200. Resurrecting the Child You Once Were and the Mother You Had to Let Go featuring Bridey Thelen-Heidel

Bridey Thelen-Heidel joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up with a mom who was addicted to everything including dangerous men, revisiting and writing about a traumatic childhood forty plus decades later, when you have to let go to protect yourself, choosing to balance the heaviness and dysfunction in a story with pop culture and lightness, writing creatively with an audience in mind, speaking for the child you once were, being true to your past experience, learning to let go and trust editorial feedback, knowing the ending of your book as you live it, literary devices and motifs, being a hybrid author and her 3 Cs for rocking book promotion, grieving the mother she never had, and her award-winning memoir Bright Eyes.

Also in this episode:

-trauma bonding with music

-enmeshed relationships

-investing in yourself

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Some Bright Morning I’ll Fly Away by Alice Anderson

-The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

-The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

-Fearless Writing by William Kenower

-Fast-Draft Your Memoir: Write Your Life Story in 45 Hours

by Rachael Herron

-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

-The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

Bridey Thelen-Heidel is a teacher, TEDx speaker, and cast member of Listen To Your Mother NYC. Her memoir, Bright Eyes, earned a Zibby Award “Best Story of Overcoming,” New York City Big Book Award “Distinguished Favorite,” and Runner-up from the San Francisco Writers’ Festival. A fierce LGBT+ youth advocate, Bridey has been celebrated by the California Teachers' Association. She’s also partnered with NAMI and numerous domestic violence and child abuse resource agencies, speaking about defeating our monsters but also learning to live without them.

Connect with Bridey:

Website: bridey-thelenheidel.com

FB: https://www.facebook.com/brighteyesthememoir/

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/brighteyesauthor/

TikTok: @brighteyes_author

TEDx Talk: ROB the Trauma: Steal Back Your Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT6rvXyjsZU&t=152s

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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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Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers