Memoir Nation

This week’s show is a meditation on grief and the ways it weaves itself into our writing. Guest Siri Hustvedt says so many profound things about the writing process, about writing after loss, and about how to make sense of a life in the absence of a person who’s been part of your everyday for more than four decades. Hustvedt was married to the acclaimed novelist Paul Auster for 43 years, and her new book, Ghost Stories, is a book about loss, and a book that works to keep Auster alive on the page through his own words. The book has been widely compared to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and for Memoir Nation provides a beautiful portal into the many permutations of loss.
Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, four collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and in 2019 princess asturias prize. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her most recent book is Ghost Stories: A Memoir.
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This week we’re taking a bit of a departure from all things memoir to celebrate independent media with Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman, who bought “The Rumpus” in 2025. We’re supporting their relaunch in this interview, and talking about the indie media landscape, some of their new initiatives, when they knew they were buying the magazine, and also the all-important role their dog Max plays in the new endeavor. We invite you to please support indie media in all the ways you can. Sign up to become a Rumpus member, and as Brooke and Grant suggest in their opening banter, small gestures go a long ways—like “Buy Me a Coffee” where you can tip Memoir Nation for the suggested amount of $5 if you like this or future shows. And thank you!
Founded in 2009, “The Rumpus” is an influential independent online literary magazine dedicated to fostering community and championing diverse perspectives. For over 15 years, the publication has served as a premier platform for emerging and established voices, publishing original fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, comics, and cultural criticism that challenge, provoke, and inspire. Work published in “The Rumpus” has consistently earned the literary world’s highest honors, including Pushcart Prizes, PEN America awards, Best American anthology selections, and Best of the Net recognitions. This week’s guests are the new owners of “The Rumpus,” partners in life and in this collaboration—literary goddess Roxane Gay and brand strategist and visionary Debbie Millman.
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So much of what’s funny stems from what’s terrible and tragic, and the funniest people are also often the darkest ones. This week we explore that truth with comedian Rosebud Baker, who talks with Grant Faulkner about her alcoholism, what happens to women when they become moms, and also her anger—and how she turns that into humor. This is a permission-giving show, as so many Memoir Nation episodes are. We invite anger and tragedy and hardship here, and also always the acknowledgment that writing memoir is hard work. On the trend we talk about the linear memoir and remind listeners that the elevation of one form doesn’t mean the collapse of another. It’s all there for our use, and your memoir knows what it wants to be!
Rosebud Baker is a comedian, actor, and Emmy-nominated writer named to Variety's "10 Comics to Watch" and Vulture's “Comedians You Should and Will Know” lists. She wrote for Saturday Night Live from 2022 to 2025 and won a WGA Award for her work on Inside Amy Schumer. Her Netflix special The Mother Lode premiered in February 2025. Fully Baked is her debut memoir.
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This week’s show is a nuanced exploration of the various and creative ways memoir can be an exploration of identity, culture, and history, and how in unearthing our own stories, we can discover so much about the world around us. Guest Beronda Montgomery has written a thoughtful and “thinking” memoir that has us ruminating on trees, legacy, ancestors, and who gets and is denied credit in our society. We learned so much from reading this book, and gained so much from being in conversation with Beronda. In the book trend this week, we talk about shorter books—the financial and attentional reason shorter might be better.
Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms, like plants, react to external light cues. Beronda is author of two books When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy and Lessons From Plants.
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This week’s episode will be a fast favorite because guest Ronit Plank is speaking the language of a memoir advocate. We get right to the heart of so many things that make memoir special and important. Ronit speaks about coming to memoir kicking and screaming, and how it opened her up, and how memoir makes us all more empathetic. A true memoir advocate, with her own popular memoir podcast, Let’s Talk Memoir, Ronit is a kindred spirit in this space. She’s also a new contributor to the Memoir Nation Community with her quarterly group, Mining the Depths, and she’s delightful to listen to. Let’s talk memoir, let’s talk advocacy—here on this week’s Memoir Nation.
Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Her memoir, When She Comes Back, was named a Book Riot Best True Crime Book, and won a 2022 Book Excellence Award and other indie awards. Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place and her work has been widely anthologized. She teaches memoir for the University of Washington’s Continuum Program, and she’s host of the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir and writes the Substack Let’s Talk Memoir.

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