Putting your life on the page with Ann Patchett, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Julia Samuel and Arifa Akbar
Woman's Hour
BBC
4.2 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2022
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, Emma and guests explore why so many of us want to put our lives on the page. What stops us, what gets in the way and is it always a good idea? Is getting published the answer or are there are other ways to tell your stories. How different is writing personal essays or a memoir to creating a fictional world? Can writing stand in for therapy? What are the ethical and moral considerations of such sharing? To discuss these and many other questions Emma is joined by prize-winning author Ann Patchett, Sunday Times bestseller Cathy Rentzenbrink, psychotherapist and writer, Julia Samuel and journalist and author Arifa Akbar.
Presenter: Emma Barnett Producer: Lucinda Montefiore
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:41.0 | Hello I'm Emma Barnet and welcome to Womensa from BBC. podcasts. 22. Happy New Year to you. Here we go, eh? Looking back over 2021, some of the most memorable |
| 0:57.7 | interviews I conducted on the programme were with women who had chosen to put some of the most |
| 1:02.1 | intimate details about their lives on the page and into books. |
| 1:06.4 | I found myself grasping for language and for words to try and give voice to what I'm feeling. |
| 1:15.7 | And increasingly, I feel that I'm at a loss. |
| 1:18.6 | I feel that I still haven't quite been able |
| 1:21.0 | to articulate what the emotions are. That for example there is something |
| 1:26.5 | more hollow than sorrow, but I don't know the name for it, but I can tell you that I felt it. |
| 1:32.1 | It's one of the many reasons why I did choose to share my story, |
| 1:36.0 | because I want to reclaim what that history was, how I felt, |
| 1:41.0 | I feel an unburdening frankly. I really do and I have to live with it. I know I have to live |
| 1:46.6 | with this the rest of my life. When I was writing I was thinking who the hell is going to be |
| 1:50.9 | interested in what you were eating in 1942. |
| 1:54.0 | But my editor would say your history, so it's history. |
... |
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