Next Wednesday, January 3rd, I am launching season 3 of The Book I Had to Write podcast. I’ll feature a new interview with , author of the memoir The Part that Burns and also the inspired founder of the “Writing in the Dark” Substack.
Recently I migrated all of THE BOOK I HAD TO WRITE episodes over to Substack. If you’re new either to this newsletter or to the show, you can check out previous episodes here.
Today, I’m featuring one of those episodes, with the author and editor Sari Botton discussing one of the thorniest challenges with publishing memoir and other personal nonfiction: how to write about others in your life.
It’s probably the most popular interview I’ve ever published (10,000 downloads & counting) and among my all-time favorites as well.
I wish you a healthy and creative 2024! —Paul
Don’t Miss a Single Upcoming Episode!
About this Episode
In this episode of TBIHTW, originally released last year, I talk with
, author of the memoir-in-essays …And You May Find Yourself and founder ofBack around 2010, Sari started an interview series at The Rumpus called “Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me.”
By definition, memoir and essays inevitably include stories about the people in our lives. But figuring out what the lines are – who we feel we can write about and how to do it – that takes time. And lots of real-world practice.
However, when she herself was first working on memoir, Sari says she felt paralyzed by the fear of hurting those closest to her.
Over the course of a dozen years, Sari grappled extensively with how to give herself permission to write about herself and others. As her 2022 memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself..., started coming together during the pandemic, she landed on a different way to understand this issue.
Writing about herself is really an act of defiance, she says. Women, and particularly women writing memoir, are often derided for first-person writing.
Or, as she writes in the foreword to her book: “I remembered that my voice matters. I’m using it now, to take up space, to say, ‘I was here.’”
In this interview, we also talk about Gen X identity, and about Oldster magazine, which was then a newer project for Sari, and is now an extremely-popular Substack aimed at exploring of how we live inside our aging bodies.
Sari Botton is also the editor of two anthologies, the award-winning Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY, as well as the NYT bestselling followup Never Say Goodbye: Writers on their Unshakeable Love for NY.
Check out more of Sari Botton’s work
And You May Find Yourself... available from Bookshop | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
Conversations with Writers Braver than Me by Sari Botton (The Rumpus)
Working on a memoir? Here are some additional resources for how to handle writing about others
A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables of Writing about Other People, by
Other People’s Secrets: An Interview with Kerry Cohen by Paul Zakrzewski, (Brevity Magazine)
The Truth of Memoir: How to Write about Yourself and Others with Honesty, Emotion, and Integrity, by Kerry Cohen Bookshop | Amazon
“Other People’s Secrets” (essay) by Patricia Hampl, collected in I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
Credits
This episode was compiled by Paul Zakrzewski and produced by Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions.
How do you write about yourself and others? with Sari Botton (From the Archives)