Life Stories #41: David Schickler

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photo: Martha Schickler

In this episode of Life Stories, David Schickler guides us through The Dark Path, his memoir about struggling, in his late teens and early twenties, with the belief that he might be called to the Catholic priesthood—a belief that was hard to reconcile with his sexual appetites (and his desire for one woman in particular). We talk about why he’s decided to tell this story now, twenty years later, and about the issues he has with “super-shiny” religious pop culture, and how he’s negotiated for himself the balance between his faith and the dark subject matter he explores in his fiction and television work; he also talks about those years when he desperately hoped for a sign from God as to what direction his life should take:

“Certainly the Catholic Church would never say, ‘Guess what? Each of you is going to hear from God literally once in your life,’ but that’s how I felt as a child, especially looking at the Bible—I felt like, well, Moses, a lot of these guys, heard the voice of God one time, and then they knew; they knew what they were going to be. That’s sort of what I craved and, to a certain extent, in my prayer, in various different ways, I was looking for… if not literally hearing God’s voice, some kind of a sign, some sort of a shove toward a path or a vocation.”

Things didn’t work out quite that way, as you’ll hear…

Listen to Life Stories #41: David Schickler (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released.

22 September 2013 | life stories |

Life Stories #40: Jessica Dorfman Jones

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photo: JessicaDorfmanJones.com

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Jessica Dorfman Jones opens up about Klonopin Lunch, a memoir about how, after “leading a life of should” for about three decades, she blew apart her “perfect-on-paper” marriage for an affair with the guy who showed up to teach her how to play guitar. We discussed her willingness to focus on the period during which that affair (and the attendant carousing and drug use) took place, without the pendulum swing back—in effect, casting herself as the villain of her own story.

And yet, as she explains, her recklessness and selfishness also brought about a “self-immolation” out of which she emerged realizing that instead of all the things she’d been doing to earn a living before, what she really wanted to do was write—and we talk about the book she’s working on now, which stems out of women’s reactions to the self-disclosures in this memoir.

Listen to Life Stories #40: Jessica Dorfman Jones (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released.

16 September 2013 | life stories |