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 separate incidents of sexist behavior that Woods has faced in her lifetime, a pattern of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse (including sexual assault) that starts when she's five years old and continues to the present day. It's a patten that, I speculated, just about any woman should find instantly recognizable, to which Woods replied: "I keep saying a lot of memoirs are written because the author thinks it's an exceptional story. I actually felt like I needed to write this memoir because my story is not exceptional at all, and I wanted to show how pervasive sexism is in multiple spheres of society... I just wanted to show how pervasive it is everywhere and how it affects us constantly throughout our lives."

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 significant control over his addictions, and had extricated from a dysfunctional first marriage—a moment when, as I jokingly said during our conversation, "everything should be coming up Rick Moody." But it didn't go that way; instead, we have an account of a couple grappling with the financial and emotional tolls of fertility treatment, along with various other assaults from the outside world... and, as Moody describes it, a shutdown of his creative faculties so all-encompassing that, eventually, the only thing he could see himself writing about was what was happening to the two of them.

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 lived at the time; that wasn't the only reason we hit it off, but we did, and so I was excited when I found out he was publishing a memoir, I Will Be Complete. I spoke to him in the summer of 2018 about his family history, how he'd tried to deal with it by writing fiction in his twenties, and the path toward eventually finding the right literary structure through which to tell the story. One of the first things I mentioned is how perfectly it illustrated that famous Philip Larkin verse about what your parents do, which eventually brought us to a discussion of how some relationships simply can't be fixed.

We also talked about how working on I Will Be Complete has made Glen a more confident writer, and the newly honed skills he's been able to take back to his fiction. Plus the story of how David Leavitt became his literary archnemesis, until he actually went to a David Leavitt reading...

I met with Minna Zallman Proctor a while back, shortly after the publication of Landslide, a collection of autobiographical essays that orbit around her relationship with her mother. One of the things we discussed was how circumspect she was in the portrayal of her own children, and that prompted me to say something about how we don't really know the author of a memoir or an autobiographical essay, that the "I" we read is a controlled, calibrated literary invention. Proctor challenged that assumption.

"The book is, at best, a portrait of my brain," she told me, "of the way I think of things. In that sense, it's incredibly honest. I don't think that you can write a book like this without a degree of intimacy, a degree of candor and vulnerability—a great degree of those things—and I think that the vulnerability that I express in my personal essay writing... and sometimes my book reviews, too, for that matter... is in that I am laying it all out. This is the way my brain works."

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 agent after reading the proposal for her book, which combined a memoir about surviving childhood sexual abuse with solid explanations of the psychology involved in the dissociative identity disorder that Stevens, among others, developed as a result of that protracted trauma. I was impressed by the proposal, and the meeting, but I wasn't the one who got to make those sorts of decisions, so we ended up passing on the book—fortunately, Scared Selfless wound up with a great publisher who was able to support the book in a way it deserved, so chances are that, sometime in 2017, you might have seen her in a magazine you were reading, or on a daytime talk show...

Happily, she and I were able to keep in touch, so when she came to New York City to do some media, we were able to get together for a frank conversation about—among other things—what dissociative identity disorder is (and what it isn't), about how surviving her trauma motivated her career in psychotherapy, and about what it's like to come forward with a story about surviving sexual abuse in a country where, let's face it, the outcome of the most recent presidential election suggests our concern about sexual assault is not what it should be. I'm delighted to finally be able to share this conversation with you.

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 up in Cincinnati in the 1960s and early '70s in a glass house designed by her architect father—years that were so unsettling to live through that when Garber began speaking to her mother and her two brothers about the abuse they all endured, they initially refused to have anything to do with the topic. Which didn't exactly surprise her, because it was the last thing she ever intended to write about, either.

During our conversation, Garber and I discussed how she had mentally and emotionally blocked out her father's most invasive and abusive behavior while it was happening, and about how friends and neighbors, and even her father's therapist, turned a blind eye to the blatant signs of his mental and emotional condition. We also discussed how her father's most famous project became a landmark metaphor for all the shortcomings of modernist architecture... along with the more personal meaning it accrued within the family.

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 memoir, A Body of Work. It's about his relentless quest for perfection, from his earliest days as a ballet student in Arizona to his role as a principal dancer at ABT (and as the first American to hold a position of comparative stature at the Bolshoi's dance company). But it's also about realizing that, even though he thought he was pushing himself to the limit, he was really holding himself back—and about how a career-threatening injury drove him not just into physical therapy but into a complete overhaul of his emotional approach to his craft.

As I was reading A Body of Work, I started thinking Jim Bouton's classic baseball memoir, Ball Four. Both books are by young men who've dedicated themselves to their field but find themselves coming face-to-face with the prospect of no longer being able to do the thing they love, far sooner than they'd ever anticipated. Fortunately, Hallberg WAS able to make the comeback, and as this episode goes online he's approaching the first anniversary of his return to the stage.

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 to do something special. So, in the spring of 2017, I sat down with Kat Kinsman, the author of Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves, and Andrea Petersen, the author of On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety, for a wide-ranging discussion about their personal experiences with anxiety disorder, about maintaining their mental health while dealing with the pressures of their careers in the media industry—like, what does and doesn't work for them, and why it might or might not work for someone else suffering from anxiety—and about the battle that was then raging to protect our government health care programs. (A battle that we'll undoubtedly have to fight again before too long.)

Sometimes it's hard to believe that it's been nearly six years since I uploaded my first Life Stories interview, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have talked to so many fascinating people about their experiences, and about how they've striven to communicate their experiences to others. There's several more interviews already in the pipeline, and while the schedule has been somewhat erratic at times, I'm hoping to establish a steady rhythm in 2018. I hope you'll continue to join me for those conversations!

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. One night, they went out to a bar, and she was in the midst of a karaoke number when an aneurysm in her brain burst. When she regained consciousness, her ability to communicate with the people around her was massively impaired. A Stitch of Time is the story of her recovery from that aphasia—which was so severe at one point that she lacked a conscious interior voice.

There's a lot of personal story packed into Lauren's memoir, and into this conversation. We talk about her frustration at what felt like a parent's attempt to co-opt her "story," about her then-boyfriend's attempt to essentially treat her brain injury as an opportunity to "reboot" their relationship, and about how the injury forced her to fast-track a re-evaluation of her life that had already begun. As she explains, "It's not unusual for someone twenty-seven in New York to say, 'This is not enough for me. Do I take a dramatic turn?'"

As she regained her command of language, and her writing steadily improved, Lauren began to learn more about the neuroscience behind her condition, and that education makes its way into the memoir as well. And we discuss how she drew inspiration from the life stories of Helen Keller and... Casanova?

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, and then they asked if she would be prepared to work on the case of convicted child murderer Ricky Langley. Attempting to familiarize herself with the case, she was overwhelmed by memories of being molested by her grandfather—and though her career as a lawyer was pretty much over before it had even begun, her future as a writer was just beginning.

In The Fact of a Body, Marzano-Lesnevich writes about her efforts not just to confront what had happened to her and her sister, and how her family had suppressed it, but also to understand Rickey Langley—not to sympathize with him, as we discuss in this interview, but to understand what drove him to commit his crimes... and how his attempts to seek help before then had gone unanswered.

During our conversation, she also described one of the long-term effects of her grandfather's molestation, how even as an adult her body would sometimes "freeze up" in a dissociative state—and how, since the writing of this memoir, that had stopped. It led us to discuss the clich&@33; about memoir writing, which is that it's supposed to be cathartic, a notion she vigorously challenged. We also talked a lot about the true crime genre, from the reasons writers choose to write about certain crimes to the creative effort that goes into developing a narrative rooted in the bare facts of a case.

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 Listen, I asked a kidding-but-not-kidding question: "So, what were you walking away from?" Because you don't set off on foot to talk to random strangers unless there's something you don't want to deal with at home—but, as Andrew explains, the journey actually forced him to confront everything he'd been dealing with since his parents' divorce a few years earlier.

And while he did talk to people that he met along the way, I realized that for the vast majority of his journey, he was out there alone with his own thoughts; as I told him, he could just as easily have gone up to the top of a mountain to meditate, but instead he chose to put one foot in front of the other.

Listening to this conversation again a few months later, I was struck by Andrew's thoughtful determination to really listen to others—to meet them with the full force of his empathy, even when (as we discuss) what they're telling him is rooted in prejudice and hate. In a political climate where pundits make a lot of noise about "listening" to "forgotten" Americans, Andrew's story offers a model for genuine conversation.

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 madness, medication, and music" as the subtitle puts it. Rhodes has a fascinating personal story: He'd played the piano some in his adolescence, then gave it up for a career in financial publishing. When he was twenty-eight, he decided that if he couldn't be a musician, he'd be an agent for musicians, and reached out to one of the best agents around, who agreed to take him on as an apprentice. But then they met, and the agent, having asked Rhodes about his interest in music then inviting him to play his own piano, realized that Rhodes was meant to be a musician. And so he went into training—but, in upending his entire life like this, Rhodes was forced to confront his memories of being repeatedly raped by one of his teachers as a child:

Instrumental is a powerful memoir of surviving sexual trauma and coping with mental illness, but it's also a work of fierce advocacy for the power of music—Rhodes hates the term "classical music"—to make a difference in our lives. And so our frank and uncensored conversation takes on everything from what's wrong with today's classical music scene to the consequences of living in a society that makes an admitted serial sexual assaulter its political leader to the legal battle that threatened to keep this book from ever getting published.

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 Second Language, which is simultaneously a personal story about how Collins fell in love with a French man without really knowing the language—he spoke perfect English, sure, but there was still a significant aspect of his life, his personality, his identity that was closed off to her until she could become fluent—and a broader account of how language helps shape the way we see the world, and how we work to maintain control over that power. (In particular, I'm thinking about how the French government has an académie whose job it is to maintain the purity of the language, coming up with alternatives to pesky English words that threaten to slide into usage.)

How, I wondered, had Collins decided to combine her personal narrative with the reportage and research?

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 thought to tell him about winter. He'd read about winter in American novels, of course, but he just assumed it would be like the annual cold snap in Nigeria, when the temperature could drop as low as sixty-five degrees, and he dressed accordingly. After his flight arrived in New York City, he stepped out of the terminal to look for his escort, and quickly learned what he was in for in the months ahead.

Never Look an American in the Eye is Ndibe's memoir of his first years in the United States, how he gradually acclimated to our climate and our culture—and, too, how he's had to deal with American assumptions about him and his cultural heritage. (For example, although he's an American citizen, who didn't even begin writing fiction until after he'd been in the United States for a while, one of the first editors to see his debut novel on submission rejected it because she didn't see how readers could be interested in an "African writer.") It's all shot through with Ndibe's warm sense of humor, which comes in part from his belief that, as he says, "I've lived a very interesting, rich life in America, [but] it wasn't always like that when it was happening."

"When I wasn't getting paid as an editor," he continues, "when I was working for food, it wasn't 'interesting.' When I had to lie about writing a novel, and had to go and write one, it was painful; it was difficult. When I was stopped by the police, it was terrifying. But as I looked back, it struck me that I had a very rich harvest of American narratives—and this is the quintessential immigrant culture in the world. I thought that the ultimate homage I could pay to America for the gifts that it's given me... is to tell my part of this immigrant drama that is America."

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 about life as a farmer in England's Lake District. When he came to the United States for the first time in the fall of 2016 to promote his two books, The Shepherd's Life and The Shepherd's View, I was excited to chat with him about how Internet fame has changed his life (not much, it turns out) and his role as an advocate for sustainable practices for farmers and consumers alike.

