Craft Talk Book Club Nicole Breit & Mary Adkins

Mary and Nicole are taking a break before season 2. Catch up on The Idiot by Elif Batuman before they return later this year. See you next season!

A common challenge for writers of memoir is how to create emotional safety while bringing readers in close. One of the ways McCandless does this is by including photos, artifacts and documents as a starting point for essaying. Nicole + Mary discuss the many ways McCandless brings a sense of play to her exploration of difficult truths in Persephone's Children.

Persephone's Children doesn't follow a traditional narrative arc; it doesn't even have a consistent first-person narrator. And yet the story McCandless tells feels perfectly cohesive. Nicole and Mary consider key elements that unify the book and speculate on the placement of a visual metaphor that gave them pause.

A contract, a word search, a play, a grimoire. How does a writer go about finding the right container to shape their story? Mary and Nicole discuss their favorite essays in Persephone's Children, why they work so well, and how a writer might discover the right form to tell their own vulnerable stories.

What is a mosaic memoir? And why go about writing one vs a traditional straightforward narrative? Nicole + Mary dig into the ways crafting a memoir-in-essays helped Rowan McCandless grapple with difficult subject matter like racism, intergenerational trauma, and domestic abuse.

Perhaps the most significant and explicit symbol in this novel is black cake, and it's rich (pun intended) indeed. In this final episode discussing Black Cake, we unpack Wilkerson's choice to build a world around this one dessert, and all the implications of that choice.