Conversation Between Friends: Renee Gilmore and Kelly Foster Lundquist
Memoir asks writers to transform the messy materials of lived experience into structured stories that illuminate larger questions of identity, loss, resilience, and meaning. In this conversation, Renee Gilmore (Wayfinding(opens in new tab), Trio House Press, 2025) and Kelly Foster Lundquist (Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage(opens in new tab), Eerdmans, 2025) explore how personal history becomes literary art. Both writers approach difficult truths with striking compassion and humor, revisiting the limiting stories they once told themselves in order to discover wider and wilder narratives.
Lundquist writes about her complicated first marriage and the intersections of sexuality and love through the lens of cultural history and literary theory in Beard, which recently won the 2026 Minnesota Book Award in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. Gilmore’s acclaimed Wayfinding traces a lifelong journey through loss, betrayal, and violence, using road trips and travel as a framework for a story of healing and self-discovery in a book praised as “masterful” and “incisive.” Lundquist and Gilmore met in 2025 when both were preparing to launch their books. In this conversation, they discuss the craft of writing memoir: how to balance personal revelation with storytelling, how to write about family and relationships with honesty and care, and how memoir can serve as a vehicle for reckoning and redemption. Their conversation will offer insight into transforming even the most painful experiences into stories of resilience and hope.
Kelly Foster Lundquist: In The Art of Memoir(opens in new tab), Mary Karr recommends that memoirists “show [themselves] wanting something dumb,” which honestly was one of the simplest but most helpful insights into the process that I could possibly have received. Because a huge part of Beard involves reckoning with this cultural trope of a plain, gullible woman who marries a closeted gay man and doesn’t get it (think “The Girl With No Gaydar(opens in new tab)” from early aughts’ SNL, for instance), there were temptations to distance myself from the nineteen-year-old evangelical who didn’t see what was coming (much of which appears blatantly obvious to the forty-eight-year-old agnostic I am now). And it would have been easy to retroactively apply my current POV to that nineteen-year-old. But telling a true story, much of which I chose to capture in present-tense narration, required that I suspend judgment of that younger self and, instead, depict the depth and intensity of her longing not just for some heteronormative redemptive love story, but also for the evangelical version of God she grew up with.
In Wayfinding, there were plenty of similar opportunities to avoid showing yourself “wanting something dumb”—relationships you stayed in longer than you “should have,” choices you made that later proved self-defeating, times you could have run but didn’t immediately do so, even just beliefs you maintained about yourself (I’m thinking of that scene early on at the swimming pool) that readers can see were formed out of wounds or fear. How did you approach showing yourself wanting something “dumb”?
Renee Gilmore: There were so many times I was tempted to varnish the truth! But in writing Wayfinding, I made a deliberate effort to really engage with my younger self and depict her in all her authentic, sometimes unflattering ways: needy, lonely, awkward, scared, overly trusting, and engaging in behaviors that I am now not only embarrassed by but, in some instances, not particularly proud of.
During the writing process, I considered portraying her more positively, smarter, as more sophisticated, and emotionally healthy; however, ultimately, I felt that approach would have been a disservice to the readers I hope to connect with.
One of my primary objectives in writing Wayfinding was to show readers who may be in the “messy middle” and struggling to move on from their own trauma, that hope, joy, freedom, and connection are possible. I realized that authenticity, honesty, and an accurate portrayal of my young (and not so young) self—flattering or not—were essential to illustrating my journey. Did it feel great? Often not, but if one person can see themselves in this book and it helps them chart a path toward transformation, the discomfort was worth it.
Kelly, one of the things that struck me most about Beard is the way your memoir deeply investigates “performance” on so many levels—not just within marriage, but within religion, gender, and feminine identity.
As I was writing Wayfinding, I realized just how adept I was at the art of masking. Throughout my life, I have cultivated a personal brand of responsibility, organization, and success. I had been performing “fine” while privately carrying enormous grief and confusion underneath that surface. There were many points when I was slowly (and not so slowly) unraveling.
Beard feels similarly interested in the distance between the life we curate/project and the life we live internally. At what point in the writing process did you realize that perhaps the story was becoming less about discovering your first husband’s hidden identity and more about interrogating your own? And did that realization change the emotional architecture of the book for you?
