169. Boat Baby featuring Vicky Nguyen

Vicky Nguyen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up Vietnamese in America and what this country has meant for someone like her, writing memoir as a public figure, pivoting as a writer, not being too quick to self-edit, managing backstory to keep a memoir propulsive, having conversations with loved ones about shared family history, connecting through vulnerability, book promotion as a whole other job, exhausting every marketing channel, writing about people who don’t necessarily want to be in our memoirs, how we “rememoir” things, digging deep, and her new memoir Boat Baby.

Also in this episode:

-when family remembers things differently

-writing in our voice

-anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S.

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

-Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen

-The Manicurist’s Daughter by Susan Lieu

-Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran

-The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

-The Writer by James Patterson

Vicky is an NBC News senior consumer investigative correspondent and anchor of NBC News Daily. She reports for the Today show, Nightly News with Lester Holt and NBC News Now. She graduated as valedictorian from the University of San Francisco. Vicky lives in New York with her husband and three daughters. Her parents are always nearby.

Connect with Vicky:

Website: https://www.vickynguyen.com/

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

Get Boat Baby: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Boat-Baby/Vicky-Nguyen/9781668025567

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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

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

Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers