Life Stories

Life Stories #107: Chavisa Woods

05 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Chavisa Woods' 100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism is a book that, as our British friends say, does exactly what it says on the tin—chronicling 100 s...

Life Stories #106: Rick Moody

05 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In The Long Accomplishment, Rick Moody takes readers through the first year of his second marriage. It was a moment in time where he'd gained signific...

Life Stories #105: Glen David Gold

19 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

I first met Glen David Gold when he was on a reading tour for his second novel, Sunnyside, which happened to be the name of the neighborhood where I l...

Life Stories #104: Minna Zallman Proctor

27 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

I met with Minna Zallman Proctor a while back, shortly after the publication of Landslide, a collection of autobiographical essays that orbit around h...

Life Stories #103: Michelle Stevens

25 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

I first met Michelle Stevens in 2014, back when I was an acquiring editor for a startup book publishing company. We took a meeting with her and her ag...

Life Stories #102: Elizabeth W. Garber

24 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

I spoke with Elizabeth W. Garber the Monday right after Father's Day, an apt time to be discussing her memoir, Implosion. It's a story about growing u...

Life Stories #101: David Hallberg

18 Dec 2017

Contributed by Lukas

I met David Hallberg at the midtown offices of the American Ballet Theater, where they'd set aside a conference room for us to talk about his new memo...

Life Stories #100: Kat Kinsman & Andrea Petersen

07 Dec 2017

Contributed by Lukas

For the 100th episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I've been talking to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I wanted...

Life Stories #99: Lauren Marks

01 Dec 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Lauren Marks was an actress in her late twenties when she went to Edinburgh in 2007 to direct a friend's play in the city's annual Fringe Festival. On...

Life Stories #98: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

21 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

When Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich was in law school, she did a summer internship at a Louisiana law firm. She was firmly against the death penalty, an...

Life Stories #97: Andrew Forsthoefel

20 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

As I was talking with Andrew Forsthoefel in the spring of 2017 about his 4,000-mile walk across the United States, which he writes about in Walking to...

Life Stories #96: James Rhodes

18 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

In the early months of 2017, I met the British concert pianist James Rhodes, who had come to the United States to discuss Instrumental, "a memoir of m...

Life Stories #95: Lauren Collins

17 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Back in 2016, I had a fantastic conversation with Lauren Collins, a staff writer with The New Yorker who had just published When in French: Love in a ...

Life Stories #94: Okey Ndibe

17 Jun 2017

Contributed by Lukas

When Okey Ndibe came to America at the end of 1988 at the invitation of fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe to edit a magazine about African culture, nobody...

Life Stories #93: James Rebanks

15 Jun 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Like many people, I first became aware of James Rebanks through his Herdwick Shepherd Twitter feed, where he posts pictures of his flock and talks abo...

Life Stories #92: Thomas Dolby

13 Jun 2017

Contributed by Lukas

As I mention at the beginning of this episode, my inner 13-year-old was thrilled at the opportunity to talk to Thomas Dolby about his memoir, The Spee...

Life Stories #91: Danielle Trussoni

12 Jun 2017

Contributed by Lukas

I spoke to Danielle Trussoni about her second memoir, The Fortress, in late 2016, just a few days after the news had broken about Brad Pitt and Angeli...

Life Stories #90: Barbara Schoichet

02 May 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Barbara Schoichet got hit with a triple whammy just before her fiftieth birthday—she lost her job at a movie studio in Los Angeles, her girlfri...

Life Stories #89: Jamie Brickhouse

22 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

I've known Jamie Brickhouse for a long time; in his former life as a book publicist, he was someone to whom I'd frequently reach out when I wanted to ...

Life Stories #88: John Kaag

18 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

I spoke to John Kaag about his memoir, American Philosophy, shortly after the 2016 presidential election, so although we did spend a fair amount of ti...

