When I first got into this book writing class at Columbia, on the first day the professor said,

if you think you can be happy doing anything else, don't write a book. And I just knew already, like, I have to do this. I don't

know why, but I have to do it. I don't care what else in my life suffers. Welcome back to working.

I'm your host, Karen Hahn. And I'm your other host, June Thomas. Hi, June. How are you? I am fabulous. Thank you. I am getting

settled in our new home, which is in Scotland. I am more or less over jet lag and most relieving of all.

I'm finally getting back to a routine of working on my book. So that is great. How are you doing?

I'm doing pretty good. I have to say it's always fun when someone you zoom with a lot has a new

Zoom background, which you now do, having moved. So it's a very novel experience. Yes. It's looking

very empty right now because all of our stuff is, well, I think waiting to be put on a ship

rather than actually on a ship. Oh, wow. But it's funny because you don't need that stuff.

I need to tell myself all that stuff that I paid a fortune to send a... I don't need it. But hey,

there we are. There we are. So who did you talk to this week for this episode?

So the voice we heard at the top of the show

belongs to Casey Parks. She is a journalist at the Washington Post and she has an amazing

new book out called Diary of a Misfit, a Memoir and a Mystery. And I wanted to speak with her

because in some ways it's a book about the struggle to write a book,

but it's also a really beautiful and compelling read. I really highly recommend it, but I really

wanted to talk to her about it. Yeah, it sounds really, really fascinating. And I guess,

kind of on that subject, what can we look forward to in the Slate Plus bit this week?

That's right. Speaking of fascinating, so Slate Plus members will hear what reading the audio

version taught Casey about the book she'd spent 13 years working on. And I also asked her

about books that she read to help her structure or frame her own memoir.

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