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Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner

Memoir Nation: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is an extension of the Memoir Nation community hosted by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner, two friends and colleagues who bring a community-minded sensibility to the writing journey. Originally launched as Write-minded in 2018, this is a weekly writing podcast that focuses on memoir and personal writing, as well as industry trends and tips and resources for writers and authors. 

Memoir Nation features a segment called Book Alley at the end of each episode to talk about recent memoirs that authors have sent Brooke and Grant, or memoirs they've discovered that are thought provoking or have sparked inspiration. Brooke and Grant bring to this weekly podcast their deeply held belief that everyone is a writer, and everyone’s story matters. Discover more about Memoir Nation at memoirnation.com.

Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers

This week we’re in full prep mode to write write write in January for our JanYourStory writing challenge. With that in mind, Brooke and and Grant tackle beginnings. How to start isn’t limited to how to get started. Starting involves starting to write each day, and how to start thinking about writing, and ways to start a memoir. We talk about all this and more, with an eye on the new year and throwing down a lot of content in January. Let’s go!

Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner are the cohosts of the Memoir Nation podcast and the cofounders of Memoir Nation, which is hosting the inaugural writing challenge, JanYourStory, running January 1-31, 2026. Join us here.

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Brooke & Grant on How to Start or Restart Your Memoir (JanYourStory Prep)

This week’s interview with the cofounders of SheWrites.com, Kamy Wicoff and Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, is especially touching for Brooke because these two women are where it all started. This week’s interview is about why community matters as told through the histories and sensibilities of two community champions who started something that lit the literary world on fire in 2009. SheWrites back then was a little bit like Substack is today, but with small breakout groups and a lot of meet-ups happening in the real world. The feminist sensibility of SheWrites was what drew Brooke to the platform, and to Kamy and Deborah in those early days when she was a Senior and then Executive Editor at Seal Press—and this origin story is both a walk down memory lane and an inspiring episode on the enduring power of community. 

Kamy Wicoff is a writer, former publisher, and psychotherapist with a degree in social work. Kamy holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia and is the author of several books, including the novel Wishful Thinking and the nonfiction book I Do But I Don’t: Why the Way We Marry Matters, and has contributed to multiple anthologies, most recently Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology. Kamy is the cofounder of She Writes Press. She serves as a trustee on the board of the Brooklyn Public Library and lives with her husband and their four sons in Brooklyn. 

Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, PhD is a Visiting Scholar in Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University and the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted and co-editor of the literary anthology Only Child. She is a regular on Chicago’s “live lit” storytelling stages. Deborah’s essay “My Husband, the Reluctant Barista” just appeared this past October in the Modern Love column at The New York Times. Her op-eds and essays on gender, motherhood, family, feminism, and writing have appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She’s a TEDx speaker, a longtime coach and champion of writers, and her coaching company, Girl Meets Voice, Inc., has supported hundreds of established and emerging writers. Together, they cofounded SheWrites.com in 2009. 

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Kamy Wicoff and Deborah Siegel-Acevedo on The Power of Community (JanYourStory Prep)

This month we’re doing a series to get our listeners in the mindset to write! Once you have a goal and a deadline (last week’s show), the next hurdle you will invariably face is time—lack thereof or mismanagement or both. Don’t worry, this week’s guest, Laura Vanderkam, has got your back. There are such practical tips and helpful reframes in this episode. If you’re not planning to write with us in January, maybe this will help you venture to give it a shot. You can write in the nooks and crannies. You can make the very best use of time confetti. You can do the things you say you want to do—if you change how you look at how much time you have and plan accordingly. You can, you can, you can. 

