Life Stories #33: Alexandra Aldrich
photo: Marisa Benedetto
This episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, features Alexandra Aldrich, the author of The Astor Orphan, a look back at the summer she was ten and living with her extended family at Rokeby, an estate in New York’s Dutchess County that’s been in the Astor and Livingston families for the last 11 generations… although, as she vividly recounts, the later generations had very little left of the “Astor fortune” except this sprawling home. It was a weird summer, much of that precipitated by her father, an Ivy League graduate who had no inclination or, really, aptitude for a traditional career—but no longer had the means to be an aristocratic gentleman. Yet, even as he’s scrounging up dented TV dinners from the nearby processing plant to feed young Alexandra, he’s putting his mistress up in another part of the compound…
We talk about that, and about Aldrich’s decision to focus on a very brief portion of what appears to be a remarkable life, and the inspiration she drew from James McBride’s The Color of Water… among a few other topics.
Listen to Life Stories #33: Alexandra Aldrich (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.
4 June 2013 | life stories |
Life Stories #32: Dale Maharidge
photo: Dale Maharidge/Columbia
I spent a good part of my Memorial Day re-listening to an interview I’d conducted with Dale Maharidge for Life Stories about Bringing Mulligan Home, an account of Maharidge’s father’s experiences in the Pacific theater of the Second World War based on interviews he conducted with the men who served with his father—an attempt to understand his father’s post-war life, and by extension his own early life, by finally getting at what had happened to him overseas. It’s a powerful story on several levels, not least of all for how it became, in Maharidge’s words, a “massive therapeutic session” with “a dozen adopted dads.”
In discussing what his father and his father’s comrades witnessed, this conversation by necessity touches upon some of the worst of war, which some of you might wish to take into consideration before listening. I hope you will listen, though; if you were captivated by the way a previous Life Stories guest, Michael Hainey, used his journalistic skills to get at his family’s buried history, you’ll find Maharidge’s story equally compelling. You’ll also be moved by how Maharidge’s interview subjects knew that speaking up about what happened to them—including the multiple blast concussions that, ultimately, explained Maharidge’s father’s condition—would help the young men and women coming home from today’s conflicts likely to have suffered similar brain injuries.
Listen to Life Stories #32: Dale Maharidge (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.
27 May 2013 | life stories |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
