Second Acts: Resolution & Irresolution after Memoir

Memoir is a complicated process. Writing a memoir typically requires condensing a life into a conventional narrative structure, with a beginning, middle, and end. And while biographers can savor the tidy solution of a subject’s death as their works’ ending, memoirists do not enjoy such an obvious last chapter, so to speak. How do memoirists grapple with their reader’s need for resolution, particularly when they might not feel that sense of resolution themselves? Can memoir be a form of healing? And how do they navigate their life and story beyond the last published page, and the vulnerability of presenting their life to an audience? Acclaimed memoirists Isaac Fitzgerald (Dirtbag Massachusetts), and Ashley C. Ford (Somebody’s Daughter), and Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful) join the World Voices Festival in conversation with Miwa Messer, host of the Poured Over podcast, for an intimate and tender discussion of how we tell the most vulnerable of stories: our own.