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including the forthcoming Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance (May 5, 2026), along with Tranquility by Tuesday, Juliet’s School of Possibilities, Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. She is the host of the podcast Before Breakfast and the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and five children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

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Laura Vanderkam on Making Time to Write (JanYourStory Prep)

Through the month of December, Memoir Nation podcast is hosting a series called JanYourStory Prep to get listeners ready and excited to participate in our January writing challenge to write 500 words a day every day in January. Inspired by Grant’s 12 years as Executive Director of NaNoWriMo, JanYourStory is for memoirists, but anyone can join this free challenge. Instead of writing 60K words in November as was the case with NaNoWriMo, we’re inviting writers to write 15K words in January. Many of the principles and values of NaNoWriMo are buoying this event, which is why we’re so grateful to have the blessing, support, and wisdom of Chris Baty, who joins the show this week to talk about why writing challenges are helpful and should always be grounded in fun, and what he’s learned about writing and writing in community since he accidentally founded NaNoWriMo in 1999. 

Chris Baty’s idea for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) sprang into the world in 1999 with 21 friends writing novels together in the month of November. He watched the event grow to more than 300,000 writers in 90 countries. He’s currently working on a novel about an assistant librarian trying to return a DVD in post-apocalyptic Canada. He’s also the author of No Plot? No Problem! and the co-author of Ready, Set, Novel. In 2025, Chris launched NaNo2 with a group of other volunteers in the wake of NaNoWriMo closing its doors—and he’s happy to take the credit we’re giving him for being the father of it all. 

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Chris Baty on The Magic of a Goal and a Deadline (JanYourStory Prep)

This week’s Memoir Nation is an onstage interview with Brooke and guest Susan Orlean, author of the new memoir, Joyride. This interview was a LitQuake event that happened in late October in Oakland, California. Susan is a delightful storyteller on the page and on the stage. There are some not-to-be-missed stories about working for Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown at The New Yorker; what it felt like to have Meryl Streep play her in the movie, Adaptation; and insights about whether or not she could have the career she’s had if she were starting today. Thank you to LitQuake and Susan for allowing us to repurpose this interview—and Happy Thanksgiving week to all. 

Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, and eight other works of nonfiction. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, she’s known for her vivid storytelling, deep curiosity, and ability to illuminate the extraordinary in the ordinary. Her work has been widely anthologized and adapted for film, including the Oscar-winning Adaptation. She is one of the most influential nonfiction storytellers of our time.

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Susan Orlean on Writing the Story of a Life Well Lived

Memoir Nation guest Beth Macy’s new memoir, Paper Girl, offers us the opportunity to dive into a social-cultural discussion this week as we explore the forces that seek to divide us, and also that seek to prevent pathways out of poverty. This is an important if hard conversation about subjects close to Beth’s book and her life—about the safety nets that are no longer there for the poor; about the legs up people are no longer getting; and about the resentment that’s been sowed as a result. Today’s show reminds us that memoir is many things, and that what we choose to write about can both get us into trouble and set us free. 

Beth Macy reported and wrote for The Roanoke Times for a quarter-century before leaving in 2014 to focus on book writing. She’s the author of Dopesick, which was made into a Peabody Award-winning series for Hulu. She’s also the author of Raising Lazarus and Factory Man. Her books examine the forces eroding American society, such as addiction, offshoring, and economic inequality. Paper Girl is her first memoir.

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Beth Macy on Writing to Explore Why We’re So Divided

This week we delve into all the ways memoir can be transformative. In framing her own memoir as an act of service, Julie Lythcott-Haims helps us to contextualize what your memoir is for, who it’s for, and whether you’re ready to write it for others, or if it needs to stay with just you, at least for a while. This is a powerful and impassioned conversation about memoir, why we write, and what we write for. Julie also shares about how prescient her memoir, Real American, was—as she was writing it in 2016 with the rise of Trumpism, and what it meant to be part of a chorus of voices writing about experiences of race and racial identity in America. 

Julie Lythcott-Haims is a writer, speaker, teacher, mentor, and activist. The New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult, which inspired a widely viewed TED Talk. Her award-winning memoir, Real American, explores her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. Her third book is Your Turn: How to Be an Adult. Julie earned a B.A. from Stanford, a J.D. from Harvard Law, and an M.F.A. in Writing from California College of the Arts. She also holds an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Puget Sound. She lives in Palo Alto, where she serves on the City Council, advocating for housing, equity, climate, and youth mental health. Julie and her lifelong partner Dan are parents to two twentysomethings.

