Otherppl with Brad Listi

Gloria Harrison is the guest. She is a writer and a longtime contributor to The Nervous Breakdown, and in May of 2013 she was featured on This American Life, Episode 494. ***Note: This is a Premium episode. It is available for Premium subscribers only. Please sign up for Premium. It costs $2. That's it. Two bucks a month. (Or else you can pay $4.99 for six months of access, or $8.99 for a year.) You do that, you can listen to Gloria's episode—plus you'll have access to the podcast's complete archives. Every single show. You can listen online here, or else you can listen while on the go via the free, official Other People app, available now for your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Android device. Okay? Okay. Thanks for listening, everybody. -BL Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Percy is the guest. Her new book, Demon Camp, is available from Scribner.  It is the official January selection of The TNB Book Club. Dexter Filkins, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, calls it “...a tale so extraordinary that at times it seems conjured from a dream; as it unfolds it’s not just Caleb Daniels that comes into focus, but America, too. Jennifer Percy has orchestrated a great narrative about redemption, loss and hope.” And Esquire magazine calls it “A powerful debut and a haunting portrait of PTSD, and the effects of war on the psyches of the soldiers who fight and the extreme lengths they'll go to to find relief and heal."  Monologue topics: war, peace, humanity, pacifism, confusion.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Miller is the guest. Her debut novel, The Last Days of California, is available from Liveright. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, raves “Beyond the well-crafted coming-of-age narrative, Miller gets every little detail about the South—from the way the sky greens before a storm to gas stations where Hank Williams Jr.’s 'Family Tradition' blares—just right. But it’s Jess’s earnest, searching voice, as she contemplates her parents, the trip, and their values, that lingers after Miller’s story has finished. In Jess, Miller has created a narrator worthy of comparison with those of contemporaries such as Karen Thompson Walker and of greats such as Carson McCullers.” And Alexis Smith says “The Last Days of California is the Sense and Sensibility of pre-Apocalypse America, and Jess and Elise may be my new favorite literary sisters: different as night and day, on a road trip to the Rapture with their Evangelical parents, they find they have nothing to lose but each other. Mary Miller is a ventriloquist of adolescent angst and a nervy surveyor of American culture.” Monologue topics: photos, concretizing the experience for me, where you are, notecards, ventilating my anguish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elisa Gabbert is the guest. Her new book, The Self Unstable, is now available from Black Ocean.  Teju Cole, writing for The New Yorker, says "I found Elisa Gabbert’s The Self Unstable a wonderful surprise. It was the most intelligent and most intriguing thing I’ve read in a while, moving between lyric poetry, aphorism, and memoir, and with thoughts worth stealing on just about every page.” And Make Magazine says "Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise." Monologue topics: the insufferably stupid anti-sunglasses stance of my early twenties, squinting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ravi Mangla is the guest. His new novella, Understudies, is now available from Outpost 19.  Laura van den Berg raves "Ravi Mangla's Understudies is a brilliant meditation on the private cost of celebrity, the longing to transcend the ordinary, and the seductive nature of performance. Darkly funny, sharply-observed, and terrifically moving, Understudies is an essential debut." And Gary Lutz says "Ravi Mangla's delightingly tight, micro-chaptered Understudies is an unassumingly beautiful and moving debut. It's elegantly and hilariously precise about everything it touches, and it touches almost everything human." Monologue topics: repetition, rhyming, making beats, stuff, my annual purge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Scott is the guest. His debut novel, The Kept, is available from Harper. Kirkus, in a starred review, says “Scott is both compassionate moralist and master storyteller in this outstanding debut.” And Tom Perrotta says “The Kept starts out as a straightforward revenge narrative, then slowly deepens into something much more mysterious and compelling. James Scott has written a riveting and memorable debut novel.” Monologue topics: New Year's, mail, iTunes reviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

[Note:  I've decided to make this episode available without subscription so that people can listen to it and share it as easily as possible. -BL] Jennifer Michael Hecht is the guest. Her new book is called Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. It is available now from Yale University Press. Billy Collins says “The title of this book is an imperative against the departure that is suicide, and its contents provide a learned, illuminating look at the history of what is perhaps the darkest secret in all of human behavior.” And Newsweek says "That it's not all a drag and you might as well get on with life's vagaries is the strikingly simple and convincing argument of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. . . . While not insensitive to people who use suicide as a way to end the suffering of terminal illness, Hecht brands suicide an immoral act that robs society — and the self-killer — of a life that is certainly more valuable than what it may seem in that dark moment. It solves nothing, complicates everything. . . . Her argument is that it — whatever dark truth that pronoun signifies — almost always gets better." Monologue topics: Ned Vizzini, suicide, grief.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the guest. Her new memoir, The End of San Francisco, is now available from City Lights Books. Kirkus calls it "A blisteringly honest portrait of a young, fast and greatly misunderstood life. . . . An outspoken, gender-ambiguous author and activist reflects on her halcyon days as a wild child in San Francisco." And The San Francisco Chronicle says "It would be easy to describe The End of San Francisco as a Joycean 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Queer' (although the book's intense stream of consciousness is reminiscent of the later, more experimental, Joyce) . . . but this is misleading. This journey of a life that begins in the professional upper-middle class (both parents are therapists) and the Ivy League and moves to hustling, drugs, activism -- Sycamore was active in ACT UP and Queer Nation -- and queer bohemian grunge, is profoundly American. At heart, Sycamore is writing about the need to escape control through flight or obliteration." Monologue topics: my awkwardness, the over-analysis of my awkwardness, preemptive crucifixion, Pontius Pilate-ing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Olivia Laing is the guest. Her new book The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, is available from Picador. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, says “The tortured relationship between literary lions and their liquor illuminates the obscure terrain of psychology and art in this searching biographical medidation....Laing's astute analysis of the pervasive presence and meaning of drink in the writers' texts, and its reflection of the writers' struggle to shape—and escape—reality...A fine study of human frailty through the eyes of its most perceptive victims.” And Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, says “I’m sorry I’ve finished this wonderful book because I feel I’ve been talking to a wise friend. I’ve been trying to work out exactly how Olivia Laing drew me in, because I hardly drink myself and have no particular attachment to the group of writers whose trials she describes. I think the tone is beautifully modulated, knowledgeable yet intimate, and she can evoke a state of mind as gracefully as she evokes a landscape....I think this is a book for all writers or would-be writers, whether succeeding or failing, whether standing on their feet or flat on the pavement....It’s one of the best books I’ve read about the creative uses of adversity: frightening but perversely inspiring.” Monologue topics:  Twitter, HTML Giant, The Zambreno Doll controversy, Disney on Ice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is my conversation with Ned, which first aired on December 16, 2012.  I wanted to make it available to those who love him and those who love his work. (Prior to today, it was only available via premium subscription, because it was in the deeper archives.) My heart goes out to all who feel this loss, especially his family.  -BL Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices