Jessica Wilbanks, memoirist

Are you a voracious reader who is disappointed that Claudia Rankine-level magic isn’t happening when you sit down to write? We relate! In this episode, the brilliant memoirist Jessica Wilbanks holds our hands as we cross the gap to recognizing good writing and then actually doing it, performing the juggling act of nailing the right voice for your personal essays, and figuring out how to make your life interesting to people other than yourself and your best friend. We’ve particularly fallen in love with how Jessica thinks about success in writing as not inundant wealth and copies sold, because the “books that have really changed [her] life are not books that most people have read.”

(Plus, Avengers: Endgame spoilers. Sorry, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re probably never going to.)

You can find more from Jessica on Twitter, Instagram, and her website which includes her blog and a full list of publications.

Jessica’s Writing We Discussed

• When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

• “From Essay to Book: On ‘Mirrorings’” in Essay Daily

• “On the Far Side of the Fire: Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta” in Longreads

Suggested Reads and Honorable Mentions from Jessica

• Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje 

• Bluets by Maggie Nelson

• Cameron Dezen Hammon’s upcoming memoir, This is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession

• “Shitty First Drafts” from Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

• The Body Papers by Grace Talusan

• Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

• “Mirrorings” by Lucy Grealy in Harper’s Magazine

• Claudia Rankine (The White Card: A Play, Citizen: An American Lyric, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, and others)

• Roxane Gay (Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Difficult Women, Bad Feminist: Essays, and others)

• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (English translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori)

• The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First-Century Amazon by Chris Feliciano Arnold

• The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick

• “Me Talk Pretty One Day” from Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

• Charles D’Ambrosio (Loitering: New and Collected Essays, The Dead Fish Museum, and others)

• Bonus: Nick Flynn is telling us all to write at least 50 knockout pages

Suggested Reads and Honorable Mentions from Our Very Own

• Jesus Land: A Memoir by Julia Scheeres

• Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

• Educated by Tara Westover

• The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea 

Also Discussed

• The episode of “Bullseye with Jesse Thorn” (podcast) focused on Brian Raftery’s book, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. You can find the episode on the Maximum Fun network here.

• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance