Life Stories #81: Nicole C. Kear

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photo: Justine Cooper

Nicole Kear was 19 when she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that, at the time it was discovered, was chipping away at her peripheral and night vision and would, she was told, result in more and more loss of vision over the years. Your life is going to change dramatically, her doctor told her; start planning now. So, as she writes in her new memoir, Now I See You, she made an enormous effort to keep her deteriorating eyesight a secret from all but those closest to her for years. In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, we talk about the fears that drove that decision… and about what it was like, after hiding her condition for so long, to put the truth in a book for everyone to see:

“When I was writing it, people would say ‘What’s it about?’ and I would realize that if I told them what the book was about, clearly they would know my whole story. I really didn’t want to tell them, so I would be super evasive and basically not reveal what the book was about, and just, you know, say it was about parenting or something. Essentially lie about the book. It got to the point where my friend, who’s also a writer, was like, ‘You are literally writing a secret book about your secret eye disease! You do want people to buy the book, right? Perhaps that will help you to come to terms with this!’

I remember when the book went up on Amazon, and I linked to it on social media, and all of these people that I knew, the next few days, just were like ‘Wowwwwww. We thought it was fiction, but we went back and saw it was a memoir… is that really true?’

And at first it was excruciating, and then I was like, this is great. It was so the opposite of excruciating, it was really liberating. And now it’s amazing, because everyone knows, and if they want to know any pertinent details, I can refer them to my book, and I don’t even have to worry about having that awkward conversation…”

Listen to Life Stories #81: Nicole C. Kear (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

10 August 2014 | life stories |

Life Stories #80: Ava Chin

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photo via AvaChin.com

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Ava Chin discusses some of the things she’s learned foraging for edible plants within New York City limits—but that’s only half the story of Eating Wildly. She also writes about growing up as the only daughter of an emotionally distant single mother and grandparents who encouraged her to enjoy many different types of foods, and how that&#8212and what happened when she finally connected with her father—shaped her adult relationships. As our conversation turned to some of Chin’s favorite memoirists, we talked about how her method of combining personal reflections with recipes echoes Molly Wizenberg, and then she cited Patti Smith’s Just Kids:

“It’s not just that it’s written by Patti Smith and she’s an amazing writer; it’s not just that she’s Patti Smith and she’s writing about her relationship with Mapplethorpe, or that it’s New York in the ’70s… It’s all those things plus—what she did was she wrote following the heat of the story, the emotional heart of her story. And I think that’s necessary to have readers turn the page and to be thoroughly engaged in the narrative.”

Chin could have simply written about foraging and the ways that it’s affected how she thinks about food and her place in the food economy; after all, she’d been writing on the subject online at the New York Times for several years. But “I didn’t want this book to be a guidebook,” she explained. “I felt like I needed to tell this story in a way that a 700-word blog post, even a series of them, couldn’t.” In doing so, she was able to confront the identity that others had imposed on her from before she was even born and take the steps towards redefining herself in a more fulfilling way.

Listen to Life Stories #80: Ava Chin (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

9 August 2014 | life stories |