Nancy Au Can’t Sew a Straight Line, or It’s Weird When Death Feels Familiar.

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And The Next Thing You Know

Suzie Sherman

18 episodes

1 week ago

And The Next Thing You Know is a podcast about how our lives go exactly not as we planned them. No matter how hard we cling to our plans for college and career and relationships and creative goals, it's actually the disruptions in our lives, the wrenches and the tangents, that throw us in a different direction and force us to inhabit these beautiful, messy, trauma filled, disappointing, gorgeous, sexy lives, despite ourselves. Find us, and host Suzie Sherman, at nextthingpodcast.com; nextthingpod on fb, gmail, & patreon; soozenextthing on insta & twitter.

The banana peel is by Max Ronnersjö. Theme and interstitial music is by Jon Schwartz.

Personal Journals

Society & Culture

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Personal Journals

Society & Culture

Nancy Au Can’t Sew a Straight Line, or It’s Weird When Death Feels Familiar.

And The Next Thing You Know

1 hour 44 minutes 37 seconds

5 years ago

Nancy Au Can’t Sew a Straight Line, or It’s Weird When Death Feels Familiar.

And The Next Thing You Know podcastEpisode 005: Nancy Au

Nancy and Suzie both have tattoos honoring their parents.

Nancy Au is an author and a writing teacher based in the Bay Area. Her full-length book of fiction Spider Love Song and Other Stories was published in September of 2019, and it’s longlisted for the 2020 PEN America Literary Awards/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.
Nancy and I got together to talk about our shared experience living with dead parents. One of Nancy’s most formative And The Next Thing You Know stories is that her father and mother died within 5 years of each other, marking the beginning and the end of her college years.Nancy Au’s book is Spider Love Song And Other Stories, available at Acre Books. Nancy’s website is peascarrots.com.

Nancy Au is the sweetest podcast guest, y'all!

Nancy is so engaging and delightful to talk to, and this was such a sweet, tender conversation we had.

We also hear Nancy read from her story “How To Become Your Own Odyssey, or The Land of Indigestion,” and we talk about how our intimate losses contribute to the art we make.

Major themes in our conversation

Being friends with your grandparents; the death of parents; experiencing death at a young age; grief; feeling preternaturally old; fantasies about what relationships might have been like; career paths and family obligation; our mother’s new relationships after our fathers died; sharing memories with loved ones and family friends; how grief shapes you; Mahjong; Chinese American experience in San Francisco and the Central Valley of California; Nancy’s work as a writer; fiction; making art.

References in the episode

We just briefly mention that Nancy’s grandmother survived both the Japanese occupation of China (1937-1945) and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She was a teenager during the occupation, and fled China in the 1950s when she was in her 30s.M.A.S.H., Dynasty, Bob’s Burgers, and Murder She Wrote were all referenced.

Nancy mentioned Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, with respects to trauma, and holding our stories in vs.