Let’s Talk Memoir with Ronit Plank & Guests

"Ronit is the Terry Gross of Memoir." - Nic Sims

Let’s Talk Memoir is a podcast for memoir lovers, readers and writers, featuring interviews with memoirists about their writing process, their challenges, and what they’ve learned about sharing the most personal of narratives. Hosted by writer, speaker, and memoirist Ronit Plank, each episode of this limited series highlights different aspects of the memoir writing experience, writing tips, and inspiration.

Recently on Let’s Talk Memoir

Episode 250 ft. Samina Najmi

Episode 250 ft. Samina Najmi

Samina Najmi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up under a military dictatorship in Pakistan, the colonial legacy in South Asia, writing about migration, race, and gender, teaching as a secular Muslim woman in the aftermath of 911, living...

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About The Host

Ronit’s essays and fiction have been featured in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in both the 2021 Best Book Awards and the 2021 Book of the Year Award and a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and will be published in 2022. She is host and producer of the podcasts And Then Everything Changed and The Body Myth.

More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir.

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"Finally, a memoir-themed podcast with an educated, skilled host who welcomes a spectrum of writers. The topics are so helpful to me in this stage of my writing career. I look forward to each new episode. Thank you, Ronit Plank. "

"Ronit is an excellent interviewer who brings in an array of guests demonstrating wisdom and vulnerability in navigating some of the hardest situations in life. This podcast is a guiding light."

"This is my go-to show about writing. It offers both depth and conciseness. Every episode I've listened to has added to my understanding and appreciation of modern memoirs."

"Ronit is an expert interviewer. Every episode of her show is packed with great conversations and so much wisdom. This is a must-listen for every memoirist."

"Ronit Plank is shining a bright, white spotlight on memoir. Her intimate knowledge of the genre coupled with excellent interviewing skills allow memoir writers, lovers of memoir, and anyone who's ever wondered what memoir is all about to gain insight. Her guests reveal vulnerable truths along with craft tips, their journeys to publishing, and books that inspired them. This is a professional, insightful podcast that's not to be missed."

“Wonderful in every way. Excellent interviews from an outstanding Interviewer."

"MFA by Podcast! Such great insight from hundreds of memoirists! My fav!"

Other Episodes

Episode 249 ft. Jenny Lisk

Episode 249 ft. Jenny Lisk

Jenny Lisk joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing her husband to an aggressive brain cancer and becoming a widowed parent, learning how to do a job she never asked for, being a resource for widowed parents, feeling like you're doing grieving wrong,...

Episode 248 ft. Courtney Kocak

Episode 248 ft. Courtney Kocak

Courtney Kocak joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her Hollywood misadventures, facing coercion and exploitation as a young woman, systemic structures we bump up against, fighting the patriarchy, having compassion for the girl she was, landing on essays...

Episode 247 ft. Carol Odell

Episode 247 ft. Carol Odell

Carol Odell joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being methodically sexually groomed as a girl during her time working at a stable, sexual grooming as a slow desensitization process, interrupting the patterns created from unprocessed trauma, including her...

Episode 246 ft. Cinelle Barnes

Episode 246 ft. Cinelle Barnes

Cinelle Barnes joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her brain aneurism rupture, writing a memoir two years after brain surgery, the healing modality that is writing personal narrative, memoir as a palimpsest, having multiple memoirs, narrating from the...

Episode 245 ft. Amil Niazi

Episode 245 ft. Amil Niazi

Amil Niazi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the pressure on children of immigrants, outsiderness, striving to change our circumstances, what happens to women in the workplace after becoming mothers, confronting misogyny and racism, The Hard Part - her...

Episode 244 ft. Melissa Febos

Episode 244 ft. Melissa Febos

Melisa Febos joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about romantic obsessions, celibacy as a portal to freedom, living her way into a corner and having to fight her way out, leading with scene and story and plot, taking back the sovereignty of her own mind and...

Episode 243: Jill Christman interviews Ronit Plank

Episode 243: Jill Christman interviews Ronit Plank

In celebration of the launch of season 8, Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir to interview Ronit about growing up with no blueprint for making a relationship work, fending for ourselves in childhood, being driven by curiosity, writing about others with generosity...

Episode 242 ft. Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez

Episode 242 ft. Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about going through almost a decade of conversion therapy, dismantling the dogma of pseudo science with its added layer of spiritual discipline, feeling desperate to change, yearning for a place to...

Episode 241 ft. Dr. Craig Yorke

Episode 241 ft. Dr. Craig Yorke

Dr. Craig Yorke joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the toll of centuries of bigotry, being consumed by race, growing up with psychological financial desperation, living other people’s lives, rethinking what Black studies are, processing shame, shedding...

Episode 240 ft. Monica Macansantos

Episode 240 ft. Monica Macansantos

Monica Macansantos joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about organizing her collection of essays around her father’s very sudden and unexpected passing, not being sure she could write again, when common themes begin to emerge, connecting with loved ones through...

Episode 239 ft. Jacque Gorelick

Episode 239 ft. Jacque Gorelick

Jacque Gorelick joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up missing a mother, surviving a fractured family and worrying you’re broken in unfixable ways, how her husband's medical crisis upended her life as a new mother, letting our inner selves be...

Episode 238 ft. Jill Christman

Episode 238 ft. Jill Christman

Jill Christman joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about contextualizing a memoir in a post-Roe world, what it means to make a choice as mothers, ending a pregnancy, knowing you will write about an experience while it is happening, writing about childhood...

Episode 237 ft. Mimi Nichter

Episode 237 ft. Mimi Nichter

Mimi Nichter joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being hijacked on a plane when she was twenty years old in the first incident of international terrorism, how we can be socialized into silence about our stories, processing old trauma on the page, building...

Episode 236 ft. Rachel Tzvia Back

Episode 236 ft. Rachel Tzvia Back

Rachel Tzvia Back joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about living with depression, losing a sister, when a mother is emotionally and psychologically absent, how myths can be cloaks, listening to our language and what it offers, thinking in image, when stories...

Episode 235 ft. Julie Scolnik

Episode 235 ft. Julie Scolnik

Julie Scolnik joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about falling madly in love with a married Frenchman when she was 20 years old and living in Paris studying music, working our way back from aching first love, searching for answers, cutting everything that...

Episode 234 ft. Stephanie Weaver

Episode 234 ft. Stephanie Weaver

Stephanie Weaver MPH joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about family estrangement, gaslighting, her recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, chronic illness, not wanting a book to be about revenge, reframing a memoir around a larger cultural moment to...

Episode 233 ft. Nikkya Hargrove

Episode 233 ft. Nikkya Hargrove

Nikkya Hargrove joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the effects of incarceration on the family system, growing up lost and unsure who her family was, accepting the responsibility of becoming her brother’s mother, the spark that got her writing her memoir,...

Episode 232 ft. Amanda McCracken

Episode 232 ft. Amanda McCracken

Amanda McCracken joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about what happens when you’re hopelessly, stubbornly in love with longing, fear of intimacy, the idea of falling in love vs. being in love, person addiction, choices around sex, longing for avoidant men,...

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