects: craft. Tune into Jane Alison and Jeannine Ouellette to glean insight and inspiration about your writing and the structures, forms, playfulness, and directions it can take when you’re attuned to all the possibilities and permutations. Don’t miss Janet Fitch’s August 19th class. Details are online here.

Jane Alison is the author of four novels, as well as Change Me, translations of Ovid’s stories of sexual transformation, and Meander, Spiral, Explode, about the craft and theory of writing. Her newest novel is Villa E, about the collision of architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Jeannine Ouellette is the author of the bestselling Substack Writing in the Dark, a creative community of almost 18K people strong. Her lyric memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature, and her essays and short fiction have appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Narrative, North American Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and others.

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This week, our final episode of our seventh season, features John B. King Jr., who served in President Barack Obama's cabinet as the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education. This is a book about mentors who helped King along the way and how he rose in the ranks of public education to eventually be appointed as Secretary. Brooke and Grant discuss what it means to do what you love, and talk about the difference between working to live and living to work. This episode is particularly poignant in light of the current assault against the Department of Education.

Book Alley this week features Garrett Glaser's Fairyboy, which explores the hidden world of gay New York before the Stonewall Riots and you can watch a TV spot here.

John B. King Jr. served in President Barack Obama's cabinet as the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education. He has been a high school social studies teacher, a middle school principal, the first African American and Puerto Rican to serve as New York State Education Commissioner, a college professor, and the president and CEO of the Education Trust, a national education civil rights organization. King is currently the chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY), the nation's largest comprehensive system of public higher education. Both of King's parents were career New York City public school educators. 

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Join us for a conversation about all the ways our creativity is fueled by our stories—the stories of who we are and what we have to tell. Guest W. Kamau Bell tells stories through so many mediums, and this episode explores his approach to creativity, conversation, and advocacy. We have a couple links we mention in the show that we’re dropping here: 1) a link to Kamau’s Substack, specifically a post from earlier this year about Gavin Newsom; and 2) a link to She Writes Press’s STEP contest that we hope you’ll share widely.

W. Kamau Bell is a stand-up comedian, Emmy-winning TV host, filmmaker, author, and podcast creator known for tackling race and social justice with humor and heart. He’s the director of We Need to Talk About Cosby, creator and host of CNN’s United Shades of America, and co-author of Do the Work. Kamau is also the author of the memoir, The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell. He blends activism and storytelling across platforms, making space for honest conversations that challenge, connect, and inspire.

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This week Memoir Nation ventures into waters rarely touched except when speaking “about” the topic. Yep, it’s celebrity memoir.

Jeff Hiller is a Peabody‑winning actor (“Somebody Somewhere”), solo storytelling favorite (“Grief Bacon, Middle Aged Ingenue”), and memoirist whose essays reveal the surprising twists behind his “overnight success”—a path shaped by small‑town Texas, UCB improv, social work, and a late‑blooming acting career. He’s also an improv teacher, a proud pet parent, and married to artist Neil Goldberg.

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Memoir Nation has a touching episode this week with fashion designer Prabal Gurang, who shares about his relationship with his mother, who, in allowing him to pursue his joy, encouraged him also to pursue his dreams of fashion design. We discuss the power of reading a memoir aloud and the emotions that evokes, and about authenticity on the page when you set out just to write the best story you can write—not necessarily coming to your memoir as the best or most trained writer in the world, but rather as someone with a story that matters. Much inspiration here this week!

Prabal Gurang is a famous fashion designer who is also a memoirist. His new book, Write Like a Girl, tells the story of his childhood in Singapore and Nepal, education in India, and career in the U.S. fashion industry, where he was subjected to racial discrimination. A reviewer for Kirkus called the memoir “an insightful and entertaining look into the life of a famous fashion designer.”

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Molly Jong-Fast’s new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, is celebrity memoir meets real literary merit. As fans of Molly’s podcast and political commentary, and also because we had Molly’s mother, Erica Jong, on the show back in 2023, we were eager to connect with Molly to talk about mother-daughter dynamics, the buzz and controversy this book is getting, and—importantly—opening a vein on the page (in the tradition of Erica Jong). This interview explores betrayal, reclamation, dementia, alcoholism, narcissism, the theme of bad mother/bad daughter, and so much more. As Brooke said, this is the kind of nepo baby memoir she can get behind—so come find out why.

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This week Grant and Brooke consider images as enhancements to memoir. Historically publishers have tended to regard images in memoir with reservation, but that’s been changing in recent years. Guest Jennifer Croft’s recent memoir, Homesick, is accompanied by her own Polaroids. When should photos be included, or central? And what are some other memoirs that have been improved by the addition of images? Whether to include images involves many considerations—from your reader, to style, to the interplay between words and image, and Jennifer Croft offers thoughtful insights around this and more.

Jennifer Croft is the author of the illustrated memoir, Homesick, and the translator of Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, for which she won the 2018 International Booker Prize. She won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for Homesick. She is a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review and has published her own work and numerous translations in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, BOMB, and many more.

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