So, my guest today, Morgan Jirkins, is a journalist and author, editor, professor at Columbia University

here in New York City.

Her debut essay collection, a book called This Will Be My Undoing, exploded into the public

consciousness last year, becoming an instant New York Times bestseller.

She writes with this raw sense of transparency and a fierce sense of self-examination and

revelation, sharing really deeply personal, provocative stories and moments and reflections

that often center around her experience as a woman of color around intersectionality,

feminism, the writing life and the world of publishing, which was part of our conversation,

gender and race, and so much more.

Morgan has also been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, S.Y.R. Rowling Stone,

all these other awesome places.

This conversation was deeply powerful, opened my eyes, opened my heart, opened my mind

on so many levels, both after reading her words in her book and also in sort of deconstructing

both the language, the stories and the experiences that led to these essays and so much more

really excited to share it with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

I'm fascinated by people's writing processes because it's so different for so many people.

It's like I'm a writer, I've known so many writers and I've literally read a story about

a guy who once did all of his writing at a diner, the diner burned down.

He couldn't write.

So he literally had a version of the diner recreated in his backyard.

So he had this plate like he could only write at that one booth in this one diner.

...