Grandma was in her 90s and more than 60 years had elapsed since the family left Cuba, but my mother was not making a point about the passage of time; she was showing me a family tree made not of DNA or birthdays but one made of stories, shared experiences, and memory. As my mother’s only daughter, someday I too would be my mother’s memory. Perhaps that was already underway. 

I did not intend to use my grandmother’s and mother’s stories in my travel memoir A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana. This book is about the five days in Cuba that changed my life and my view of myself as a Cuban-American woman. But, as a young child learns from the world around them, I learned about Cuba from the words and actions of my mother and grandmother.

They made a mysterious foreign embargoed land accessible: My mother showed me Cuba’s place on a world map and told me that our family’s presence in Cuba that dated back hundreds of years, and my grandmother demonstrated what a day looked like in Cuba by introducing me to Cuban food, speaking a little Spanish around me, and teaching me about Cuban customs, hobbies, and pastimes. When I asked questions, they answered and added a little story or two. Their perspectives wove together, complemented, and informed one another, giving me a starting point for exploration and curiosity.

As I grew up, my mother’s stories evolved not because she had learned something new or because she had eureka moments of sudden remembering, but because my mother realized that she had become the custodian of a collection of my grandmother’s memories. My mother told me stories from Cuba and those first few years in the United States that my grandmother was a part of but never told me herself. My mother vividly recalled struggles faced as they adjusted to life in a new country. Those early challenges compelled my mother to safeguard her story, so that for years all I knew was, “We left Cuba one day and never went back. The End.”

She was not being vague or secretive; she was learning how to tell both her own narrative and her mother’s. She has embraced all aspects of her story from the harrowing tales of a child growing into adolescence while stuck between two worlds to lighthearted tales threaded with humor and joy. Her relationship with and her stories about Cuba will always be hers alone, and so will my grandmother’s. No story is ever complete and I have to acknowledge and respect that there are likely other custodians holding other parts of their stories. Still, I am glad that “The End” has been abandoned in favor of a flowing continuum and layering of stories from my grandmother to my mother to my mother’s version of my grandmother’s story and finally to me.

When I traveled to Cuba as an adult, I unknowingly packed a carry-on bag of matrilineal oral history that came to life as I experienced Cuba myself. As I walked Havana’s famous sea wall the Malecon, I recalled both my own memories of beach days with my mother and my grandmother’s stories of her beach visits when she was a young girl in Cuba. As I tucked into a plate of arroz con frijoles, fragrant with garlic, I remembered my mother’s innovative adjustment of the classic recipe for a slow cooker so that weeknight dinner cooked itself and how my grandmother guided me through a recipe for the classic Cuban dish arroz con pollo.

My memories and my matrilineal narratives came to life and re-invented themselves in my Cuba, and I leaned into them as artifacts, no less solid than a fossil in a museum or a document in an archive, overindulging in detail in early working drafts of the memoir. A few years had elapsed between my trip to Cuba and my first drafts of the memoir, yet I could rely on photographs from my trip to Cuba to jog my memories of Cuba and of my childhood and earlier years. As I spelunked the cave of my own memories from my past and my experiences of Cuba to form the book’s arc, my mother’s and my grandmother’s stories surfaced and joined mine as the scaffold for my own Cuban narrative.

Because family narratives are handed down in images, snippets, stories, food, and tiny acts that seem insignificant, it’s easy to dismiss them as unimportant or lacking in meaning for others. But many women exist from day to day in the small spaces where barriers between cultures, customs, and languages dissolve. When readers start to tell me a story about their grandmother and her recipes and stories from her country of origin, I see the universality in my experience. What I have found in sharing my story built from my matrilineal line is that women seek a custodian for their stories, someone who can dust off the artifacts, make meaning by bringing an experience from long ago into the present day, and mark the individual swirls of fingerprints left on this world.

Check out Barbara Caver’s A Little Piece of Cuba here:

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In this interview, Kristin discusses how writing an essay led to her new book, What Debt Demands, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Kristin Collier
Literary agent: Sarah Fuentes from UTA
Book title: What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Release date: November 18, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Elevator pitch: What Debt Demands follows my journey navigating my own devastating student debt burden—hundreds of thousands of dollars taken out fraudulently by a family member in my name—alongside my growing awareness of how debt shapes our physical, interior, and social worlds.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I spent all of my 20s and a portion of my 30s arguing with debt collectors and trying to find relief within a lending system hostile to student borrowers. This was, essentially, the start of my research process for this book, though I didn’t see it as that yet; I was just trying to survive. As I began to learn more about how this theft was possible and how it fit into the larger lending history, I realized that other people might be as interested in this subject as I was. So, I tried writing an essay about my debt—which was an enormous challenge!—to see what that would feel like, and the essay seemed to really connect with people. Sarah, my now-agent, reached out after reading it and asked if I had thought about writing a book, which I had.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

That’s a hard question to answer because as I noted, I was doing research for a very long time simply by attempting to pay or refute my student loan bills.  So, you might say that the book took me15 years to write. But the most concentrated research and reporting occurred over the three years I wrote a book proposal, drafted the book, and then revised the book. The core of the idea—that I would try to understand my debt and how it shaped my relationship to myself, my family, and the world—was always there, but I experimented with how much history and contemporary reporting I would weave into the narrative.

I often worried that there would be too much memoir for people who wanted something more historical and journalistic, and too much research for the people who were interested in memoir. I still think that may be true, but I hope the inclusion of both will illustrate that while my story may, on the surface, seem startling or unique, it’s ultimately both a symptom of and the conclusion of a system built on inequality and predation.

In addition to trying to figure out how much personal narrative and research to include, I also wrestled with how to put these threads in conversation with one another within the same chapter, ultimately writing a few different drafts before landing on the book’s final form, which relies on each chapter finding a thematic center that the memoir and the research can work toward.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Before publishing the book, I had been a high school educator for 15 years and was on the older end of debut authors, and though I read widely and had gotten an MFA, I felt somewhat outside the literary world, which is to say, I guess, that this entire experience felt like a huge and extended surprise! I was lucky enough to have more than one press interested in the proposal, and figuring out which press and editor to work with was a bit like going on a series of speed dates before deciding whom to marry. Maddie Caldwell, my editor, really understood the project for what I wanted it to be while also pushing me to be more ambitious. In our initial conversation she spoke insightfully and with humor, something hard to pull off in a book about student loan debt. Both of us had to have a lot of trust; she had to believe that I was capable of writing the book I claimed I was, and I had to believe that she would help me get there. I think our trust was well placed!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

This is the first book I’ve written. Finishing it felt similar, though on a much larger scale, to completing an essay, which has always felt a bit methodical and mathematical while also feeling mysterious and magical. The draft wasn’t working and wasn’t working and wasn’t working, and I kept experimenting with it and getting feedback from friends and my agent and editor, and then all of a sudden something legible and interesting began to take shape. For me, writing can feel so messy and iterative and layered that I often don’t believe the process will result in what I want it to. And, sometimes it doesn’t! In this case, I think and hope it did.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope readers with student loans will read it and feel understood, less alone, and if they have shame, less ashamed. And I hope readers without debt will have a more complete and nuanced understanding of indebtedness. I hope all readers will understand our system as more than flawed, but predatory, and believe that we should be fighting for a higher education system that works for everyone, one in which public education is free.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Find strong readers who understand your voice and vision and who will give you rigorous feedback. For me, there’s no greater gift than someone generously lending me their time to read and comment on my work. And offer that to other writers as well. 

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(Writing Scenes With Your Senses.)

And yet, I also discovered something surprising. Once I gave myself permission to be bold, I was able to draw on my multi-genre writing experience to create a memoir that was uniquely mine.

When starting a memoir, there’s documenting, and then there’s The Truth—which, depending on point of view, distance from the events, and a hundred other variables, can be squishy and subjective. Writing Wayfinding meant hours and hours of fact-checking. But once you’ve done that hard work and drafted your story (or stories), you eventually get to the fun part: polishing the vignettes.

Still, even after polishing, one big question remains: How do you know if the structure is right?

My Accidental Memoirist Story

A few years ago, I set out to write a poetry collection—a chapbook about my father. I had already published several poems on this topic in literary magazines, and I wanted to go deeper. Our relationship had been complicated, and I needed space to explore. I planned to build a 48-page chapbook from four or five foundational poems.

Here’s the thing about great writing plans: They often fall apart once the words start flowing. That’s exactly what happened. After a couple of weeks, I realized what I was writing wasn’t poetry. It wasn’t a chapbook. And it wasn’t even entirely about my father.

The poetic form felt too constricting for what I wanted to say. Within weeks, I had already surpassed the limits of a chapbook. I was excavating, discovering, questioning. Writing Wayfinding became a journey of its own.

Here’s the thing. At first, I played it safe. I “reported the news.” The draft of the book was good—but not great. I hadn’t been vulnerable enough. I hadn’t fully shared the questioning, the pain, or the insights I uncovered.

Then I got an editor. That’s when the real work began—and how I ended up with a nonlinear-hybrid-quest/journey-epistolary memoir. Could it fit neatly into one category? Sure. But the point is this: You, the writer, get to choose the format and structure. If you can’t find a structure that works, invent your own. Be bold. Why should fiction writers have all the fun?

Why Structure Matters

There’s another side to this: the reader. Books don’t live in a vacuum. If you’ve come this far in your memoir journey, you’re likely hoping for others to read it. You want them to engage, connect, and feel. The foundation for that intimacy begins with structure. I’ve created a framework to help you get started and remove some of the guesswork.

Memoir has no single magic formula. Structure isn’t just about order—it’s about meaning. Your story may need a linear backbone, a braided weave, or something entirely different. Experiment until the structure reflects both your truth and the experience you want your reader to have.

Memoir Structure Types

• Chronological/Linear: Start-to-finish, such as childhood to adulthood. I began Wayfinding this way, but later found that other structures better captured the fractured nature of my journey and better served the story.
• Nonlinear/Fragmented: Moves around in time and space, often circling a central theme. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
• Braided/Threads: Weaves two or more storylines together. H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald.
• Themed/Topical: Built around a single theme (e.g., addiction, trauma, travel). Wayfinding ultimately took this form, organized by forms such as letters, themes like redemption, and geography. It is a complex structure, and it took trial and error to get it right.
• Hybrid: Mixes forms—essays, lists, poems, fragments. Wayfinding incorporates essays, prose poems, and letters.
• Epistolary: Told through letters, texts, diary entries, emails, etc. Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker.
• Quest/Journey: Centers on a physical, emotional, or metaphorical journey. Wild by Cheryl Strayed.
• Circular/Returning: Begins and ends in the same place (geographically or emotionally). Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

5 Tips to Help You Find Your Memoir’s Structure

1. Identify your memoir’s core theme(s).
If you’re unsure, ask for input. Common themes include trauma, relationships, resilience, and personal growth. Your theme often suggests a structure: A lifelong journey may suit chronology, while a series of linked events may work better in a nonlinear or themed format.

2. Define your memoir’s scope or timeframe.
Does your story cover decades or a short period? Solito by Javier Zamora focuses tightly on his two-month migration journey, while Becoming by Michelle Obama spans a lifetime.

3. Shape your story arc.
Like fiction, memoirs need emotional arcs. You might start a chronological memoir in the middle of a dramatic moment, or group stories by geography or theme instead of adhering to strict chronological order.

4. Be brave and explore possibilities.
Most memoirs default to a linear structure: “I was born, I lived, now I’m older.” I thought that would work for Wayfinding, too. But early readers challenged me. Eventually, I dismantled the book and rebuilt it in a nonlinear, thematic way—closer to how I experienced the events themselves. Masterful examples of nonlinear memoirs include Inheritance by Dani Shapiro and Mean by Myriam Gurba.

5. Leverage your storytelling tools.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. For some of the toughest material in Wayfinding, I shifted from narrative to epistolary—writing letters to characters and even an apology letter to my own body. At first, rewriting finished sections felt strange, but it turned out to be exactly what the book needed.

Your memoir deserves a structure that carries its deepest truth. Be bold. Experiment. Let the form not only serve your story but also foster meaningful engagement and connection with your reader.

Check out Renee Gilmore’s Wayfinding here:

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(How to Add Value With a Prologue.)

We all have had the experience of hearing a song from our teen years and having flashes of memory from our high school dance from decades before. Suddenly we see the disco ball shooting shards of light across our friends faces, we smell the perfume or cologne of our dance partner, we feel our feet shuffle on the floor to the rhythm of the music, we taste the flavor of our favorite gum.

Smell is the most effective sense in evoking memories since it has a direct connection to the parts of the brain that affect emotions (amygdala) and memory (hippocampus) unlike the other senses that must first pass through the thalamus for processing. The direct connection to the brain makes those olfactory memories feel more vivid and significant. Scent memories are often from early childhood, a period of significant emotional experiences and intense sensory learning.

I first learned how the power of the senses could evoke detailed memories decades ago in LA in a sense memory Stanislavski Method acting class. Our teacher instructed us to recall a childhood memory to share and after a warmup, I sat in a chair in front of the class and described the memory.

My father had died when I was seven, so I didn’t have many memories of him, but the most vivid memory was of a summer day when I was about four. As he tended to his strawberry patch, I watched as he chose the biggest, reddest, strawberry in the patch, wiped off the dirt and popped it into my mouth. “I see the deep red, ripe strawberry. I see it’s red heart shape, and the green, pointy cap and stem…” I continued to describe in vivid detail the taste of the succulent red juicy sweetness bursting in my mouth and dripping on my chin. My father’s gentle gesture made me feel happy and loved. As we walked to a white lattice arbor heaving with honeysuckle, I described the delectable fragrance that filled my head. My father inhaled deeply as the sun shone on his nose and tiny beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.

I intentionally chose what I thought was a happy memory of my dead father but as I continued this exercise, emotions began to roil in my stomach and up into my chest and throat that were unfamiliar to me. When my acting teacher asked me to speak out loud to my father I resisted and hesitated, then I gasped and snuffled. The feelings that bubbled up did not match this deeply touching memory of him. I squirmed in my chair and choked on the words “I’m mad at you.” I was shocked because I had no idea that I was angry at him for dying and leaving me.

When my father died, no one explained anything to me. No one said it was very sad that my father had died but that he was very sick, and his body was too worn out to heal. No one said that I needn’t worry—even though my father had died, my mother was healthy and young and would not die. No one said that we would grieve properly, and missing him would hurt, but we would all be okay.

Of course, then, it was a revelation to me that I had unprocessed grief, sadness, fear, and yes, even anger that my father had died nearly 20 years prior. It was a powerful sense memory acting class that uncovered what needed to be embraced and processed for my healing.

Years later, I used that sense memory exercise to write the scenes in my upcoming book My Pretty Baby. In the first chapter I describe being in a dark voting booth with my mother. Inhaling her luscious Estee Lauder Youth Dew perfume, I gazed at her black shiny high heels, reached out and touched her smooth black nyloned calf, and felt a tingle all over my body as I listened to her quiet yet excited whispers. In contrast, at my father’s funeral I described the details of my dead father’s waxy face as he lay in his white satin lined coffin and the overwhelming nauseousness as I inhaled the stench of carnations.

Try this exercise to incorporate the five senses into your writing: Close your eyes and recall a childhood memory. Connect to the place. Feel your feet planted on the ground. As you recall the memory, write down one detail for each sense.

1. Smell: What did the place smell like? Can you smell cigarette smoke, bacon cooking, fresh mown lawn, a summer rainstorm? Layer the senses gradually. Sometimes less is more and two vivid senses is enough.
2. Sound: What do you hear? Is it loud, soft, muffled, nearby or faraway? Do you hear the rattle of the pans as your mom cooks in the kitchen. Do you hear the loud “potato-potato” rumble of a Harley motorcycle outside your window?
3. Taste: Can you taste the metallic tang of fear in your mouth as you hear the creak of floorboards in the middle of the night. You can also use contrast: do you taste the sweet chocolate cake while sitting at the kitchen table listening to your parents argue?
4. Sight: What do you see? Colors, light, shadows, movement? Describe in microscopic detail the texture, pattern, or grain of the wood floor or carpet in a room. You may not necessarily use the entire description, but this practice will reveal nuggets of richness that will make your scene vivid.
5. Touch: What is the temperature? Hot, cold, clammy? What bodily sensations do you feel through your skin? soft, scratchy, sharp, smooth?

As psychologist James Pennebaker’s research suggests, writing with your senses in not just a craft tool; it can also be a healing practice. And as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma is often stored in the body. By listening to the body’s memories with the senses, we can gain access to emotions and trauma that are hidden in the body. In this way, sensory writing becomes both a creative practice to enliven your writing, but also as a personal path to unearth, heal, and integrate past emotional experiences and traumas.

Sensory details anchor the reader in the experience, not just in the explanation. Engaging the senses can transform flat details that tell what happened into a three-dimensional narrative that creates vivid cinematic scenes that pull readers into the heart of a story and show them not only what happened but how it felt to be there.

Check out Wendy B. Correa’s My Pretty Baby here:

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My daughter was an adult when I began writing about her childhood. Though focused on my personal arc, my story overlaps hers—making privacy another issue I’ve had to navigate. She gave me her blessing, and I promised to delete anything that made her uncomfortable.  

Writing about your child can be tricky—ethical questions arise with no clear answers. Like, when is a child truly capable of consent? Is a parent naturally entitled to expose details about their child? Where’s the line between authenticity and exploitation?  

Yet, our stories are important. Raising a child with a physical or mental illness is often painfully isolating, and parenting memoirs can be a powerful source of solace, offering validation, hope, and a sense of community.  

I spoke with seven nonfiction writers whose work examines how they dealt with a child’s illness, disability, addiction, or death. We discussed their approaches to privacy and consent, what drove them to share their stories, and advice they’d give other writers. I’ve edited their responses for clarity and length. 

Prioritize Consent 

Most of the writers waited years to start their memoirs. By then, their children were grown. They asked for consent (including the use of real names), agreed to change or remove content upon request, and kept their kids’ current lives off limits to protect their privacy as adults.  

One exception was Jaclyn Greenberg, who is writing a parenting book about accessibility and has published numerous articles featuring her 12-year-old son, who is disabled and nonverbal. Because he “doesn’t fully understand the implications” of consent, Greenberg consults her husband and oldest child instead. 

The writers whose children passed away checked in with the other parent and surviving siblings.  

Balance Honesty and Privacy  

In her memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, Casey Mulligan Walsh included details about her contentious divorce, family divisions, and the sudden loss of her oldest son at age 20. Throughout, she strove to portray her three children as kids caught in a difficult situation, rather than as difficult kids.  

“Writing through that lens, I included scenes that illustrated how they were affected by the conflict in our lives and how they behaved in response—sometimes badly—but gave space for their positive qualities and my empathy for them, even in the middle of these scenes. I excluded things they might see as personally embarrassing or would be particularly difficult for them if made public,” she said. 

Eileen Vorbach Collins, author of Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, a memoir in essays about losing her 15-year-old daughter, said, “Although I wrote about my daughter after her death, I was still aware of privacy issues and considered how she might feel about what I was disclosing. Though I couldn’t ask her permission, I tried not to write something she’d have been uncomfortable sharing.”  

Go Where Your Story Leads You 

As is often the reason for writing memoir, these writers originally hoped to make sense of what happened—or as Jessica Fein, author of Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes, said, “to get some control of the narrative in a world that was upside down.” Fein’s daughter, Dalia, was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease that ended her life at age 17. 

By staying open to—and exploring—the deeper narrative themes revealed during the process of writing, each author transcended their child’s story to create a work with emotional resonance and broader appeal.   

Ann Batchelder wrote her memoir, Craving Spring: A Mother’s Quest, a Daughter’s Depression, and the Greek Myth That Brought Them Together, to figure out when and how her daughter’s struggles began.  

“Halfway through writing the book, I realized: This isn’t about her, it’s about me,” she said. “That changed everything—the focus, the intent, the need to be more open and honest about my reactions to her depression and addictions.”  

Mulligan Walsh said, “I set out writing what I thought was a story of relentless resilience in the wake of repeated loss. The thread that tied it all together was the search for belonging.” 

Be Authentic  

As parents, the instinct to protect our children can test our writerly responsibility to the truth.  

When writing her memoir, Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, Karen DeBonis had to overcome fears that her son “would realize how I’d failed him and hate me.” Recognizing the value of authenticity, she owned how her people-pleasing nature contributed to her son’s delayed diagnosis.  

“I knew others, women especially, would see themselves in my story and hopefully not make the same mistake I did in stifling my voice,” DeBonis said.  

Batchelder added, “As mothers, we all want to paint ourselves in the best light. But when you dig down and you’re honest about some of your motivations or your anger or frustration—as well as your love for your child—you create a character in your book that’s much more relatable.” 

Remember Why You’re Writing 

Alicia Garceau is writing a memoir about her daughter’s mysterious illness and her family’s two-year search for answers. “When I approached my daughter about writing the memoir, I explained why I wanted to do it, but gave her the final say. She was ultimately diagnosed because of another memoir, Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan, so she expressed a desire to ‘pay it forward’ and hopefully help others,” she said. 

After publishing a long-form essay about her experience, Garceau received emails from parents in the U.S. and abroad thanking her for writing it. “Being able to make people feel less alone in whatever they’re going through encourages me to keep writing,” she said. 

Fein echoed a similar response to her memoir: “I’ve heard from other parents that they feel less alone when reading my story; that they’ve gained new perspective.” 

Writing and publishing their stories also allowed the writers to feel less alone and better understood. The act of re-examining painful events through a literary lens helped them uncover new layers of meaning and continue moving forward.  

Greenberg said, “I initially started writing because I felt like my son and I were both isolated from friends, family, and the community because of his disabilities and my caregiving responsibilities. Sharing breaks down those barriers and brings people into my world in a positive way.” 

As Batchelder said, “When we share our stories, we heal ourselves as well as others.” 

Central to Batchelder’s healing was knowing that her daughter approved of her memoir. “She has often told me she’s proud of me for writing it. She said it helped some of her friends understand their mothers.” It helped her daughter understand Batchelder, too.  

“I was nervous when I first gave her my manuscript to read—some of it was hard for her to read, and we both cried. But after she finished, she looked up and said, ‘This is a love letter to me, isn’t it?’” 

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(The Messy House of Memoir.)

Throughout that time, if either of us saw something that reminded us of the other person, we’d DM or email. Once we both got cell phones, we’d text occasionally. He sent me a lovely note when I got remarried telling me how happy I seemed in my wedding photos, and how happy it made him to know that. Every six or seven months, I’d write him to say, “Hey. I’m still working on this book project about our marriage. Are you still okay with it?”

Maybe because I did that so often and no publication was forthcoming, I often felt like The Girl Who Cried Book. I wondered if he even believed I was writing anything at all as the years dragged on and on. Sometimes I wondered that same thing as I navigated parenting a young child with a full-time job with this elusive dream of a book always hanging over my head. No matter how real it felt to him, though, my ex-husband always said the same thing when I asked, “For the rest of my life, I promise you can say anything you want about me.”

Now, after more than 20 years of stalled attempts, that book is finally coming out. And once it became clear that the book would be published, I started to talk to my ex-husband more. I sent him the manuscript. We chatted about it, which eventually led to comfortable chatting about the rest of our lives. When I was in Chicago last year, we had dinner. When I was back in Chicago recently, we had brunch. We talk fairly often now, over email and text—sometimes about the book but mostly just about life: Movies we’ve watched lately, documentaries, podcasts, TV shows, songs we like, updates on family and friends.

During that long time I was writing our story, it was easy for him to feel like a character I’d invented. But I knew I’d be sharing stories about intimate moments of our life together. I knew in order for my story to make sense I’d have to include details of his life that it had taken him years to be able to say out loud: among other things, the fact that he’d spent his adolescence in conversion therapy and then not shared the full details of that with me until several years into our marriage.

When we’d chat, though, I’d be reminded of the stakes of what I was attempting—the reality that this was a living, complex, sacred human being with whom I’d shared seven years of living, complex, sacred human time. I hope that the gravity of that responsibility comes through in the way I wrote about the two of us. It’s meant more than I can say to hear from readers and writers who’ve already read the book that they think it does.

About a year ago, in order to finalize the plans for the manuscript, the legal department at my publisher needed my ex-husband to sign a waiver that read, “I agree that I have been fairly represented in the manuscript, and I give my consent to publication of the material relating to me.” He immediately did so and returned it to me before I’d even closed out of my email.

I’d never been worried he would refuse at the last minute to sign off on the manuscript. I knew he knew enough about it and about me to trust that I wasn’t going to betray or exploit him. So, it wasn’t necessarily relief or at least it wasn’t only relief I felt to know he was signing off on the final project. I think the more accurate way to describe how I felt would be validation.

He was the only other person in that marriage I’d been excavating for two decades. Because of all this, no matter how the book is ultimately received or reviewed, there’s no endorsement that will ever mean more to me than that signed waiver. And no love letter I ever received from him meant more.

Because you doubt yourself constantly when you attempt to write anything at all, especially a story that really happened. So, to have the other person involved in the story say, “This really happened—not just the facts, but the emotional truth of it. The depiction of me feels honest and accurate. I agree to let this person who used to be married to me share these details of our life together,” undid me for several days in ways that not even my most effusive endorsement has done since.

I don’t know that there are any universally applicable rules to how best to write about someone else’s life, especially if that person is alive and able to contradict or refute what you might say or worse, to be wounded by the way you might say it. In my particular case, I constantly wrestled with how much of anyone else’s story to share in telling mine. I knew I didn’t want to center myself in his story or to share anything I felt was only his to tell. I knew I wanted to tell my own story and have that be the focus of the narrative.

But here’s the thing: None of us live a life in which there are no other people. If we’re going to write about our own lives, then other people will always be implicated in those stories. One approach I took to ethical treatment of others in my work was that before publishing anything that included someone else, I showed them what I’d written: my college roommate, my parents, my brothers, etc. I could do that because I love and trust all those people, and they are all safe people for me. I know that’s often not an option for other writers telling stories that involve unsafe people.

No matter what, I think it’s important to constantly interrogate your own memory and motivations. I’ve read several memoirists who said they’d never write unless they felt they could do it from a place of love. I’ve heard others who say that particularity is the key. Both those approaches—love and particularity—resonate with me deeply.

Ultimately, maybe it’s only in remembering how wrong you can get it that we can ever be right when we attempt to put a 3D human being onto 2D paper. It makes me feel connected to adherents of religions that never attempt to draw the Divine. We will never get all of it right—the entirety of any holy mystery—but maybe if we keep that in our minds, we can get closer.

Check out Kelly Foster Lundquist’s Beard here:

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(Dyslexia Is a Writer’s Superpower.)

I did not grow up believing I would write a book. I grew up with spatial dyslexia, which meant lines could tilt off the page, paragraphs blurred into brick walls, and sequences—left to right, up to down—refused to behave. But I also grew up with a father who believed the point of writing wasn’t to look smart; it was to be understood. When I finally sat down to write my memoir, Nobody’s Girl: Mother, Model, CEO On My Own Terms, I leaned hard on his newsroom rules and found my way through the maze—one clean, true sentence at a time.

Phrases and ideas fly in and out of my head on an ongoing basis, and the trick is to make note of them when it happens. Ultimately, I had an editorial village, too, but gathering your thoughts and crafting cohesive communication is quite a solitary process.

The lead is a lifeline

Writers talk about “finding the heartbeat” of a book. My dad called it the lead. “If you can’t tell me the story in one sentence,” Bill would say, “you don’t know it yet.” Because spatial dyslexia makes large outlines feel like quicksand, I wrote a one-sentence lead for every chapter before I wrote the chapter, starting with: WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN.

Those five words were my compass. When a paragraph wandered, I held it against the lead. If it didn’t serve the sentence, it didn’t survive. That discipline kept me from drowning in backstory and helped me write with the forward momentum a memoir needs.

Writing out loud

Spatial difficulties make tracking lines of text exhausting, so I drafted much of the book by speaking. I recorded scenes. Later, I transcribed the audio and edited on the page. That two-step process gave me three gifts:

• Voice. When you speak your story, you hear your rhythms, your humor, your silences. The page sounds more like you.
• Honesty. It’s harder to posture out loud. Whispered details found their way into the manuscript because I heard myself reach for them.
• Stamina. Talking let me cover emotional ground without simultaneously fighting the mechanics of reading.

For revision, I flipped the process and used text-to-speech to listen back. Hearing each line read aloud made clunky phrasing obvious and highlighted where I’d lost the thread of a scene.

Short lines, strong verbs

The newsroom taught me to trust short sentences. Spatial dyslexia reinforced it. I pared paragraphs to their bones, then added only what clarified or revealed. Strong verbs did the heavy lifting—”confessed” instead of “said sheepishly,” “bolted” instead of “ran quickly.” I broke long blocks with subheads and white space, both to help me track ideas and to welcome readers who read the way I do: in focused bursts, with frequent breathers.

Fact-check the feelings

Memoir isn’t journalism, but journalistic values serve it well. My father’s second-favorite question (after “What’s the lead?”) was “Who says?”

When I wrote about a pivotal conversation from years ago, I felt in my gut it was the truth, which doesn’t necessarily have corresponding documentation. If two memories conflicted, I wrote that conflict into the scene. Paradox belongs in memoir. Confirmation through intuition gave me the courage to tell how it felt without hedging.

Build a reporter’s kit for your life

Reporters carry notebooks or index cards. Each card can hold a scene: where it took place, who was present, and the sensory specifics that tether memory to the body. In my case, this “reporter’s kit” was so burned in my memory and my upbringing I had no need to keep a physical card. I’ve lived my life with the phrases as a steady and repetitive understanding of how to approach many situations: Who? What? Where? Why? When?

