To a Buck-Toothed Girl in Luxembourg
New episode with David Levithan & Jens Lekman, a little art, and my new AMA challenge!
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 649 of my Virtual Memories Show. feat. writer David Levithan and singer-songwriter Jens Lekman and the collaborative alchemy that led to their novel SONGS FOR OTHER PEOPLE’S WEDDINGS (Abrams Press), about a Swedish singer-songwriter who builds a side-career playing original songs at people’s weddings. We talk about the nature of collaboration, the power of a great song, and how David & Jens traded writing prompts with each other — a wedding song leading to a chapter, a chapter leading to a wedding song —, discovered how differently they each look at love, and managed to fuse that tension into a story of how love changes over time. We get into the differences between writing stories and songs, how Jens had fallen out of love with music (blame Spotify) and how this book helped him fall back in love with it, whether they’ll write a sequel about funerals, and how Jens’ song, “If you ever need a stranger (to sing at your wedding),” led to his side-career as a wedding singer. We also discuss Jens’ new album inspired by the book, David’s upcoming history of the AIDS era, the ways collaboration helps create new structures, what it means to be alone, how our private lives can get drowned by our public ones, their book/music tour and the importance of face-to-face interaction, the value of emotionally honest fiction, and more, including numerous Nick Cave references. Give it a listen! And go read SONGS FOR OTHER PEOPLE’S WEDDINGS!
Last week I posted Episode 648, feat. cartoonist Sacha Mardou and her phenomenal graphic memoir, PAST TENSE: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself In Therapy (Avery), about the midlife process of overcoming lifelong traumas and anxiety. We talk about her decision to to make her therapy process (& sessions) public, first as online comics and then as Past Tense, the benefits of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, what it took to violate the English stiff upper lip and admit that she had problems and needed therapy, and her mother’s Jehovah Witness conversion and how she’s still sifting through the damage of that. We get into how therapy changed her relationship to her daughter, why corniness is no reason to avoid addressing/admitting one’s inner child, and how her families (and therapists) feel about seeing themselves in the book. We also discuss Sacha’s indy comics upbringing, her marriage to fellow cartoonist Ted May, how we feel about Gen X getting overlooked, her Doris Lessing binge during perimenopause, why we need to turn up the bonobo & turn down the chimp, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read PAST TENSE!
Recent episodes: Oliver Radclyffe • Eulogy • Rachel Cockerell • Paul Karasik • Kate Maruyama • David Denby • Peter Stothard
To a Buck-Toothed Girl in Luxembourg
It’s time for a new Ask Me Anything (AMA) episode of The Virtual Memories Show*! Hit me with any & all questions you have about the podcast, me, or my various artistic/cultural pursuits & interests**!
You can
email me your question (text or an audio clip) at groth18@gmail.com,
leave it as a comment on the web-page of this email,
call my Google Voice number: 973-869-9659,
or I guess like use a carrier pigeon or something.
Get me your questions by this Sunday (Aug. 17), and I’ll answer as many of them as I can for next Tuesday’s show. And let me know if it’s okay to include your name when I read the question. (I’ll default to NOT naming the questioner.)
If you need ideas, here are some episodes where I’ve let you AMA — 12/29/14 & 8/20/19 — or been the guest — 12/28/21 & 1/3/23.
* Because I don’t have a guest lined up up for next week; I do have a pitch out, but even if that comes through, I haven’t done an AMA episode in a long time, and would love to hear from you guys.
** Heck, I’ll even answer menswear, haircare, and workout questions:
*
This email setup runs $29/month, podcast-hosting via LibSyn is $20/month, and the remote recording setup on Zencastr is $20/month, so if you want to help out with these expenses or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can support the Virtual Memories Show with a contribution of any size, one-time or recurring.
Instaxery
No new Instax, so here’s Dan Nadel’s cat from a few months ago:
Artistry
I dashed off a tree Monday with the brush pen —
— and mis-sized a fawn last week —
You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.
Postcardery
Let me know if you want to be on my postcard-a-day list. (Financial supporters of the podcast get a hand-drawn or painted postcard as a thank-you.)
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far. I’ll be back on Sunday with links, books, & workout-/meditation-craziness, and on Wednesday with a new episode, and maybe some art and an Instax.
Shyness is nice and shyness can stop you / From doing all the things in life you'd like to,
Got questions you want me to answer in the next episode of the podcast? Fire away!