In Episode 5 we’re talking memoir with anthropologist and writer Long Litt Woon. We discuss the tricky questions involved in making a book about yourself. What to put in, and what to leave out, for example. How long after an experience should you wait before writing about it? And is a memoir only about the self, or is it just as much about other people? 

After 32 years of marriage and without warning, Long Litt Woon suddenly became a widow. She was, of course, paralysed by grief. But eventually, almost by accident, she signed up for a beginner’s course in mushroom hunting – and found a way back to life. All this is detailed in her first book, The Way Through the Woods: on Mushrooms and Mourning.

We recorded this interview in early March, during Adelaide Writers’ Week. That now seems a blissfully innocent time - we had no idea then of the scale of the catastrophe unfolding across the world, and that even a week later this interview would have been impossible.
We hope you enjoy this pandemic-free conversation about writing, grief, translation, anthropology and the healing capacity of the natural world.