Stephanie Foo on Her Memoir, What My Bones Know

Everything we do our whole lives, including the way we live, should be a collaborative process

Welcome back to Origin Stories. It’s been a busy couple weeks.

I interviewed Stephanie Foo, a veteran radio producer and longtime staffer at shows like Snap Judgment and This American Life. She joined me to talk about the creation of her NYT best-selling memoir, “What My Bones Know,” which explores her early childhood trauma and her more recent diagnosis of complex PTSD.

I was excited to talk to her because memoir, to me, feels like the hardest type of writing to get right – and yet Stephanie’s book does exactly that. It’s a balance of tender and incisive, tragic but ultimately redemptive.

And sure enough… Foo discusses fart jokes, mining old journals for content, her husband’s editing skills, and how she deals with feedback.

“Everything we make––everything we do our whole lives, including the way we live––should be a collaborative process,” she says. “Everything from taking edits in a Google Doc to dealing with your husband when he’s telling you to stop leaving out food. How are you going to help other people have their needs met?”

Foo continues, “How are you looking out for the audience? Maybe some artists think about this differently and they make art for themselves, and they think, ‘My audience will come along for the ride.’ But for me, I was thinking very intently about my audience in every single sentence of this book.”

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Thanks,

Matt