Let’s Talk Memoir28 Nov 2023

60. Confronting and Capturing the Complexity of Our Parents on the Page featuring Priscilla Gilman

Priscilla Gilman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about parentification and hypervigilance in children, toggling between the child character and adult narrator, confronting and capturing the complexity of parents on the page, negotiating our inner critic, and her new memoir The Critic’s Daughter.

Also in this episode:

-writing about close family members

-good writing is rewriting

-negotiating feedback and reviews

Books mentioned in this episode:

Faith, Sex, Mystery by Richard Gilman

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

Priscilla Gilman is the author of two memoirs, The Anti-Romantic Child (Harper, 2011) and The Critic’s Daughter(Norton, 2023) and a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College. The Anti-Romantic Child received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, was selected as one the Best Books of 2011 by the Leonard Lopate Show and The Chicago Tribune, and was one of five nominees for a Books for a Better Life Award for Best First Book. Nick Hornby called The Critic’s Daughter “beautiful: honest, raw, careful, soulful, brave and incredibly readable," and Kiese Laymon declared: “The Critic’s Daughter is an exquisite and rare example of how the memoir needs as much inventiveness in scope and form as our most lush fiction and poetry…I’ve read few books in my life as skillfully executed and willfully conceived as The Critic’s Daughter.” Gilman’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Slate, REAL SIMPLE, the Washington Post, O, the Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

Connect with Priscilla:

Website: www.priscillagilman.com

X: www.twitter.com/priscillagilman

Facebook: www.facebook.com/priscillagilmanauthor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/priscilla.gilman/

–

Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa 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 a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot and was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Housatonic Book Awards, and the Book of the Year Awards. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, and her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award. She is creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and lives in Seattle with her family where she is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/

More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/

Connect with Ronit:

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

https://twitter.com/RonitPlank

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

Background photo: Canva

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

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

Episoder(263)

257. Unburdening Ourselves From Decades of Shame featuring Kim Murphy

Kim Murphy joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about unburdening herself from decades of shame, her often absent and unpredictable mother, what we owe or don’t owe our parents at the end of the...

1 Sep 40min

256. The Catharsis of Memoir: From Resentment to Understanding featuring Jason Allen

Jason Allen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up working poor on Eastern Long Island with an alcoholic father, the threat of different types of violence, his father’s quickness ...

25 Aug 46min

255. The Relief That Comes From Sharing the Toughest Thing featuring Dr. Kara Zivin

Dr. Kara Zivin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal mental health and her own her mental health crisis during pregnancy and postpartum, how she became a patient and professor in t...

18 Aug 42min

254. Writing the Hard Stuff featuring Nicole Walker

Nicole Walker joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how we talk about current traumas and past traumas in ways that don’t retraumatize us, making our work matter to others, giving ourselves...

11 Aug 34min

253. Getting to the Story Beneath the Story featuring D/Annie Liontas

D/Annie Liontas joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about suffering 3 brain injuries in one year and how that changed their relationship to their body and to the world, post-concussive syndrome...

4 Aug 31min

252. Pulling Readers Inside Our Experience with Specificity and Particularity featuring Rachel Weaver

Rachel Weaver joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the mysterious illness she lived with for nearly two decades, seeing 30-40 doctors and spending 18 years in the medical system, the toll ...

28 Jul 37min

251. Mining Opening Pages for Impact featuring Deborah K. Shepherd

Deborah Shepherd joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the large age gap in her first marriage and having mixed feelings about the love story of her youth, the titillation of secrecy and hu...

21 Jul 35min

250. Leaning into Bursts of Memory featuring Samina Najmi

Samina Najmi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up under a military dictatorship in Pakistan, the colonial legacy in South Asia, writing about migration, race, and gender, teachi...

14 Jul 35min