I have some really exciting news that I will be sharing with everyone soon, which has sprung from my love of memoir as a form, but also from my PhD, which was about the transformative power of writing memoir, for the writer, and therefore also for their reader. But in the meantime, I will be doing a series of interviews with memoirists, some of whom are yet to be published, and others who have recently been published, and others who were published once upon a time. The general format of interview questions will be similar for each writer, and will be published here for all to read.

The subject of the interviews is on the process of writing memoir, and how the craft of writing can be healing – so it’s not just about purging raw experience, it’s manipulating that experience to find story, and excavating it to find meaning, and the developments that happen in the process, in a writer’s relationship to her past, as well as her relationship with family and friends. How the writing is of a life, but the life changes through the process of writing, and these changes then influence the memoir being written.

To launch this new series, I will be running my first interview this week with Noreen Masud, who recently published A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton/Melville House Press, 2023). A beautiful book about flat landscapes, growing up in Lahore, and what it means to live with complex post traumatic stress.