When my brain was tired, I could still sort notes into a timeline. Moving the story physically helped me see the arc when the screen would not. That was another of Bill’s lessons: If the copy won’t behave, change the format, not the truth.

What my book set out to prove

We are more than our test results or advanced degrees, and we have many untapped resources within us. In addition to my innate problem-solving skills, I was blessed with a sharp tenacity and bundles of energy. I also had a profound instinctive awareness that I didn’t fit any traditional mold, either in academia or jobs, and had to amass the skills to be my own woman. Penning my memoir took an extraordinary effort. My mission of helping others do great things with their lives against sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds kept me going page to page.

Find editors who see you

In a newsroom, copy doesn’t go to print without an editor. Neither did my chapters. Because spatial dyslexia makes it easy to miss a missing word—I “see” what I meant, not what’s there—I recruited a small, steady crew for structure, continuity, a bit of cheerleading, and the ultimate finish.

In truth, I wrote a book about potential and belonging—to my own voice, to the people who held me accountable, and to a lineage of journalists who believe the truth can stand up to questions. Bill Crago didn’t make me a writer; he made me a reporter of my own life. The lead of Nobody’s Girl is simple: I learned to stop letting the shape of my brain be an apology and started letting it be a method.

If you are rigorous with facts and generous with feelings, others will feel your experiences. Hopefully, they will be inspired to live life on their own terms.

Check out Amber M. Brookman’s Nobody’s Girl here:

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In this interview, Jesse discusses breaking rules she made for herself in the process of writing her new memoir, sorry i keep crying during sex, their hope for readers, and more.

Name: Jesse James Rose
Literary agent: Mollie Glick, CAA
Book title: sorry i keep crying during sex
Publisher: Abrams Image
Release date: October 21, 2025
Genre/category: Memoir, LBGTQ+, Humor, Future Pulitzer-Prize Finalist (is that a category?)
Previous titles: none, unless you count long captions about my exes
Elevator pitch: sorry i keep crying during sex is about healing from sexual violence while my grandfather was dying of Alzheimer’s. His brain was falling apart, and I was trying to put mine together, and our stories intersect for one brief moment in time.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I needed a friend to cry on the bathroom floor with when I was healing.

At the time, in 2018, the #MeToo movement was resurging with Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony, and everything was deadly serious. As it should’ve been! Survivors were getting our moment; people were starting to take us seriously. At the same time, I’m a person who needs to laugh. If I’m not making a joke during something horrific that’s how you know it’s bad. But I May Destroy You wasn’t out yet. I’m Glad My Mom Died wasn’t out. One of my best friends sent me a vile meme about 9/11, and I laughed so hard I cried. Not because it was particularly funny, but because the laughter itself felt so good. It was hope for healing. Proof of life.

I change my answer. I needed a friend to sit on the bathroom floor with me and laugh, so I wrote it into existence.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The actual writing took six months, but from idea to publication was more like six years.

The idea began when I was walking home from my assault on that fateful night in October, but I let it percolate until after I had undergone EMDR and knew I was ready to offer this story responsibly. I didn’t want to be writing from a traumatized place; I wanted it to be a process of artistic creation. Somewhere in the middle I wrote a piece for my grandfather’s memorial service and overwhelmingly the response from people I did not know was “You have to write a book.” I told them I was, which was a funny thing to say, because I hadn’t written a word. I think that’s when I got serious.

I wrote my proposal, which included a 15,000-word sample (the first 50 pages, more or less) and signed with my agent all in the summer of 2023. By that fall I signed my book deal with Abrams, and by June of 2024 I had turned in my first draft.

As for what changed? The mediums I use, that’s for sure! I pitched the book as evolving from blog-style snippets into full prose, and I handed in a compilation of blog-style snippets, Grindr chats, text messages, play scripts, lists, and poetry. This came as a surprise to me and my editor! For instance, when I wrote “A Scene from a Long-Distance Relationship,” (p. 97) it was by accident. I started with a dialogue-only draft as an exercise to get the shape of the argument, figuring I’d add in the prose around it later. When I reread it, I thought No, this is complete.  Maggie Nelson says she “writes in the form that seems most fitting” and she chooses “depending on the problem at hand.” I second her methodology—I understood that moment in time through the dialogue, so a dialogue-focused medium was the only one I could write it in.

This became the first of many examples where I wrote outside the container I made for myself. The most pertinent example is probably Section II, which was not in my original pitch either. I think I wrote the entire collection in two days. It just poured out of me, and when I reread it, I felt insane flipping from page to page. It was perfect; it captured the sensation of losing your mind (PTSD flashbacks) while repeating the same thing over and over (Alzheimer’s). If I’d stuck to the container of blog-style-to-prose, we wouldn’t have what has become many readers’ favorite piece.

I hope the takeaway here for editors and publishers is give your writer the freedom to experiment, and we’ll give you something worth reading.

I hope the takeaway here for writers is: If you make a rule for your piece, you better find a way to break it.y Jakobson’s writing class which gave me the structure I needed to sit down and write the proposal.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I learned a lot about trusting myself.

Selling experimental work is hard, and then following through and learning whether your experiment works in real time is even harder. In my mind I knew the structure of the book could work, but I didn’t know what shape it would take in the end.

For context, I wrote the book completely out of order. When it came time to tie it together, I spent two solid weeks in a conference room I rented with my advance money sorting out what should go where. I color-coded an order on the white board. I printed the entire draft and moved stacks of pages around the room. I added notes in my Scrivener margins about what the reader already knew before going into each chapter so I could shape the readership experience. I gave up and flew to my best friend Zach’s house across the country and finally figured it out on his dining room table. When I sent it to Sarah, my editor, I had looked at it so many times that it was all meaningless and I was sure I had failed miserably (too experimental! Too many formats! Too confusing!) and I would need to rewrite the book.

In the end we cut two pages, edited some minutia, but the order is the same. “You really cooked here,” Sarah wrote in an Adobe in-line comment on the entirety of Section II. “I’m not touching this.” I was so proud.