We also dove into his personal history, including a reflection on how writing about nature typically comes from a leisurely perspective. "It doesn't tend to be the person that's pulling the turnips or plowing the field," Rebanks explained. "It tends to be somebody who somehow has enough time and enough money to wander through it and wonder how beautiful it is... And it's beautiful, and it's special, and it's wonderful writing. But it's not the full story of what happens on the land."

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 Speed of Sound, because I’d been a big fan of “She Blinded Me with Science” and the album it came off of, The Golden Age of Wireless, for over three decades. But grown-up me was also excited to learn more about the inspiration Dolby took from the ’70s punk scene in London, and about the lessons he learned about himself and his craft while working as a technology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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 Angelina Jolie's marriage falling apart. The timing was apt, given that Trussoni's book detailed how, in a desperate bid to save her own marriage, she took the windfall she'd earned from her first novel and moved with her husband and two children to a medieval fortress in the middle of France. Spoiler alert: Moving to the other side of the world doesn't actually put everything that's gone wrong behind you.. When I mentioned to Trussoni that her husband's treatment of her read like blatant gaslighting, she told me that she'd never actually heard that term until after she escaped her marriage—to me, that was an important reminder of how easy it can be to find oneself in a relationship this destructive. She also observed that after a childhood shaped by her father's intense PTSD, she was used to and perhaps even attracted to turbulence and drama... and, too, conditioned to sort out her problems on her own, not showing even those closest to her how bad things had gotten and how much she needed help.

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 girlfriend left her, and then her mother died. Don't Think Twice is the story of how she pushed back against all that by learning to ride a motorcycle, then flying out to New York to buy a Harley Davidson and ride it back home across the country. Almost immediately, she got first-hand experience of the camaraderie that exists between Harley drivers, through random acts of kindness on the road... and that was something she wasn't entirely prepared for:

"To be honest with you, I kinda had a death wish. I didn't care whether I came back. I just wanted to divert my mind from all that was going on in my life. And one of the best ways to divert grief is to focus on something else. I focused on staying alive. It's interesting, because I had a death wish, but I was really searching for a life wish. I mean, the great thing about this trip was all I had to think about was staying upright and getting to the next town I was going to stop at, and looking at every nook and cranny in the road, making sure I didn't hit something. It really healed me, because by the time I got back, I thought I could do anything."

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 talk to... well, people like him in his current life as the author of Dangerous When Wet, "a memoir of booze, sex, and my mother," as the subtitle sums it up. So, among the many other things we talk about in this episode, we discuss how the publishing industry was a place where he was able to hide his alcoholism in plain sight for a long time—and, too, how knowing how hard it is to get attention for a good book didn't deter him from writing with an eye to publication. We also talk about his recent efforts converting a 271-page book into a sixty-minute solo theatrical show, as he's recently done for New York City's FRIGID Festival. So there's a lot of stories in the book that aren't in the show—and that, even in a slightly longer conversation than usual, we didn't get a chance to touch upon. You'll just have to read the book to find out about them!

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 time talking about his personal story, and how a rare book collection tucked away in an old building in the woods of New Hampshire helped Kaag make his way back from a profound, life-questioning despair, we also discussed what American philosophy can do to give solace to those of us who were shocked by what looked (and still looks) like the triumph of wrong over right, of evil over good. Philosophy, I think, offers us a guide to how we can live our lives, how we can best respond to the world around us, by getting in touch with what others have called "the better angels of our nature." Kaag recommends essays by James and Henry David Thoreau as starting points for readers interested in what the American philosophical tradition, with its emphases on pragmatism and renewal, can tell us about how to move forward. And he hints at future writings on his part that might follow in those footsteps: "I think that there are lots of times in the history of philosophy where philosophers have had to stake a great deal on their thoughts, and I think that we might be entering one of these times," he says. "I'm in the process of writing another sort of memoir like this one, but... it will have to be in some ways politically oriented, or socially oriented, because I think it's wholly unacceptable for philosophers to ascend into the ivory tower when things are going really nasty."