It was ten a.m. and already the temperature was ninety-seven degrees. Waiting at a stop light in Scottsdale at a very affluent intersection, I could see the heat rising off the asphalt like a moiré. Arizona heat, even in its infant stages before the temperature hits one hundred degrees, is unforgivable. It makes you feel like a piece of meat about to be thrown on a grill. Even I was sweating, sitting in my air-conditioned car that hadn’t yet been able to recover from the hours it had been baking in the driveway since sunrise.  I had nothing to complain about, however, because directly across the street on the corner was a short man holding a giant sign for a shoe and luggage repair shop in the strip mall behind him. His head was tucked under the crook of one arm, trying desperately to shield himself from the relentless, white heat.

Emily Rapp is the guest. Her new memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, is now available from Penguin.

Get the free official app. Subscribe for free at iTunes.

I was arrested on April Fool’s Day, 2001, for OVWI, “operating a vehicle while intoxicated.” I crashed my jeep into a chain-link fence and a tree, narrowly missing a telephone pole, while coming home from downtown Indianapolis. It was cold and wet outside and the tires didn’t grip. For a long time after the crash, I put the blame on the weather. The reality is that I was drunk, I was driving too fast, missed a turn and blacked out, but the car kept going. I woke up to a face full of airbag.  Opened the door.  Fell out.  Landed on the wet grass. My nose hurt from the impact, and the air stank of sulfur from the deflated airbag. I was twenty-two years old, drunk and depressed, sitting on the wet ground sometime after 3 a.m. I would’ve run away from the scene, but I could hardly walk.

I’m standing on the sidewalk in Blue Hill, a tiny town in upstate New York, hands cupped around my eyes, peering through the plate-glass window of a Victorian house that’s been converted into a café, like a thief, or a real estate agent, or—given the crazed reflection looking back at me from the plate glass— an ex-husband spying on his ex-wife. All of which I may become. But first, I need to eat. I’m insane with hunger, having driven around for three hours now, since shortly after breakfast, trying to find food my wife, Jane, will allow our two young boys to eat. So that I can eat.

I can’t write this review without disclosing that After Visiting Friends is my story. Or so it felt, as I read. Like Hainey, I am a member of what he calls the DFC, the Dead Father’s Club. Hainey was six when his father died at age 36 in Chicago. I was seven when my father died at 32 in Detroit. A veil of silence hung over the details throughout Hainey’s childhood. And mine.

Scott Nadelson is the guest. His new memoir, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress, is now available from Hawthorne Books.

Get the free official app. Subscribe for free at iTunes.

How would you describe Wedlocked?

Wedlocked is an intimate, uncensored self-portrait of a man (once a boy) leaning towards infidelity. Perhaps that Leaning towards The Other began as I watched my older brothers and father leave my mom, our dog (a black lab named Bump), and me in the house in the woods, and perhaps that Leaning gained space-shuttle lift when I failed to cope with something as ordinary as marital loneliness. Wedlocked describes (among other things) my desire for The Other inflating my sense of self, filling my sense of self with POTENT PONTERI SELFDOM. This book is the car ride to the collision, the dark hallway to the Void, the burnt bulb dangling by wire from the ceiling.

First off, let me say I think it’s fabulous that you’re publishing a memoir about your son.  Even though it’s a sad topic and, given a choice, you probably would have given up your writing life altogether for Silvan to be healthy,  I’m glad this book is in the world. Holding Silvan is a great title, by the way.

Thanks.  I needed to hear that. In fact, this is something I literally repeat inside my head: “It‘s good that I’m publishing this book.” Otherwise, I feel nothing but anxiety.

Anxiety? I didn’t know you suffered from that.

I didn’t either. But it must be pretty common before the publication of any book, let alone a first book like this.

How could you do this to me?

I’m sorry.

I thought we had a deal.

I know, I know.

You were supposed to go on writing your little stories about everyday woe in the New Jersey suburbs, and I was going to enjoy my obscurity here in Oregon.

