“We choose our identities based on what’s available, and those choices are not just about what is true for ourselves. We take on identities because we need a purpose.”

Can people change? How continuous is identity? With YOU’VE CHANGED: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation (William Morrow), Benoit Denizet-Lewis explores the concepts of personal change and change-in-the-world, the ways we find identities and community, and the peril of changing into our parents (haha). We talk about how we define change and transformation, what happens when we think we’ve changed but the people in our lives don’t notice any difference, how his husband feared that he would change too much in the writing of the book, and how the American narrative of change equals “overcoming one’s problems.” We get into how he made his own story of change and addiction part of the book (while guarding his privacy), whether change involves finding a core self or something new, whether redemption is possible for people who committed heinous crimes, what happened the time he got scientifically tested about his sexual preferences, and the chapter he wishes he could’ve included in the book. We also discuss who he’s reading, whether the therapy that works for him now would have helped when he was younger, how one can prioritize one’s own happiness while the world is (let’s say) ending, his hallucinations in Esalen, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read YOU’VE CHANGED: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation!

“The core question that comes up throughout the reporting for this book is: What changes and what stays the same?”

“We change in community; we need buy-in from other people. Most profound changes need other people to validate them.”

“A lot of the change we experience is unintentional and we don’t notice it happening.”

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“To not be gentle with myself is like booing a sunrise.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has written three previous books, including America Anonymous and the New York Times bestseller Travels With Casey. A New America Fellow and NEH Public Scholar, he divides his time between Boston and Prague.

Follow Benoit on Instagram and Bluesky.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at a NYC hotel on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. B/W photo of Benoit by someone else; double-selfie by me. It’s on my instagram.

“I was interested in that relationship between philosophy and art, between philosophy and life-writing, philosophy and narrative form: it’s really at the heart of this project.”

Philosopher and biographer Clare Carlisle converses & communes with me over her new book, TRANSCENDENCE FOR BEGINNERS: LIFE WRITING AND PHILOSOPHY (NYRB). We talk about her existential moment of being invited to give the Gifford Lectures on natural theology and how it led her wonder what she could say about the knowledge of God, how writing biographies raised philosophical questions on the nature of a life in its entirety, how flexible the notion of transcendence is (and why it doesn’t have to be “rising above” the world so much as “spreading out” into it), and how the lecture mode offered her an opportunity for a different writing voice. We get into the possibility of communion and transmission, the tension between biography and philosophy, the harmfulness of the notion of attainment and what that implies of the seeking of wisdom, and what happens if you’re like Kierkegaard and you hear The Call but don’t know what it’s calling you to do. We also discuss her philosophical love affair with Spinoza and his philosophy of interconnectedness, the bridge she discovered between Spinoza and Indian traditions, the influence of past guest Celia Paul on the lectures, and more. Give it a listen! And go read TRANSCENDENCE FOR BEGINNERS!

“I’d written biographies of thinkers, but with these lectures I felt I needed to say something myself rather than just interpret another thinker.”

“For Spinoza, on a metaphysical level, each of us is completely interconnected with everything else, and each of us is a singular manifestation or expression of the whole.”

“There’s the ongoing yet diffuse effect of the books we read the thinkers we encounter; they become part of our way of thinking.”

“That idea of necessity, that ‘you have to do this,’ interests me. What kind of necessity is it? No one’s forcing you. It’s not even the Kantian moral law. Not logical necessity. So what is it? What is that necessity that we sometimes feel, that THIS is something I have to do.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Clare Carlisle is the author of eight books on philosophy and philosophers, including Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard and The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, which won the 2024 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Clare grew up in Manchester, England; studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge; and now lives in East London. She is a professor of philosophy at King’s College London.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Nassau Inn in Princeton on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Clare by someone else; photo of Katy Mouse by me. It’s on my instagram.

“All of my best friends were sent away to reform school. I kept the letters they sent me, and they’re in the book.”

Pull up a chair, enjoy a kasha varnishke, and listen to me and Josh Alan Friedman talk about his kaleidoscopic novel, ALL ROADS LEAD TO GREAT NECK (Wyatt Doyle Books/New Texture)! We talk about the momentous years he spent in Great Neck as a kid and why he set his novel in 1970, the ne’er-do-wells and drug addicts he knew (and emulated) in school, how Great Neck has changed since his “glory days,” and the larger-than-life Yiddishkeit ghost who haunts the novel. We get into how he managed to weave Irving Berlin, Floyd Patterson, and Leslie West into the story, how his wife got him to finish the book by putting up post-it notes in their kitchen about each chapter, and how he reconstructed 1970 Great Neck from his collection of the notes girls used to pass in schools and the letters his friends sent him from reform school. We also discuss life after losing his dad, Bruce Jay Friedman, in 2020, how he used to take his 14-year-old pals to see showings of Bruce Jay’s play Steambath so they could catch the nude scene, how it felt to see pieces of his childhood transformed in his dad’s stories (incl. a visit to Las Vegas), what’s left of the New York of his heyday and why he misses Joe Franklin, the play he’s writing about his chauffeur days, his retirement from his lifelong guitar career after a carpal tunnel diagnosis, and more. Give it a listen! And go read ALL ROADS LEAD TO GREAT NECK!

“My father was an anchor of my life. I never laughed with anyone the way I laughed with my father. All the rerefence points that we had, it’s a big gap that he’s not there.”

“Mott Street in Chinatown is still wonderful. It’s still my New York.”

“We only have our own experiences to draw on.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Writer-guitarist Josh Alan Friedman was born in New York City in 1956. By 1987, he’d had enough and followed his wife to Texas, a year after he published Tales of Times Square.

Josh’s 2026 novel, All Roads Lead to Great Neck, is based on a doomed adolescent hippie Josh knew as a teenager. His autobiographical novel, Black Cracker, tells the saga of his childhood being the only white boy at Long Island’s last segregated school. Before that, he published, Tell the Truth Until They Bleed, a wrenching collection of music profiles, When Sex Was Dirty, a follow-up to Tales of Times Square, and I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life (with Al Goldstein). He co-edited Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, with Nile Southern.

Josh set off satirical fires as writer half of the Friedman Bros, the most feared cartooning duo of the late ’70s and ’80s, along with his brother, Drew Friedman. Anthologies include Warts and All and Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental.

On the music front, as “Josh Alan,” he barnstormed the state of Texas for 30 years, rocking arenas with his Guild D-40. He copped three Dallas Observer Music Awards for Best Acoustic Act, and released six albums: Famous & Poor, The Worst!, Blacks ‘n’ Jews, Josh Alan Band, Sixty Goddammit, and his 2025 tour de force, Acoustic Instrumentals.

Follow Josh on Instagram and Facebook.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Carnegie Diner on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Josh by someone else, except for the cigar one of us; that’s by me. It’s on my instagram.

“I think we live in an era that is so deprived of authenticity, where people can’t live the lives Peter and Paul did, and so many young people are desperate to do that: to live in a cheap neighborhood and make art.”

With THE WONDERFUL WORLD THAT ALMOST WAS: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (FSG), Andrew Durbin brings us a masterful biography of a pair of artists, their art, gay life pre- and post-Stonewall, and more. We talk about his first exposure to each of their art, why he restricted the biography to the years Paul and Peter were together/around each other (1956-1975), how queer lives are often oriented around death and why he wanted to affirm life with this book, when a biographer can let his subjects go, and why he prefers Thek over Hujar. We get into the ephemerality of much of Thek’s art installations, Hujar’s dissatisfaction with commercial photography and the struggles with getting photos taken seriously as art, the triangle they formed with Andrew’s hero, Susan Sontag, Thek’s belief that marrying the right woman (Sontag, at one point) would have “fixed” him, his regret at not getting to interview Joseph Raffael for the book, and how meeting Ann Wilson changed the course of the book. We also discuss how Andrew became an art-writer/-editor by accident, how NYC has changed since he left 6 years ago, why young people are enthusiastic about his Thek and Hujar, why he needs to decompress from writing about history, how art criticism feeds his fiction and poetry, and more. Give it a listen! And go read The Wonderful World That Almost Was!

“You can’t bring people back from the dead, but you can build a bridge.”

“My entire education in contemporary art happened because every time someone would ask me to write something, I would say yes and have to immediately have to learn all about it.”

“I live with a Polaroid of Susan Sontag next to my bed. . . . I really enjoyed writing Paul Thek’s crush on Susan.”

“All art writing is about trying to figure out why an arbitrary thing is in the room at any given moment. And that’s what fiction is, and that’s what poetry is, too.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Andrew Durbin is the editor in chief of frieze magazine. He is the author of the novels MacArthur Park, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland, and served as the editor for Kevin Killian’s posthumous work Fascination. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Paris Review online, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in London. His new book is The Wonderful World That Almost Was.

Follow Andrew on Bluesky and Instagram

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Nice photo of Andrew by Suzannah Pettigrew; selfie in subway by me; photos of Paul Thek (contact sheet) and in studio by Peter Hujar. Some of it’s on my instagram.

With REAL LIFE COMIX: ONLY IN NEW YORK (Cosmic Lion Productions), editors Dean Haspiel and Doug Latino bring together 66 fantastic cartoonists and writers to tell 51 autobiographical comic stories about NYC . . . and I’m among them! We got together to talk about the book & its publishing history, the incredible lineup Dean and Doug have assembled (including ~20 of my past pod-guests — like Roz Chast, Drew Friedman, Jonathan Ames, Karl Stevens, Jennifer Hayden, Ben Katchor, and Moby — and a ton of other great cartoonists!), why no one’s made a New York City-centric autobio-comics anthology before, what makes for an “Only In New York” story & why I went with a tough one for my 2-page comic, and why YOU NEED TO SUPPORT THE KICKSTARTER (ending May 8, 2026) to help bring it all into print! (Yes, we talk about other stuff, like My Joe Franklin Story, what I’ve learned on hiatus, what Doug & Dean have learned about editing, the challenges of bringing non-comics-writers into the book, why I don’t ‘think’ comics, my favorite Deadly Sin, and more.) Give it a listen! And go support REAL LIFE COMIX: ONLY IN NEW YORK!

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guests

Dean Haspiel is an Emmy & Ringo Award-winning NYC cartoonist, playwright + Yaddo fellow. He is the creator of Billy Dogma, The Red Hook, Covid Cop & Chest Face. Dean has worked for Marvel, DC, Archie, Image, Webtoon, etc., and is currently making the one-man comics anthology, ANTIMATTER.

Doug Latino is a short story writer, visual artist, and photographer, based in Brooklyn, NY.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Dean’s studio in Brooklyn on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones and a Shure Beta 58A feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Doug & Dean by me. It’s on my instagram.

“Persephone lives in the land of the dead for half a year, every year. Emotionally, psychologically, how does a living girl end up in the land of the dead? And that’s what depression feels like.”

With The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir (Wesleyan University Press), poet-translator-professor Rachel Tzvia Back explores her life with high-functioning depression, weaving Ancient Greek myth, poetry, family history, interviews, and more into an amazing tapestry of life in the dark forest. We talk about the challenge of structuring the arc-less nature of depression, the shame of not being completely debilitated by her illness, how the myth of Demeter and Persephone helped her translate and understand her experience as a mother and a daughter, what it means to be the mother who fails and why she included interviews with her adult children in the book, whether there’s a therapeutic aspect to writing a memoir like this, and how much of a departure this book was from her poet-roots. We also get into how she found herself in Greek and Roman myths in contrast to her orthodox Jewish upbringing, how she manages to bridge the Athens and Jerusalem divide as a teacher, her family’s roots in Israel and what the country has become since she moved back 40+ years ago, what it’s like to live life under rockets and how normalizing it affects us, our takes on Achilles and Odysseus, and more. Give it a listen! And go read The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir!

“Depression has no real narrative arc, no rising action, no climax, no resolution. It just is.”

“The Israel I moved back to in 1982 is radically different than the Israel of today.”

“My children remind me how bizarre it is and how we have normalized that which is abnormal, these rockets, and we can’t begin to understand the long-term impact of it.”

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Rachel Tzvia Back is a poet, translator and professor of literature. The author of 12 books, her poems and verse translations have received awards and recognitions, including the Times Literary Supplement Award, PEN Translation Prize, and Finalist for the National Poetry Award in Translation.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Rachel by someone else. It’s on my instagram.

Essayist Sven Birkerts, one of my favorite past pod-guests, welcomes me back to the mic for a conversation about writing, art, mortality, resistance, technology, and selling rare books! We talk about what he’s learned about writing from his Substack essay-experiment, how he rediscovered his bookselling persona with his daughter, what he gets from audiobooks, the pros and cons of knowing your audience, and more. Plus, I talk about my book-in-progress, what I’ve learned from stepping back from the weekly podcast routine, why I’d like to see Dylan play one more time before one or the other of us is gone, and where this podcast might be going, among other stuff. Give it a listen! And go subscribe to his Substack and read The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (along with his other essays and books)!

(And go listen to our 2017, 2020, 2021, and 2024 conversations!)

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Sven Birkerts is the author of eleven books of essay and memoir, including The Gutenberg Elegies and Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age. He is the former Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the co-editor of the journal AGNI. He lives in Amherst with his wife Lynn.

Follow Sven on Instagram, subscribe to his Substack, and check out his and his daughter’s rare bookstore, Birkbooks, at eBay and Instagram.

Here’s me & Sven, back in 2024:

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos by Sven. They’re on his instagram.

For his 2025 year-end wrap-up, Gil’s putting The Virtual Memories Show podcast & newsletter on hiatus (!): talk about your crazy New Year’s resolutions! He talks about how he recognized It Was Time For A Break, whether or not this podcast is what gives his life meaning, what he might get up to (HINT: it’s WAY past time he finishes writing his Instax book), and how months of depression after his dad’s death left him feeling like he was out of options. He gets into his 2025 highlights and why he needed to visit his photo library to overcome his amnesia, the hairiness of his professional life, the thrill of receiving holiday cards from his arts-heroes, the blessings of this world, and a lot more. It’s the last episode for a while, so GIVE IT A LISTEN!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Gil Roth has been making The Virtual Memories Show since 2012, and is taking a break in 2026. You can find out more about him at his About page. You can drop him an email or leave a comment on this post if you want to reach him.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The episode was recorded at Virtual Memories Headquarters on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos generally by me. It’s on my instagram.

It’s time for our year-end Virtual Memories Show tradition, now celebrating its thirteenth anniversary: The Guest List! I reached out to 2025’s pod-guests and asked them about the favorite book(s) they read in the past year, as well as the books or authors they’re hoping to read in 2026! Twenty-six guests responded with wonderful, idiosyncratic, and illuminating book recommendations: Jonathan Ames, Kayla E., Dan Goldman, Dean Haspiel, Jennifer Hayden, Rian Hughes, Paul Karasik, Glenn Kurtz, David Leopold, Seth Lorinczi, Sacha Mardou, Kate Maruyama, Whitney Matheson, Josh Neufeld, Lance Richardson, Ari Richter, ML Rio, Dmitry Samarov, Jonathan Sandler, Damion Searls, David Shields, Peter Stothard, Tom Tomorrow, Peter Trachtenberg, Cecile Wajsbrot, and Mia Wolff (and me)! This great episode of The Virtual Memories Show offers up a huge list of books that you’re going to want to read in the new year, so give it a listen, and get ready to update your reading lists!

You can listen to The Guest List episode here, but if you visit our special Guest List 2025 page, you’ll find the list of all our respondents and all the books they cited (w/links!).

Also, go check out The Guest List archive page, which has links to all of the previous annual editions of The Guest List, dating back to 2013!

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Instagram, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guests

The guests who participated in this year’s Guest List are Jonathan Ames, Kayla E., Dan Goldman, Dean Haspiel, Jennifer Hayden, Rian Hughes, Paul Karasik, Glenn Kurtz, David Leopold, Seth Lorinczi, Sacha Mardou, Kate Maruyama, Whitney Matheson, Josh Neufeld, Lance Richardson, Ari Richter, ML Rio, Dmitry Samarov, Jonathan Sandler, Damion Searls, David Shields, Peter Stothard, Tom Tomorrow, Peter Trachtenberg, Cecile Wajsbrot, and Mia Wolff and me, Gil Roth!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The episode was recorded at stately Virtual Memories Manor on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of my 2025 reads by me. It’s on my instagram.

Let’s close out 2025 with graphic memoirist and comics journalist Jonathan Sandler! We talk about his childhood secret origin in comics, the comics course in 2017 that brought him back to the form, the process of turning his grandfather’s WWII memoir into a comic, THE ENGLISH GI (with art by Brian Bicknell), and how he really became a comics aficionado after publishing his first graphic novel. We get into how he started the Graphic Memoir blog and began reviewing comics, interviewing cartoonists, visiting exhibitions, and spreading the comics gospel, and why this very podcast has provided him with a ton of inspiration. We also discuss what he’s learned from and about interviewing, why he’s started drawing his own comics, why he’s glad he dived into making The English GI instead of researching all the other WWII graphic novels out there, what the late Tom Spurgeon meant to me and everyone else he met, why the most difficult thing about making comics is choosing what to put in the panels, and more. Give it a listen! And go subscribe to Graphic Memoir and read THE ENGLISH GI!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Jonathan Sandler runs a blog dedicated to exploring the latest in comics, graphic novels, and exhibitions, blending his passion for storytelling with his deep interest in visual art. He studied Politics at Leicester University and has spent much of his career in the software industry, leading and managing complex projects. In 2020, Jonathan combined his lifelong love of World War II history and graphic novels to create The English GI, a World War II graphic memoir published by graphicmemoir.co.uk in 2022. A keen sketcher, Jonathan draws inspiration from the intersection of history and art. He lives in North West London with his wife and three children.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded in a hotel room at The Westin London City on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Jonathan & me by me; photo of him at signing by someone else. It’s on my instagram.