230. Leaning into the Most Authentic Version of Our Story featuring Mallary Tenore Tarpley

Mallary Tenore Tarpley joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the middle place between acute sickness and full recovery, living with the imprints of a disorder, resisting thinking in black and white, the memoir plus genre, making memoir reportage and research seamless, showing our imperfections on the page, exploring hard truths along with hope, leaning into the most authentic version of our story, calibrating how much to reveal and how much to conceal, not ever arriving at a place of full recovery, holding onto hope for our book project, upholding values of curiosity and authenticity and truthtelling, when the middle place is the story, restorative narratives, and her new memoir SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery.

Also in this episode:

-writing a book of service

-leaving room for readers

-applying for a book-writing grant

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke

Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad

Illness As Metaphor by Susan Sontag

Lost and Found by Katherine Schulz

Mallary Tenore Tarpley is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches journalism classes in the Moody College of Communication and writing classes at the McCombs School of Business.

Her debut nonfiction book, SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery, which was published by Simon & Schuster’s Simon Element explores the under-discussed complexities of eating disorders and recovery from them. The book is equal parts memoir and journalism, and it weaves together Mallary's own narrative with perspectives from clinicians, researchers, and others with lived experience. In 2023, Mallary received a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the science-related reporting in the book, specifically around the neurobiological and genetic aspects of eating disorders. SLIP received the Association of American Publishers’ 2026 Excellence Award for Biological & Life Sciences. It also won first place in the Clinical Medicine category and was a finalist in the Outstanding Work by a Trade Publisher category.

Mallary’s articles and personal essays about eating disorders have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine, and Teen Vogue, among other publications. She maintains a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge, featuring writing tips and best practices.

Connect with Mallary:

Website: mallarytenoretarpley.com

Weekly newsletter: mallary.substack.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mallarytenoretarpley/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallary-tenore-tarpley-6719484/

Facebook: https://facebook.com/mallary.tenore

Get the book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Slip/Mallary-Tenore-Tarpley/9781668035016

–

Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.

She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank

Follow Ronit:

https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(253)

247. Turning Down the Volume on Critical Self-Talk featuring Carol Odell

Carol Odell joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being methodically sexually groomed as a girl during her time working at a stable, sexual grooming as a slow desensitization process, inte...

23 Jun 31min

246. Investigating the Many Selves Within the Self featuring Cinelle Barnes

Cinelle Barnes joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her brain aneurism rupture, writing a memoir two years after brain surgery, the healing modality that is writing personal narrative, mem...

16 Jun 47min

245. Avoiding the Need to Make Memoir Prescriptive featuring Amil Niazi

Amil Niazi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the pressure on children of immigrants, outsiderness, striving to change our circumstances, what happens to women in the workplace after bec...

9 Jun 40min

244. The Project of Looking at Ourselves Honestly featuring Melissa Febos

Melisa Febos joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about romantic obsessions, celibacy as a portal to freedom, living her way into a corner and having to fight her way out, leading with scene and...

2 Jun 39min

243. Moving Toward a Deeper Empathy and Understanding: Jill Christman interviews Ronit Plank

In celebration of the launch of season 8, Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir to interview Ronit about growing up with no blueprint for making a relationship work, fending for ourselves in childhoo...

26 Mai 1h 6min

242. Writing Memoir as an Act of Resistance featuring Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about going through almost a decade of conversion therapy, dismantling the dogma of pseudo science with its added layer of spiri...

19 Mai 41min

241. Waking Up to How Our History Has Controlled Us featuring Dr. Craig Yorke

Dr. Craig Yorke joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the toll of centuries of bigotry, being consumed by race, growing up with psychological financial desperation, living other people’s li...

14 Mai 34min

Season 8 Announcement

After four years of Let’s Talk Memoir, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for being here and share a few exciting updates about what’s ahead for the podcast. In this short episode, I talk about so...

14 Mai 3min