That was always my intention.

A man with a creepy Will Rogers smile and eyes like a snake ready to eat the eggs from the nest of some absent mother duck stared at me from the opposite bank of seats. His hair could have been finger-painted on his scalp by a slow-learning kindergartner. His broad torso was draped in a Steelers jersey.

A moment passed before I registered the awkward rising and lowering of his shoulder. Yet another moment before I saw that the hand at the other end of that arm was buried beneath the fly of his Levi’s. This was something like a first date in the eighteen-wheel-iverse—what I’d taken to calling the world I’d been living in for the past couple of months.

Terry Tempest Williams is the guest. She is the author of several books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her latest book is called When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. It was published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in 2012, and the paperback edition is due out from Picador on February 26, 2013.

The San Francisco Chronicle raves

Williams displays a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions….As the pages accumulate, her voice grows in majesty and power until it become a full-fledged aria.

This podcast now has its own app, available (free!) for the iPhone, iPod, or iPad, and is also availalble (free!) for Android devices.

Also: You can subscribe to the show over at iTunes, or at Stitcher, free of charge.

Listen here:

“C’mon. Bare-knuckle brawl. I win, you break up with her. You win and I’ll never bring her up again.”

He put his hands on his slim hips in dramatic protest. “I’m not gonna fight you. How do you think it looks if a black guy beats up a prissy blonde?”

I wasn’t worried about how it looked. Ernie could talk himself out of anything. That boy had a candy-coated mouth and friends in every corner of our mostly white, middle-class high school. My white ass, however, had four to six friends depending on how much I had been running my mouth. Some may have called me unpopular, but the disdain was mutual. During high school I took a full load of courses at a nearby community college so that I only had to go to high school in the mornings. That summer, I had just claimed my diploma a year early and was about to leave Ernie behind to finish high school without me. Not that he minded.

“Fight me!” I jumped up and down on his bed, throwing punches into the air. “C’mon. Let’s go. I wanna be a pugilist.”

Kate Zambreno is the guest. She is the author of two novels, O Fallen Angel and Green Girl, and her latest book is a critical memoir called Heroines, now available from Semiotext(e).

Bitch magazine calls it

A brave, enlightening, and brutally honest historical inquiry that will leave readers with an urgent desire to tell their own stories.

Also in this episode: A conversation with Ron Currie, Jr., whose new novel, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (Viking | February 2013) is the January selection of the TNB Book Club.

Listen here:

Rosie Schaap is the guest. She is a contributor to This American Life and npr.org, and she writes the monthly “Drink” column for The New York Times Magazine. Her memoir, Drinking With Men, will be published on January 24, 2013 by Riverhead Books.

Kate Christensen raves

This book will be a classic. There is so much joy in this book! It’s a great, comforting, wonderful, funny, inspiring, moving memoir about community and belief and the immense redemptive powers of alcohol drunk properly.

Listen here:

So, why did you write a book about Green Day? Didn’t you already write a zine about Green Day when you were 15? 

Well, for most of my life I’ve been living in the shadow of this public and profound obsession with Green Day, which started around 1994/1995 (when I discovered their music and my self esteem suddenly transformed from being in a constant state of embarassment over my list of insecurities, to not really giving a shit). So I wrote this zine, Greenzine, around 1997, which started as real deal Green Day fanzine. It included fan contributions, lengthy descriptions on why their specific songs are so important and perfect, mini novellas about getting persecuted by fellow school mates over my love for Green Day, fan drawings, fan experiences (no fan fiction, that just wasn’t my bag, I’m a memoirist) <—(Thats a joke/L-word reference). But it is true, I did not participate in GD fan fiction. Anyway, the zine grew up, as I did, and being obsessed with Green Day suddenly wasn’t as interesting as flunking math, getting into awkward verbal debates about masturbation, questioning the government, falling in love with people, and other punk bands (It mostly became heavy on the pop-punk bands, the zine became full of interviews and record reviews).