Right before we sent it to print, I freaked out and wanted to edit more—word choices, sentences, metaphors, tiny details. My managing editor, Lisa, had the grace to send me an e-mail. “You’re messing with perfection. It’s ready.”

I learned—and am still learning—to trust my vision. I’ve never read a book remotely like this one, which is why I wrote it. Part of paving your own way, especially in experimental writing, is surrounding yourself with people who understand what you’re trying to do, and can help you get there, but have enough experience to tell you when it’s time to stop.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I think it may surprise people to know writing this book was not therapeutic. I believe writing can be a therapy, but that’s meant for your journal, not for a literary pursuit. It would be irresponsible (traumatizing, triggering) to turn over the unedited pages of my journal, but I thought it would be a blast to recreate my thought process from when I was my most mentally ill. It was. I loved showing up to my desk every day and figuring out how to put you, the reader, in my brain.

Another surprise was my choice not to write a rape scene. I am tired of reading rape scenes. I’ve been there! I don’t need to be there again! Most of the time they come out of nowhere, seldom are they responsibly handled, and if they’re included in a memoir, I find myself comparing my own assault to theirs instead of listening to what they have to say. Maybe that’s a “me problem,” but I know I’m not the only one who has it. Plus, it’s less about the mechanics of what happened, it’s about what happened after.

I think it will surprise people that every fact about 9/11 is 1.) true and 2.) sourced! I wonder if, when people look up all the ridiculous one-liners about Operation Neptune Spear, they’ll realize I was telling the truth about all of them … and if all those absurd trivia facts are true, maybe I’m also telling the truth about my rape.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope they laugh! I hope they cry. I hope it’s hard to read at moments. I hope it comforts them. I hope people see the evolution of a writing style mirrors gender transition. I hope they see that the very structure of the book isn’t just queer, it’s decidedly trans. I hope people put it on their shelves and say, “That’s one of my favorite books I’ve ever read.” I hope they feel stronger, more prepared for the horrors of the world. I hope they feel held.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Start in the middle.

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(In Defense of Research for Writing.)

It began as an essay. I wanted to write about a phenomenon so typical of current Baby Boomer relationships in recent years. Many of us in the freewheeling 1970s had sidestepped traditional marriage and lifestyles and opted instead for informal live-in relationships.  (We didn’t have the term “domestic partner” back then.) We were committed to one another, but our relationship had no legal anchor or even a name. Now, many of us in our 60s and 70s are coping with our partners’ health problems. While we may not be their “next of kin” in writing, our emotional ties bind us to them in sickness just as they did in health.

I had hoped to submit the essay to the New York Times “Modern Love” column, but as I neared the finish line of the final draft, my relationship in real time took a dramatic turn. It changed the course of my essay (not to mention the course of my life) and I felt that I now had a deeper message for readers. In fact, to best communicate that message, I would need to expand the essay and tell the story in a full-length memoir. That would mean writing about individuals I met along the way and their roles in my life.

In any work of memoir or autobiography or creative nonfiction, as responsible writers we’re always mindful of the need to protect the identities and privacy of the people in our story. It’s more than simply changing names and locations. We’ll include a clearly worded disclaimer, avoid disclosing sensitive or embarrassing material, we might ask permission from those we write about. But in the case of a story that covers this span of time, in my memoir some of the individuals had passed away and their survivors didn’t know me or about me, certainly some had forgotten, there were many with whom I had lost touch and probably wouldn’t be able to find. Since the story ends with a mystery, I was afraid readers might be tempted to search out and approach these individuals in a misguided attempt to solve the puzzle. So how would I remain faithful to the story without compromising the privacy of the characters on my pages?

I grappled with the conundrum for many long hours. And then, once I knew I had taken all the necessary precautions, and the publisher had approved my disclaimer, I thought about my typical reading audience. I know them as mature and responsible. They don’t follow the lives of media or entertainment personalities, and I didn’t think they would be tempted to track down any of the individuals in my story. Instead of prying, they would accept my invitation to step back and take an honest look at how they themselves cope with life’s mysteries and their own searches for the truth. I felt that this invitation would provide an additional layer of privacy for the individuals in my story.

Another more curious phenomenon faces us. It’s the possibility that some of our readers may believe they see themselves represented in our story when, in fact, they’re not. It can happen whether we’re writing fiction, fact, memoir, or even science fiction! My mentor, Marion Roach Smith (The Memoir Project) believes it’s almost inevitable that someone reading our work will think we’re writing about them or someone they know. They’re not stalkers, just average people who misidentify a character we introduce. I’m reminded of an especially harrowing incident when a former friend from college contacted me about a novel I had written and excitedly claimed that the entire book was about her, when in fact she hadn’t crossed my mind in years! At some point, we need to remember that once we’ve been responsible with our writing, we have no control over what our readers read into our words.

Instead of seeing A Version Of the Truth as a story about my relationship and the people in it, I believe readers will accept my encouragement to see that we all face mysteries at some point in our lives, and we need to decide how we’ll cope. Do we go on searching in vain, do we cling to denial, or do we get a version of the truth we can live with, and live with it? The key to my own peace of mind was the realization that some truths will never be known, and I needed to find a version I could accept. When the memoir was published, I felt satisfied that I had safeguarded the privacy of everyone in it.

Check out Marsh Rose’s A Version of the Truth here:

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(On Editing Anthologies of Writing.)

Over many months, author Gina Barreca and artist John Guillemette collaborated on their new book Gina School over Chinese food, pots of coffee in NY-style delis, video calls, and postal packages. In person and from across miles, they crafted Gina School, Gina Barreca’s most personal and dynamic collection yet: 103 illustrated life lessons. When you’re a renowned humorist and a beloved professor practiced at the art of delivering hard-knocks advice with love and humor, you’ve got to put it all on the page.

Gina and John got together one last time to talk writing, drawing, ruminating, laughing, and collaborating.

