Michele Filgate, WHAT MY MOTHER & I DON'T TALK ABOUT

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens

Connection, Inspiration, Moms, Entertainment, Arts, Reading, Books, Parenting, Literary

4.4 • 602 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today I'm interviewing Michele Filgate, the editor of the anthology What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence. The collection is based on her essay published by Longreads in October 2017, right after the Harvey Weinstein story broke and the #MeToo movement took off. She started writing this essay when she was an undergraduate. What started as her trying to work through her stepfather's abuse culminated in this impactful piece she says is a really an essay about a daughter longing for a stronger and better relationship with her mother. She then recruited many others to tell their own stories. The collection is amazing. I loved talking to Michele about her own experiences, how she structured this book, her time in the literary world and how she made peace with her past.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the Webby-nominated podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
0:13.8	This episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books has been sponsored by Himalaya, the best app for discovering, listening, and organizing podcasts.
0:22.5	Himalaya was nice enough to reach out and make me an editor's choice. So now they're a sponsor.
0:27.7	Check them out at Himalaya.com or in the app store. I'm interviewing Michelle Philgate today,
0:33.0	who's the editor of the anthology, what my mother and I don't talk about. Fifteen writers break the silence,
0:38.3	which was based on her essay on Long Reads, a contributing editor at Literary Hub. Michelle
0:43.3	has published her work in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Paris Review,
0:47.6	Tin House, O, the Oprah Magazine, and numerous other publications. A former board member of the
0:52.3	National Book Critics Circle and a graduate of
0:54.5	the University of New Hampshire, Michelle is currently an MFA student at NYU. She was named one of the
1:00.0	100 most influential people in Brooklyn culture. Welcome, Michelle, DeMoms don't have time to read books.
1:05.7	Thanks for having me. So can you please tell listeners what inspired you to write the essay on which the anthology
1:12.8	you wrote was based and how it came to be a book? Yeah. So I started writing this essay when I was
1:21.2	an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire well over a decade ago. And when I first
1:26.4	started writing the essay, it wasn't long after I had moved
1:29.9	out of my mom and stepfather's house. And the essay really came at that point from a place of
1:35.6	anger and confusion trying to write about the fact that my stepfather had abused me. But what
1:42.9	it took me many years of therapy and finding my
1:46.4	voice as a writer to realize is that this was an essay about my relationship with my mother and the
1:52.9	fracture that this abuse had caused in our relationship. And I didn't know that when I first started.
1:59.3	When I first started, it was more about trying to get
2:01.6	the events on the page and figure out what I had just been through. So I have never spent so long
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Zibby Owens, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Zibby Owens and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.