The stories we tell ourselves hold tremendous power over who we become and how we live. The least we can do is be conscious of them.

On how memoirists mold the truth + remembering from and within trauma + the power of fragmentation + teaching in prisons + the complexities of motherhood, daughterhood, and living in a female body

Nude Study (1900) by William Orpen

Dear Readers,

I hope you enjoy this incredibly thoughtful interview about writing, trauma, and doorways with Shauna Gilligan, whose intimate and insightful questions allowed for a truly beautiful conversation. The interview first appeared on Shauna’s blog in 2021.

Ouellette’s debut memoir, The Part That Burns (Split/Lip Press, 2021), was included on The Rumpus’s Most Anticipated for the first half of 2021. The Part That Burns is a beautiful reflection on the complexities of daughterhood and motherhood. Moving through childhood, the teenage years and adulthood, it explores what it means to be female with a body through which desire ebbs and flows, is given, denied, and, at times, forced.

In this interview we focus on the craft of writing memoi…