KFL: I think it’s a pretty common experience that first drafts are just getting the events down, “this is what happened,” and so often the way those events are framed is some version of “this is what happened to me.” And I don’t think my first draft was any exception to that. But in 2017, I started meeting monthly with a writing group at The Loft Literary Center(opens in new tab) in Minneapolis, and partly as a result of their feedback and support, a more complex version of the book began to take shape, and it didn’t take too long before I could see parallels between the performances required of me both as a child actor and a kid in youth group—certain kinds of physical symmetry, certain behaviors, gestures, etc.
In every iteration of my manuscript, I wanted to avoid placing the narrative tension or dramatic weight on the discovery of my ex’s sexual identity. I did my best in every version to avoid that because it felt not only cheap, but also untrue and less interesting. Despite everything that happened, I wanted to tell a love story, because that’s what it was, even if we didn’t end up together, romantically.
As far as interrogating my own agency/complicity/motivations/fears, I think that came gradually over each draft. It didn’t hurt that the memoir begins at a summer camp (so “camp” in every sense was kind of baked into it—I had a fantastic quote from Susan Sontag’s essay on camp leading into that first section, before I cut all my epigraphs).
RG: Kelly, Beard is so literate, complex, and intellectually robust—queer theory, cultural criticism, and literary analysis run strongly beneath the narrative—yet it never loses emotional accessibility. As someone who thinks a lot about balancing lyricism, reflection, and storytelling, I’d love to hear how you decided when analysis or commentary belonged directly on the page and when it should remain beneath the narrative.
KFL: Another great question. That was one of the hardest things to do well. And I had a great deal of help from friends of mine who are better editors than I am. I was lucky enough to get a developmental edit from Samuel Ernest(opens in new tab), who’s been an editor at The Yale Review for a long time. Sam left “EXPLAINING—GET RID OF THIS—WE DON’T NEED IT” all over the comments/annotations. One of my cardinal sins as a writer is that I sometimes fail to trust that my intentions will be clear to readers. Sam kept reminding me to just stay in the narrative as much as possible and then allow the reader to have their own reactions and interpretations of what was happening.
As far as braiding those other elements in, like I say, it just took trial and error, but part of the editing process between me and my editor was determining which elements were fundamental to the narrative. There’s three whole chapters of the book (and bits of other chapters) where I’m essentially in a classroom having my mind changed by discussions of literary theory. For instance, there’s a whole chapter on the literary theorist Jacques Derrida and the principles of deconstruction. Kind of like camp, for me there was the figurative and the literal layer, and like onions, the more you peeled them back, the deeper the layers got. But I embedded the Derrida bits within the narrative tension of sitting in a class as my marriage is falling apart on my third anniversary, which I know I will be spending alone.
My marriage was deconstructing. I was deconstructing the faith I’d grown up with. In the wake of my first indication that my ex wasn’t telling me the whole truth about himself, I was constantly engaged in this project of parsing “signs, signifiers, and signified” to determine the ways his identity circumscribed what we could be and how our relationship could survive. And I was struck by how wildly ironic/symbolic that class discussion on figurative deconstruction was, in light of the literal ones I was also undergoing. I mean. I was literally told on that particular day in class to diagram the sentence “I love you” (which I remembered when I found the extensive class notes I’d taken in a box of my old journals several years ago) to gauge what it meant. So. Some of those recollections were gifts I got from the ironic gods of the universe. My feeling is that as much as you can weave those elements into the story itself and make them feel embedded in it, then it’s less likely to “bump” readers out of the story. But as with many things, that’s easier said than done, and one of so many reasons I moved slowly.
Renee, one of the most gut-wrenching (and visceral, both literally and figuratively) chapters in Wayfinding was the chapter about your daughter’s hospitalization and diagnosis after the stabbing incident. It was so embodied and immediate.
Both of us had to navigate the difficulty of writing about living people. And while I’ve been lucky enough to stay friends with my ex and was certainly very concerned about depicting him fairly, there was a certain sense that I was writing about two different people in a different time and in a different relationship that had clearly ended.