Life Stories #87: Barry Yourgrau

05 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Barry Yourgrau actually lives just around the corner from me in Queens, so it was absurdly easy for us to get together to chat about his memoir, Messâ...

Life Stories #86: Matteson Perry

28 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

After Matteson Perry broke up with his "Manic Pixie Dream Girl," he realized that he'd never really NOT been in a serious relationship since high scho...

Life Stories #85: Kim Addonizio

22 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

I didn't realize until well into my conversation with Kim Addonizio that she'd written (but never published) a full-length memoir, a straightforward n...

Life Stories #84: Emily Winslow

13 Jul 2016

Contributed by Lukas

In the winter of 1992, Emily Winslow was a young theater major getting ready for her next semester when she was followed into her building by a strang...

Life Stories #83: Val Wang

13 Jul 2016

Contributed by Lukas

In her memoir, Beijing Bastard, Val Wang writes about growing up as a Chinese-American and then moving to Beijing in the late 1990s: "I think a lot of...

Life Stories #82: Maria Venegas

17 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

When Maria Venegas was a young girl growing up in Chicago, her father killed a neighbor and in the process of evading the police abandoned her and the...

Life Stories #81: Nicole C. Kear

11 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Nicole Kear was 19 when she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that, at the time it was discovered, was chipping away a...

Life Stories #80: Ava Chin

10 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

As a New York Times columnist, Ava Chin spent several years writing about her experiences foraging for edible plant life within the city limits. But E...

Life Stories #79: Molly Wizenberg

03 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

When Molly Wizenberg's husband told her that he wanted to open a New York-style pizzeria in Seattle, she encouraged him--even though she wasn't convin...

Life Stories #78: Jen Doll

02 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Jen Doll's been to a lot of weddings. Some of them have been great experiences, others not so much. She tells both kinds of stories in her memoir Save...

Life Stories #77: Elaine Lui

24 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Some people will read Listen to the Squawking Chicken and decide that Elaine Lui's mother is not just emotionally manipulative but outright abusive, b...

Life Stories #76: Kelly Cogswell

22 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Kelly Cogswell went to the first meeting of the Lesbian Avengers in 1992 because she wanted to be able to embrace her lesbian identity more confidentl...

Life Stories #75: Rayya Elias

06 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Rayya Elias was born in Syria, then came to Detroit with her family just in time for the riots of the late '60s. As a young adult, she got involved in...

Life Stories #74: Damian Barr

01 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Damian Barr grew up in a small town in Scotland in the 1980s that was hit hard by the policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. As his ...

Life Stories #73: Annabelle Gurwitch

30 May 2014

Contributed by Lukas

I've known Annabelle Gurwitch for years, and one of the things I've always loved about her writing is the ways she's able to find things in her person...

Life Stories #72: Ophira Eisenberg

28 May 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Ophira Eisenberg wasn't interested in long-term relationships, and had taken up a casual approach to dating and sex as a young adult. Then she met a m...

Life Stories #71: Katherine Bouton

26 May 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Katherine Bouton first began experiencing hearing loss in one ear at age 30, and spent years trying to work around the problem without really addressi...

Life Stories #70: Julia Angwin

25 May 2014

Contributed by Lukas

As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, Julia Angwin has spent several years addressing the surveillance of our online activities. D...

Life Stories #69: Misty Copeland

09 May 2014

Contributed by Lukas

When Misty Copeland was growing up, she wanted to be a gymnast, and then she joined her middle school's drill team. She was eventually steered towards...

Life Stories #68: Megan Hustad

30 Apr 2014

Contributed by Lukas

When Megan Hustad was a young girl in the 1970s, her parents took her and her older sister with them to Bonaire, a small island in the Caribbean, wher...

Life Stories #67: Arlo Crawford

11 Apr 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes photo: Kristen Fortier In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their liv...

Life Stories #66: Kelly Corrigan

01 Apr 2014

Contributed by Lukas

After graduating from college in the early '90s, Kelly Corrigan couldn't wait to get out of her family's house and make some adventures for herself on...