 

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Julie Lythcott-Haims on Writing as an Act of Service

This week we have a historically important memoirist on the show. E. Jean Carroll risked her privacy and her reputation to charge President Trump with sexual assault. He was convicted for those crimes. E. Jean Carroll is a writer and an author who penned a memoir about being on trial—and how when women are victimized and assaulted, they’re slut-shamed, discredited, and scrutinized. In this interview, E. Jean tells us about her writing choices, why she opted for a breezier and often-times funny tone on such a serious topic, and why she’s not afraid. In the book trend, we talk about preorders: why and how they matter and why Amazon has such a corner on them. 

E. Jean Carroll is a journalist and longtime advice columnist best known for her column “Ask E. Jean” in Elle, which ran for over 25 years. She has written for Esquire, Outside, and Saturday Night Live. Carroll is the author of Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President, about the two sexual abuse cases she won against Trump, as well as two earlier books, a biography of Hunter S. Thompson and What Do We Need Men For? Her high-profile legal victories against Donald Trump have elevated her as a symbol of resilience and truth-telling.

 

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E. Jean Carroll on Untold Stories That Have To Be Told

This week, Memoir Nation connects with comedian Roy Wood Jr. on the serious topic of legacy—what we inherit and what we pass on. Wood’s new memoir, The Man of Many Fathers, explores the many influences in his life, and how a complicated relationship with his own father, including losing him when Wood was just sixteen, informs how he parents his son. This is a touching and heartfelt interview about life, loss, and the hope we all have for our children, or the children in our lives. For the Book Trend, we tap into a bit of darkness in honor of Halloween, and offer up a few forthcoming true crime memoirs that are getting some early buzz. 

Roy Wood Jr. is a two-time Emmy-nominated writer and producer. He is a comedian, actor, and podcaster who is primarily known for his stand-up comedy and work as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show for eight years and hosting CNN’s Have I Got News for You. He hosted the 2023 White House Correspondents’ dinner and this year’s 85th Peabody Awards. He has created original half-hour scripted projects at FOX, NBC, and Comedy Central. He is the former host of the award-winning Comedy Central podcast The Daily Show: Beyond the Scenes. He remains a regular guest star on various ESPN shows, and he lives in New York.

 

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Roy Wood Jr. on the Legacies We Inherit and Pass On

Memoir Nation is celebrating imperfection, unresolved storylines, and the art of positive obsession this week with guest Mallary Tenore Tarpley, author of the new memoir, Slip. This week’s episode has so much good stuff for memoirists—including Mallary’s story of tenacity (she was rejected many many times on her first time out the gate with this book); her pivot to memoir-plus, and her insights on writing a memoir with an unusual structure. This is fuel any memoirist needs to stay the course and believe in the project you’re being called to write. Also, over at Memoir Nation, we’ve formally launched our community, and we hope you’ll come and check it out under the “Community” menu tab at MemoirNation.com. 

Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism and writing professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, and The Tampa Bay Times, among other publications. She is the recipient of a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, which has helped support her research and writing. Mallary holds bachelor’s degrees from Providence College, as well as a master’s of fine arts in nonfiction writing from Goucher College. She lives outside of Austin, Texas, with her husband and two children. Slip is her first book.

 

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Mallary Tenore Tarpley on Writing Your Memoir When You’re Still Living the Story

This week's guest Ben Purkert, author of the newly released novel, The Men Can’t Be Saved, gives us some insight into the art of writing complex characters, including the downright unlikeable ones. Atrocious acts and bad behavior are at the center of storytelling, and when constructed well, supposedly unlikeable characters are often more gripping and memorable than likable ones. We’re titillated and drawn forth by a character’s conflict, bad behavior, and perhaps even downfall. A good author challenges their readers to be interested in their unlikeable characters—even through their flaws.
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The Art of Writing Unlikeable Characters, featuring Ben Purkert

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