The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara Episode 511: Writing to Leave the Past in the Past with Jane Marie Chen
"To be a good writer, you have to really get into the visceral parts of the experience, right? You have to bring someone into that experience with you, which requires you to go back and understand every detail, every memory, all the visceral aspects of the experience, the sounds, the smells, everything that was happening," says Jane Marie Chen, author of Like a Wave We Break.
Today we have Jane Marie Chen, author of Like a Wave We Break: A memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself. It’s published by Harmony. It’s a book whose ancestor is very clearly Eat, Pray, Love. A story of the cost of achievement and ambition, how childhood trauma permeates deep into adulthood, and the long nonlinear road to healing.
Jane, being the entrepreneur she is, has quite the ecosystem around her memoir. At her website, there’s a self-worth quiz. I don’t feel like failing, so I’m not gonna take it. If I can’t copy off the smart kid, then why take the test, am I right? She does speaking and leadership coaching, workshops on building resilience, and she recently delivered a TED talk about resilience.
Jane is the former CEO and co-founder of Embrace Global, which developed infant incubators that helped more than 1,000,000 babies, many of which would have died without this technology. She was recognized as Forbes Impact 30 and receive the Economist Innovation Award, Fast Company Innovation Award, and the World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award. She has an MBA from Stanford and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard. Didn’t I just have some clown on the show who studied at Yale and Harvard. What the fuck am I doing? If I don’t feel inadequate, I don’t feel alive, man.
You can learn more about Jane at janemariechen.com and follow her, let’s just say on the gram, at janemarie.chen.
In this podcast, we talk about:
- How she wrote the book to help people
- The importance of surfing in her life
- What’s enough?
- Burnout
- Writing the visceral
- Zooming in and Zooming out
- Playing with timelines
- Working with a collaborative writer
- Writing to leave the past in the past
- And not wanting to write a prescriptive memoir
Some pretty rich shit, man, parting shot on, shit if I know, so let’s queue up the montage. Here’s Jane Marie Chen, huh!
Show notes: brendanomeara.com