Life Stories #65: Su Meck

27 Feb 2014

Contributed by Lukas

In 1988, Su Meck was hit in the head by a low-hanging ceiling fan, further hitting her head on the kitchen counter as she collapsed to the floor. She ...

Life Stories #64: Janet Mock

19 Feb 2014

Contributed by Lukas

When she was a child, everybody had a firm idea about who Janet Mock was--and their idea didn't include womanhood. In Redefining Realness, Mock talks ...

Life Stories #63: Leah Vincent

16 Feb 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Leah Vincent grew up in an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism that keeps women in strictly regimented subservient roles, impressing upon them from the ear...

Life Stories #62: Rebecca Mead

11 Feb 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Rebecca Mead first read George Eliot's Middlemarch as a teenager in England, and she's returned to the novel about every five years or since -- and wh...

Life Stories #61: David Stuart MacLean

06 Feb 2014

Contributed by Lukas

In 2002, David Stuart MacLean snapped into consciousness on a train platform in India -- but he didn't know that at the time. He had no idea where he ...

Life Stories #60: Scott Stossel

26 Jan 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Scott Stossel has been plagued by anxiety since early childhood--for more than a quarter-century, he's tried just about every therapeutic technique, e...

Life Stories #59: Katie Heaney

23 Jan 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Katie Heaney is in her late twenties and she's never been on a date, let alone had a romantic relationship. In Never Have I Ever, she looks back at he...

Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart

18 Jan 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Gary Shteyngart and his family came to New York City from the Soviet Union when he was a young boy, but their parenting style remained, as he describe...

Life Stories #57: Jonathan Wilson

16 Dec 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Jonathan Wilson's Kick and Run is a "memoir with soccer ball" that encompasses (among other things) life as a young Jewish boy in 1950s and 1960s Lond...

Life Stories #56: Beth Lisick

09 Dec 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Beth Lisick decided she was done writing autobiographical essays--but as she started work on her novel, she realized she still had a number of persona...

Life Stories #55: Nancy K. Miller

02 Dec 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Nancy K. Miller went to Paris after graduating college in the 1960s, inspired by Jean Seberg in Godard's Breathless and determined to become somebody ...

Life Stories #54: Josh Ruxin

25 Nov 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Josh Ruxin and his wife moved to Rwanda eight years ago when he spearheaded an effort to create a model program to alleviate that nation's rural pover...

Life Stories #53: Wendy Welch

18 Nov 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Wendy Welch and her husband moved to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, bought a home, and decided to turn it into a used bookstore. They didn't have an easy ti...

Life Stories #52: Ann Mah & Anya von Bremzen

12 Nov 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Ann Mah and Anya von Bremzen both combine personal history with an exploration of national cuisine. When the State Department reassigned Mah's husband...

Life Stories #51: Ellen Stimson

04 Nov 2013

Contributed by Lukas

One day, Ellen Stimson and her family decided that if they could move anywhere, they'd move to Vermont--and then figured why not? It wasn't a smooth t...

Life Stories #50: Richard Rodriguez

25 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

The essays in Richard Rodriguez's Darling explore his relationship to religion. Whether he's visiting Jerusalem to probe the shared foundations of Chr...

Life Stories #49: Jessica Alexander

24 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Jessica Alexander has spent much of the last decade traveling from one international crisis to another, from Darfur to Haiti. In Chasing Chaos, she ta...

Life Stories #48: Patty Chang Anker

23 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Patty Chang Anker created the blog Facing Forty Upside Down to chronicle her efforts to overcome some of the fears she'd had since childhood--fear of...

Life Stories #47: Shahan Mufti

22 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Shahan Mufti is "100% American and 100% Pakistani," born in Ohio after his parents emigrated in the 1970s--and then they took him back a few years lat...

