A conversation with Terese Svoboda about her latest book, Hitler and My Mother in Law, and how writing through uncertainty and using humor to face the unbearable truths history leaves behind.

“I needed to know that others had endured what my family was going through, regardless of the outcome.”

“Can you forgive me?”

“At its core, the madness memoir is an effort to impose a literary structure on an inherently disorganized condition.”

“Isherwood’s prose blends genre and crosses time to revisit key moments in his development as a writer, a gay man, and a global citizen in Berlin.”

“I was a fixture, a force, and a fierce advocate of fashion and style,” Talley writes in the memoir’s introduction. He also acknowledges how, for most of his career, he was the only person of color in “the upper echelons of fashion journalism.”

On how writing can help to heal, or at least cope.

If one of the things we get from engaging with other beings is some sort of reflectivity, reflexivity, this past year I have been alienated not only from other people, but from myself. Much of the life that I have been able to encounter, not through a screen at least, for the past year, has been non-human.

“If there’s a kind of sculptor who finds her way by diving blindly into the fog, hands extended, that’s the kind of writer-sculptor that I am.”