In this episode, meet marketing executive and entrepreneur Bozoma Saint John, author of The Urgent Life, poet and writer Camonghne Felix, author of Dyscalculia, and writer and editor Will Schwalbe, author of We Should Not Be Friends. Listen in to hear these authors reflect on their recent memoirs, and on what it was like to recount the intricacies of love, loss, and friendship while recording their audiobooks.
Listen to clips from the audiobooks mentioned in this episode:
When Bozoma Saint John’s husband, Peter, died of cancer, she made one big decision: to live life urgently. Bozoma was no stranger to adversity, having grieved a child born prematurely–a process that led to her and Peter’s separation. When Peter knew his cancer was terminal, he gave Bozoma a short list of things to do: cancel the divorce, and fix the wrongs immediately. In The Urgent Life, Bozoma takes listeners through the dizzying, numbing days of multiple griefs, and the courage which these sparked in her to live life in accordance with her deepest values time and time again.
When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, everything shows up in the tapestry of her healing. In this raw reflection, Felix repossesses herself through the exploration of history she’d left behind, using her Dyscalculia—a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math—as a metaphor for her miscalculations in love, and negotiates the misalignments of perception and reality, love and harm, and the politics of heartbreak.
By the time Will Schwalbe was a junior at college, he had already met everyone he cared to know. He also knew exactly who he wanted to avoid: the jocks. All this changed dramatically when Will collided with Chris Maxey. Maxey was physically imposing, loud, and a star wrestler who was determined to become a Navy SEAL. Thanks to a little-known secret society at Yale, the two forged a bond that would become a mainstay of each other’s lives. We Should Not Be Friends tracks an extraordinary friendship over decades of challenge and change and is a testament to the miracle of human connection.
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