Memoir Nation

During the month of August, Memoir Nation revisits its favorite guests of the past year. This week we’re pairing up powerhouse authors Jose Antonio Vargas and Beth Macy, whose memoirs touch on social-cultural issues that force conversation—and effect change. These two episodes circle questions of immigration and who gets to claim belonging in this country (Vargas) and poverty and who can get ahead and how in this country (Macy)—and why memoir is a powerful vehicle for spreading messages that desperately need our attention. If you love these authors, be sure to check out their full episodes, and we’ll see you next week for another Best of Memoir Nation. Happy Summer!
Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and Tony-nominated theatrical producer. He’s the founder of the nonprofit immigrant storytelling organization Define American, and his best-selling memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, was published in 2018, with an updated edition in 2025. His next book, White Is Not a Country, will examine America's foundational Black and White racial binary, and where everyone else fits within and outside that binary.
Beth Macy reported and wrote for The Roanoke Times for a quarter-century and is the author of Dopesick, Raising Lazarus, Factory Man, and Paper Girl, her first memoir.
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Happy August, Memoir Nation! As is our custom, we bring you our favorite guests of the past year, partnered by theme. This week we chose Kwame Alexander and E. Jean Carroll, both of whom have seen major personal victories in the months since we originally interviewed them. Kwame Alexander launched his own imprint, Kwame Alexander Books, and E. Jean Carroll finally got her settlement money from Trump. These two guests are exemplary of how to face the hard stuff and keep going—all the way to the top. As we say in the show opening, it’s as if they’re interviews are in conversation with one another—and neither one fails to inspire. We’re wishing you good summer writing and good summer reading, and we hope you enjoy our Year 8 “best-of” series.
Kwame Alexander is an Emmy® Award-winning producer of The Crossover, his Newbery Medal-winning novel turned Disney+ TV series, the creator of the new animated PBS special Acoustic Rooster’s Barnyard Band, and the new head of Kwame Alexander Books, an imprint of Sourcebooks. His mission is to change the world—one word at a time.
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 is the author of Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President, about the two sexual abuse cases she won against Trump, twice, and for which she has subsequently received a $5.6 millon payout. Her high-profile legal victories against Donald Trump have elevated her as a symbol of resilience and truth-telling.
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These week comedian Roz Hernandez opens up her heart and her story to us—and shares about the acceptance that comes when you stop trying to be “for everyone.” As a transgender comic, Roz talks about the experience of being hated just for existing, and why she decided to take her comedy show on tour to LGBTQ+ bars around the country—and experience that would later become the foundation for her memoir, Peeing in an Empty Bottle. This is our final episode of our eighth year of podcasting, and we love that it ends on a story of transformation, acceptance, and how we all have the choice to settle into the best version our ourselves we can be—even when that means we’ll have our detractors and critics. Freedom and success often go hand-in-hand, and Roz embodies a version of what that looks like in this week’s show.
Roz Hernandez is a transgender comedian based in Los Angeles. In 2023 she starred in an 8 episode tv series on Hulu called “Living for the Dead” with Kristen Stewart. In 2024 New York Magazine’s Vulture named her one of the “Comedians You Should and Will Know”; she was the opening act for Bob the Drag Queen’s US tour; Apple Podcasts named her comedy podcast “Ghosted! by Roz Hernandez” their Pick of The Month; and she was featured in the Netflix documentary about LGBTQ standup called “OUTstanding: A Comedy Revolution.”
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Memoir Nation explores the hardest things this week with guest Emily Rapp Black. Her new book is I Would Die If I Were You, part memoir, part how-to, that supports writers through writing trauma and the things that won’t let us go, and how to stay the course. In this week’s show, we talk a lot about process—doing the work, the permission to write what is calling to be written, and how to shake things up when you’re struggling. We talk about being in the mess, not worrying about your book being right for everyone, and how to grapple with the things other people say—like I would die if I were you. There is so much wisdom and grace in this interview, and in Rapp Black’s new book. In this week’s trend, we cover Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir, Careless People, in an effort to continue the upward sales trajectory of this book that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are desperate to silence.
Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller, Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary, a New York Times Editor’s Pick; Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg; and most recently, I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truthtelling. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin. Her work has appeared in VOGUE, the New York Times, The Sun, TIME, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and other publications. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside.
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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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