Over five weeks of Spring 2025 semester, Pushkin Industries senior producer and host Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey took selected Berkeley undergraduates through the process of building an audio story — from story-hunting, sourcing, reporting, and researching to drafting and editing. Drawing on his experience making chart-topping narrative shows Revisionist History and The Last Archive and working with authors such as Jill Lepore and Malcolm Gladwell, Naddaff-Hafrey taught his students how to look for stories and build them into full podcast episodes. Workshop participants learned to build audio stories from the ground up, and left the workshop having made a short audio story of their own.
Mikaela O’Brien was a student in the podcasting workshop, and she produced the audio story On the Memoir below. Since then, she has continued to explore the memoir genre through the Art of Writing memoir-writing Fall 2025 workshop. She also revisited her piece a few months after she first produced it, and she shares her reflections here.
Revisiting the Memoir: In Conversation with Roxanne Gay and Elizabeth Abel
In the six months since finishing this workshop, my interest in the memoir genre, and life writing more generally, has persisted, frequently rearing its head in my literary consumption.
This summer, I traveled to Paris for the first time and read two of Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical narratives: The Possession and Getting Lost. In both, Ernaux peels back the layers of an unrequited romance, revealing intense obsession, jealousy, attachment and emotion. After reading, I wondered about what it means to write something shameful, but true.
I’ve read several of Ernaux’s books, including Happening, Simple Passion, The Young Man, and A Girl’s Story. In each, she reflects on a specific memory or relationship. Ernaux gracefully melds reflection, curiosity, and insight, resisting any instinct toward shame or self-reproach. Although largely consisting of ordinary observations, Ernaux’s writing delves into heavy, at times controversial, subject matter with poise and profundity.
In 2022, she was bestowed the Nobel Prize in literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” This recognition speaks to what Professor Elizabeth Abel wonders about at the piece’s end, assigning importance to one woman’s interiority and acknowledging its capacity to convey something universal.
I’m interested in further exploring the life writing genre inside and outside the classroom, paying particular attention to writers like Ernaux who merge the private and the political. I hope to identify similar literature that, by exploring sexuality, trauma, privacy, and love, exposes power structures functioning in relation to race and gender.
Read the On the Memoir transcript here.