Life Story Links: September 9, 2025

“Interviews are a dance between preparation and improvisation.”
—Simran Sethi

Vintage photograph by an unknown photographer, September 1908: “Wright Aeroplane, Ft. Myer, Virginia,” Orville Wright in plane. Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. Courtesy Picturing the Century Exhibition, National Archives.

Real stories, real people

WAR VETERANS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
“You could ask Chat-GPT ‘tell me about a story on D-Day’ and it might give you something that feels compelling and realistic, but in that case it’s about as realistic as Saving Private Ryan, because it’s an average, a sort of synthesis of lots of different stories.”

ON HER RELATIONSHIP TO WRITING
“I have difficulty with the term memoir. I suppose I’ve been writing about myself forever. But, as I wrote this, and as the structure and tone of the book came together, nonfiction seemed to be the genre that fit it best.”

THE (MANDATED) HEALING STORY ARC
“I am a memoirist and nature writer, and I live with chronic incurable illness. I lived amongst nature when I became most ill, and I still became more ill.” Polly Atkin on Raynor Winn and the longstanding problem autobiographical nature writing has with the way it presents illness.

OUR HUMAN STORIES
“It matters, those years that have fluttered by like leaves from a tree. History matters, personal history, not only the big history that is outlined in books. The history of real people is in their stories. Their memoirs.”

Journaling for good

LENA DUNHAM PEEKS INTO THE PAST
“I have been in the editing phase of a memoir, and reopening the many books I’ve carried in my purse over the years is the best trick I know for connecting honestly to days past. Even the slant of my handwriting (which is terribly changeable) tells me something about who I was trying to be.”

OUR CHANGING STORIES
“The way we experience a moment in time will be different than the story we tell about it afterwards. As time passes, layers of reflection and meaning infiltrate our stories.”

‘PLAYING IN A BOOK’
“I love prying open the word journal until it makes space for all its unruly cousins: the sketchbook, the commonplace book, the half-legible spiralbound, the grocery list where a line about milk accidentally turns into a line about mortality. Because the point isn’t tidy pages or a faithful record of the day—it’s a place of one’s own sanctuary, where the raw material of life can rest, shift, and, when the time is right, come into focus and meaning.”

CREATING SPACE
Suleika Jaouad’s antidote to the loneliness epidemic: Journaling Club. “A gathering that’s equal parts tender and mischievous. A way to meet new people or go deeper with old friends. To write together. To share—or not. To surprise yourself.” Download her free guide here.

Miscellaneous memory-keeping

AS MEMORIES FADE…
Cookbook printed with fading ink aims to mimic dementia patients’ memory loss: “Boom Saloon’s ‘living cookbook’ is designed to ‘trick people into having the conversations they should be having’ about a disease which has become the leading cause of death in the UK.”

REVEALING RARE ACCESS
The thousands of books in Cormac McCarthy’s library, “many of which are annotated with margin comments, promise to reveal far more about this elusive literary giant than the few cagey interviews he gave when he was alive.”

A ‘FIERCE MEMOIR’
Mother Mary Comes to Me, the new memoir by Arundhati Roy, “is not just a turbulent family chronicle. It is full of eccentrics, impish humor, and the absurdities of small-town and big-city life.”

JOHN CHEEVER’S SECRETS
In a new memoir, Susan Cheever searches for the wellspring of her father’s genius. “Her first book about her father fused memoir and biography; this one fuses memoir and literary appreciation.”