Life Stories #59: Katie Heaney

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photo: Louisa Podlich

This episode of Life Stories features Katie Heaney, the author of Never Have I Ever, in which she describes, as the subtitle says, “my life (so far) without a date.” Over the course of our conversation, we talk about how that’s become the case, push back against the cultural stereotypes of women who are virgins in their twenties, and discuss why it’s offensive to assume that a woman who expresses a lack of interest in dating men at a given moment must be a lesbian. Heaney also explains what she means when she says she’s gotten really good at being single:

“I think that that means being patient and not ever feeling like… I mean, I shouldn’t say not ever, because I don’t want to present the idea that I never have insecurities or doubts about the way that I have lived my life so far. But almost never feeling like I should just suck it up and date someone who I’m not even that interested in just to do it. You know, I have insecurities about how I interact with guys and how all that stuff goes, but I don’t really have many insecurities about myself as a person, and I really think that being single helps with that… I wouldn’t advise anyone to just break up with whoever they’re dating just so they can take some time and figure that out, but I think it’s so important for—especially young women—to have some point in their young lives where they are alone and not super actively working on dating someone, because it’s so instructive in telling you what you want to do with your life and what else you want to have besides the guy that’s supposed to be the only thing that we care about.

(Plus: The importance of her friendships with other women, how that influences her reaction to HBO’s Girls…and why she recommends Rebecca Harrington’s novel Penelope.)

Listen to Life Stories #59: Katie Heaney (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!)

23 January 2014 | life stories |

Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart

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photo: Brigitte Lacombe

Welcome to the first Life Stories of 2014! In this episode, I talk to Gary Shteyngart about Little Failure, his memoir of emigrating to the United States from the Soviet Union as a young child, and the ways he screwed up his life until he turned things around in his late 20s. As we discuss, he’s mined his life for his fiction before, from The Russian Debutante’s Handbook to Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, but this time around he’s confronting it head on, and I can tell you the results are entertaining and illuminating—already, the bar for memoir has been set high this year!

You can read excerpts from the interview at Buzzfeed—the first in what I hope will be a series of appearances for this podcast there. That depends to some extent on how popular it proves, so if you enjoy this episode, and want to tell your friends about it, please consider showing them the Buzzfeed link! Thanks.

Listen to Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart (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!)

18 January 2014 | life stories |