A memoir is not what happened to you, but what you make of what happened, and why that matters now.
Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, and The New York Times.
Kirkus Reviews calls her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK, “An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation”. About the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation, WHEN SHE COMES BACK earned Finalist in the Housatonic Awards and the National Indie Excellence Awards and was a Book Riot Best True Crime Book of 2021.
Ronit’s short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.
Ronit teaches memoir writing for the University of Washington’s Continuum Program and independently, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and hosts the podcast and Substack Let’s Talk Memoir featuring interviews with memoirists about their writing process and creative life.
Find everything on her webpage here.
Things Ronit and I discuss in this conversation:
Ronit began as an actor and improviser (Actors Gang, Groundlings, Ensemble Studio Theater), and how that early training deeply shaped her instinct for narrative arc, subtext, and meaning-making in writing and editing
She resisted memoir for years because of common misconceptions: that memoir is boring, self-pitying, navel-gazing, or only justified if the writer is famous or uniquely traumatized
A turning point for her memoir When She Comes Back was realizing that if she didn’t tell her own story—about her mother leaving to follow a guru—someone else would frame it for her
Ronit articulated a core definition of memoir: it is not what happened to you, but what you make of what happened, and why it still has hooks in you now
The distinction between situation and story, and that memoir requires selectivity, tension, and a narrative question
Writers should ideally have emotional support while doing their work
Common reasons less engaging memoirs fail: repetition without escalation, trauma without meaning-making, and scenes that don’t change the narrator or move the story forward
The craft of scenes in memoir and why adverbs weaken prose
An assessment of publishing in 2026: traditional, indie, hybrid, university press, and self-publishing are all valid paths, and writers must define success based on their goals
