Life Stories #25: Cynthia Zarin
photo: Sara Bennett
In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Cynthia Zarin explains why An Enlarged Heart isn’t really memoir but rather “personal history,” and from there we talk a bit about how a 400-word magazine item gets expanded into an 8,000-word personal essay, the ghost maps of memory that we carry around the cities where we live, and how the types of children’s books she’s written have changed as her children have gotten older—among other topics.
In reviewing the “tape” of this conversation, I was especially struck by her response to the question about whether there were other personal essayists whose voices she saw as a model to keep in mind while she was working on the essays in this collection: “Of course, and no.” And, too, her refusal to give in to the anxiety of influence and just concentrate on refining the voice with which she felt most comfortable, whoever else it might remind some hypothetical reader of.
Listen to Life Stories #25: Cynthia Zarin (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).
1 March 2013 | life stories |
Life Stories #24: Nick Flynn
photo: Matthieu Bourgeois
In this episode of Life Stories, my podcast series of interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I talk to Nick Flynn about his latest memoir, The Reenactments, which describes (among other things) what it was like to be on the set as his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was turned into the motion picture Being Flynn. (And, of course, we talk about knowing that he was never going to get to keep the original title once the movie got seriously underway…)
The Reenactments also reflects Flynn’s deep interest in the neuroscience of memory, with insights drawn from Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran, David Eagleman, and others. And we talk a bit about the glass flower exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, which Flynn visited as a child and continues to move him as a metaphor for how we try to retain our pasts and carry them over into the present.
Listen to Life Stories #24: Nick Flynn (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).
28 February 2013 | life stories |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