Gina: I couldn’t imagine how this book—lessons, truths, instruction, reassurances, aphorisms—could take shape. Yet I kept writing. Then, looking at John’s sketchbook, I saw what Gina School needed: a new dimension, both anchored and set free by the imaginative world of his artwork. It was like seeing a flat piece of paper, through origami, turn into a bird. John was getting an MFA, working full-time, and doing his own projects, but he was wise and ambitious enough to say “yes” when I asked him to collaborate on Gina School. He had no time, but neither did I, what with editing a book series for Woodhall Press, writing regularly for Psychology Today, and teaching full-time at UConn, in addition to lecturing nationally and internationally. Nobody you want to work with has any time for you, but you do it anyway. And so, we did.

John: A friend called the illustrations “oblique,” and I really liked that. They aren’t literal. I never tried to draw the words you sent me, at least not directly—and you trusted me enough to let me do that. Picture the process in reverse: What if the words had come after the illustration, like a caption contest? If people had to guess what the words were based on the image alone, they’d get it wrong most of the time, and I think that’s a strength of the project.

Gina: This is not a matching quiz.

John: We aren’t repeating ourselves. The illustrations don’t look directly at the writing. They walk down the block, round the corner, and then view the writing from a new angle.

Gina: A good example is Notre Dame. We’d gone back and forth with a line about ‘relationships ending in the worst way,’—one we eventually paired with an illustration of Notre Dame on fire. It grew more powerful and more oblique with each revision.

John: Seeing that image alone, you’d never guess the line.

Gina: You’d think it was about religion or God or history or something. And that illustration is so elaborate. And that sense of conflagration! I love it. What was the first draft?

John: I’d initially drawn an image of burnt toast on a plate.

Gina: Oh, yes. It didn’t quite fit.

John: It didn’t. It was too literal.

Gina: And not enough cataclysm.

John: And that was how we approached every line. Too “oblique” and you lose the connection. Too “spot-on” and you bring nothing new to the table. How far can we go?

Gina: Like Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies.” We’re human. We can’t stare at the truth; it’s like looking directly at an eclipse. In the beginning, your tendency was to be more directly representational, and it wasn’t working.

John: It wasn’t. There were often multiple characters in a drawing, a lot of people, even dialogue bubbles, which is crazy now, looking back on it.

Gina: I remember all those pencil sketches.

John: The first batch where I felt that we were getting close to establishing our aesthetic, where I finished everything in ink to see how it would go—those were mostly inanimate objects. And a little later, inanimate objects that had been interacted with by people without showing the people. One of my favorites examples corresponds to the line, “when presented the freedom of choice, most of us would prefer not to have to make a decision,” and the illustration depicts a multi-directional signpost with an axe swung into its side. So, someone was there recently. That’s what the axe tells us.

Gina: A lot of the illustrations depict either the moment right before or right after something happens. Someone was right there, or will be there soon, but they’re not in the illustration. And that someone becomes the reader. That landscape—or that set-design or whatever, that hint—is inviting the reader to be the person. As opposed to drawing the person, who then the reader understands that they are not. So, the non-representational is invitational.

John: Exactly.

Gina: You keep talking about achieving an aesthetic, which sounds very fancy but is of course true. I never thought of it in those terms.

John: And that’s the way an original aesthetic is established—organically. All we did was fine tune our book based on gut feelings. And approach each page with a relentless determination to get it right. That’s what artists do—we reach into the void of that which doesn’t yet exist, and we pull it through.

Gina: Wrestle it through. I revised that manuscript a hundred times. How many extra, unused illustrations did we have by the end?

John: Forty-four. But even these weren’t a waste—they were part of the process. They informed the re-draws that took their place.

Gina: It’s this sort of back-and-forth that makes books worth the trouble of making books. And we shook hands across what to others might have seemed like impossible boundaries: a more than 40-year age difference, differences in sensibilities and perspectives, differences of circumstance, in terms of our places in life and our proximity to its entrances and exits. There were, of course, times when our visions collided or needed clarification.

Gina: To see the other as an equal creator of a book is to realize that authentic collaboration supplies otherwise unimaginable and exotic possibilities in terms of bringing meaning to the page. We made each other laugh, convinced one another to change ideas for the better, and realized how the best of collaborative processes can work. What had started for me as writing became an entirely different entity. It was like taking a straight line between two points and making it, suddenly, into a triangle. One line became geometry, and the relationship that I had thought of as simply between the writer and the reader was suddenly kaleidoscopic. The line—and my written lines—were wonderfully complicated when the enthralling hypotenuse of art was added into the mix. No wonder so much magic and religion involves trios, trifecta’s, triads, and trinities: We always thought of the person holding the book, reading the words, and looking at the images, as our unspoken shadowy third.

John: The reader was never absent.

Gina: There’s so much texture and fun in this. Today, with AI-generated art, the chemistry, and heat, is gone.

John: I’m glad you said that because AI is limited in a way I think artists understand inherently but the broader population of consumers don’t. Remember how I said artists reach into “the void of that which does not yet exist?”

Gina: Yep.

John: AI can’t do this. AI can only reach behind, into the archives. It’s a formidable machine, don’t get me wrong—in a split-second, it canvases everything recorded by the human species. There’s no faster and more comprehensive way to mass-reference everything that has already been done. But that which does not yet exist is not part of its reference bank. It cannot midwife anything original. The artist’s mind is a womb synthesizing vision and history, future and past. AI has only one of these ingredients at its disposal.

Gina: That’s IT! AI can resurrect but it cannot give birth—not that I’m thinking of Frankenstein or anything.

John: What we made together is wholly unique. We bridged generational and experiential gaps into 103 life lessons full of humor and wisdom—the book is an organic synthesis.

Gina: Your images have everything do with embodying my observations about humor. Having spent my entire adult life staring at this topic, I couldn’t see what I was saying as clearly as you could. You helped me focus on what explosive new ways these ideas insisted on being presented. The illustrations, summoning ordinary objects, instrumentally aided my simple language. Together they could bear the weight of the impossibly complex yet utterly familiar emotions that Gina School holds.

John: There’s really no substitute for authentic, human creative collaboration.

Gina: And Gina School proves that. There’s nothing like it.

Check out Gina and John’s Gina School here:

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