Life Stories #46: Victoria Loustalot

21 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

When Victoria Loustalot was four years old, her father told her mother that he was both gay and HIV-positive. He killed himself when she was 11, befor...

Life Stories #45: Dani Shapiro

14 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Dani Shapiro's written two memoirs, Slow Motion and Devotion. Still Writing isn't like either of those two books, but it does draw upon a memoir-like ...

Life Stories #44: Jesmyn Ward

07 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Jesmyn Ward's memoir is about her own life, growing up in a poverty-stricken Mississippi community, and how she was able to make a better path for her...

Life Stories #43: Phyllis Chesler

06 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

When Phyllis Chesler landed in Kabul with her Afghani husband in the early 1960s, she was ordered to surrender her American passport; soon, she found ...

Life Stories #42: Gary Burton

03 Oct 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Gary Burton discovered the vibraphone at the age of six and it wasn't long before he was playing professionally around the midwest. At the age of 18, ...

Life Stories #41: David Schickler

23 Sep 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout his adolescence, into his early twenties, David Schickler felt what he described as "the Priesthood Ache," a potential call to the Catholic...

Life Stories #40: Jessica Dorfman Jones

16 Sep 2013

Contributed by Lukas

After "living a life of should" for nearly thirty years, Jessica Dorfman Jones threw it all away--including her marriage--when she fell immediately in...

Life Stories #39: MK Asante

09 Sep 2013

Contributed by Lukas

MK Asante grew up in '90s "KIlladelphia." His brother was in jail, his mother was in the middle of a breakdown, and his father had walked out--he neve...

Life Stories #38: Marco Roth

02 Sep 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Marco Roth grew up believing that his father had been accidentally infected with HIV working in a medical research lab; his father's condition loomed ...

Life Stories #37: Periel Aschenbrand

01 Jul 2013

Contributed by Lukas

When her long term relationship finally fell apart, Periel Aschenbrand tried to rebound by simultaneously moving into her dead grandmother's apartment...

Life Stories #36: Alysia Abbott

25 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

When Alysia Abbott was young, her mother died in a car wreck, and her father took her to San Francisco, where he was determined to raise her on his ow...

Life Stories #35: Andrew McCarthy

17 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

We recognize Andrew McCarthy from his movies, but in recent years he's established a second career as a freelance travel writer--and it happened that ...

Life Stories #34: Josh Hanagarne

10 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Josh Hanagarne has an amazing life story--several, in fact. The World's Strongest Librarian is about dealing with Tourette's Syndrome, but it's also a...

Life Stories #33: Alexandra Aldrich

04 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Alexandra Aldrich is a direct descendant of the Astor dynasty, but the family fortune had long since evaporated by the time she was born. She grew up ...

Life Stories #32: Dale Maharidge

28 May 2013

Contributed by Lukas

When Dale Maharidge was growing up, his father kept a photograph of himself with a fellow Marine, taken on a Pacific island during World War II -- but...

Life Stories #31: Dave Bry

15 May 2013

Contributed by Lukas

In his "Public Apology" column for The Awl, Dave Bry atones for some of his worst behavior over the years, clueless blundering and thoughtless slights...

Life Stories #30: Beverly Donofrio

08 Apr 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Beverly Donofrio decided she wanted to enter into a monastic retreat—she had already begun the search for a suitable spiritual community when sh...

Life Stories #29: Mary Johnson

31 Mar 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Mary Johnson spent nearly two decades in Mother Teresa's Missionary of Charity, which she writes about in An Unquenchable Thirst. It's a vivid account...

Life Stories #28: Domenica Ruta

24 Mar 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Domenica Ruta's mom was a drug dealer, and when Domenica herself finally succumbed to addiction, she went full throttle. With or Without You is a powe...

Life Stories #27: Emily Rapp

17 Mar 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Emily Rapp's The Still Point of the Turning World is a powerful memoir about finding out that her infant son had Tay-Sachs disease -- how do you raise...

Life Stories #26: Ashok Rajamani

10 Mar 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Ashok Rajamani's The Day My Brain Exploded is a memoir that does what it says on the cover -- in it, he talks about the arteriovenous malformation in ...

Life Stories #25: Cynthia Zarin

02 Mar 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Cynthia Zarin talks about her essay collection An Enlarged Heart, revealing how a 400-word magazine item gets expanded into an 8,000-word personal ess...

Life Stories #24: Nick Flynn

28 Feb 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Nick Flynn's third memoir is partially about the experience of watching as a movie gets made of his first memoir -- but it's also a meditation on the ...

Life Stories #23: Sarah Manguso

27 Feb 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Sarah Manguso's The Guardians is a powerful story about coming to terms with the death of a close friend, and an attempt to understand how her friend'...

Life Stories #22: Michael Hainey

26 Feb 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Hainey never really understood how his father had died when he was just a kid. And when he grew up, he realized there were a lot of holes in t...

Life Stories #21: Jacob Tomsky

25 Feb 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Jacob Tomsky has spent his professional life making your hotel stay more pleasant... even when you didn't deserve it. (You know who you are.) Heads in...

Life Stories #20: Dara-Lynn Weiss

05 Feb 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Dara-Lynn Weiss became notorious after writing an article for Vogue about how she'd put her 7-year-old daughter on a strict diet. We talk about that b...

Life Stories #19: David Esterly

23 Jan 2013

Contributed by Lukas

In the late 1980s, David Esterly spent a year at Windsor Castle, recreating a wall hanging by the late 17th-century master carver Grinling Gibbons th...

Life Stories #18: Sonia Taitz

28 Dec 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Sonia Taitz's The Watchmaker's Daughter is a story about growing up as the child of two Holocaust survivors -- and not realizing until later in life h...

Life Stories #17: Susannah Cahalan

26 Nov 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Everyone around Susanah Cahalan thought she was having a psychotic breakdown. One doctor looked past the surface details to diagnose anti-NMDA-recepto...

Life Stories #16: Alex Witchel & Will Schwalbe

24 Oct 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Alex Witchel and Will Schwalbe have written two powerful memoirs about being an adult and coping with your mother's deteriorating health. Two very dif...

Life Stories #15: Gideon Lewis-Kraus

09 Sep 2012

Contributed by Lukas

A Sense of Direction is Gideon Lewis-Kraus's account of pilgrimages that took him across Spain, around the Japanese island of Shikoku, and finally to ...

Life Stories #14: Anthony Swofford

06 Sep 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails is a multi-faceted memoir that reveals the downward spiral Anthony Swofford went through after the success of his first m...

Life Stories #13: Steven Rinella

03 Sep 2012

Contributed by Lukas

It's one thing to decide to eat only the meat you've hunted yourself. It's another thing to do that while living in New York City. Steven Rinella make...

Life Stories #12: Daniel Smith

16 Aug 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Daniel Smith opens up about Monkey Mind, his "memoir of anxiety" -- and how the anxiety of writing actually affected him more than revisiting his trau...

Life Stories #11: Alyssa Harad

30 Jul 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Coming to My Senses is the story of how Alyssa Harad transformed her life when she developed a love for perfume in her mid-30s. She didn't set out to ...

Life Stories #10: Cris Beam

09 Jul 2012

Contributed by Lukas

When she learned that her mother died, Cris Beam reflected on the circumstances that had forced them apart, and decided to tell that story in Mother, ...

Life Stories #9: Gary Marcus

03 Jul 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Gary Marcus, a psychology professor specializing in language and cognitive development, was 38 years old when he decided to ignore all the previous li...

Life Stories #8: Sandra Beasley

14 May 2012

Contributed by Lukas

In Don't Kill the Birthday Girl, Sandra Beasley combines her own life experiences dealing with severe food allergies with a broader medical and cultur...