But both as a parent and a writer, I wonder if it felt somewhat different writing about your experience with your daughter because of the way we tend to see our kids at every age all at once. Like, I see my daughter, who’s now twelve, still as the kid she was at three and the baby she was at nine months, while also very much realizing and loving the “her” that is now. So I’m just curious what that experience of navigating your history with your daughter during that time was like for you. I know one of the most common questions we get as memoirists is, “How do you navigate the ethics of writing about other people?” And while that’s certainly a valid and important question, I’m less interested in the ethics of it and more interested in the affective or experiential side of that for you as a writer. How did you access that time and metabolize it into such visceral writing?
RG: Oh! That is such a good question. That chapter was difficult to write for all the reasons you might expect, but also because the weight of it—that particular trauma—lived in my body for almost two decades before I could access it in a way that became language for the book. I did not have to invent the cut watermelon on the kitchen counter, with its juice dripping down—almost as a witness to the violent scene. Or the puffiness of her eyes, or the ambulance ride, or the humiliation I felt in the back of that taxi. All of that lived in me because trauma often embeds itself in the smallest, sharpest details, at least for me. My body remembers that day and night through sensory detail, not through abstraction—not as facts or data. It was one of the first defining moments, of many to come, that I experienced as a deeply conflicted adoptive mother of a child I loved and could not fully understand or protect.
Writing those scenes required me to return not only to what happened to her, but also to what happened inside me as I realized the limits of my ability to keep both of us safe. I was mother and witness all at once: the person ultimately responsible for her, and the person helpless to save her.
But the emotional questions were even more complicated: How do I write about her suffering without making it mine? How do I authentically tell the truth about my experience as her mother without claiming ownership over her experience?
I also struggled to write about the realizations I had about love. No matter how much I loved my daughter, I could not fix her or change her. And no matter how much my spouse claimed to love me, he could not—and more importantly, would not—protect me from what was happening in our family or from the ugly truths we were uncovering. It was tough to live these realizations, but they also felt extremely vulnerable on the page.
In the process of writing the book, something else happened, as Roy Guzmán(opens in new tab), an early reader, pointed out. It became obvious that I held a tremendous amount of anger, not only about that night, but also about other incidents and experiences involving my daughter over the years. That anger leaked onto the page. Unconsciously—and I’m embarrassed to admit this—I blamed her. I talked about how she made my life incredibly hard. And that was true, but the way I did it was not generous or particularly self-aware. In later stories, I called her out for poor and dangerous decisions that often stemmed from her struggles with chemical dependency, attachment, and mental health. Roy pointed out that I could keep everything I had written, but that people would hate me. I would become the villain in my own story, and I certainly would not be winning “mother of the year.”
In revision, I had to dig deep for my most empathetic self. I’ve often said that writing this book was not, overall, a cathartic experience. But in this one respect, it forced me to actively examine who I was, who I wanted to be, and what I wanted my relationship with her to become.
My daughter is no longer seven, and she has her own memory, her own interpretations, her own relationship to that time. As a memoirist, I had to accept that my version of the story is only one among many versions of a larger truth. I wrote honestly about what I saw, what I feared, what I failed to understand, and what I carried with me afterwards.
KFL: I think place plays a really crucial role in both our stories. For me, I really just had two basic locations: Mississippi and Chicago, which simplified things (as did its compressed time period of six and a half years, from 1997 to 2003, or the timeline of my first marriage). In your case, the entire narrative is shaped around so many different locations (and finding your way, as you meander from place to place and in and out of time, is literally the titular point) and spans the entirety of your life up to this point. In what phase of your process did you decide that wandering (using postcards and maps and place/car names throughout) would be the structural form for the book? And what organizational strategies did you use to map that for yourself as you went along to keep all those balls so beautifully in the air?
RG: It may come as a surprise, but that structure came relatively late, after I had already written a much more traditional draft of the book. The earliest version was mostly chronological. It moved from childhood onward in a linear way, and while the major events were there, I think I can say the book did not yet understand itself. It had the facts, but maybe lacked emotional intelligence. There was simply not enough reflection. I was telling what happened—almost reporting the news—but I had not yet explored the deeper question of how those experiences had impacted me, or how I had learned to navigate the world because of them.
The shift toward the concept of navigation was gradual. In fact, the original title of the book was I’m Just a City You’re Passing Through, which tells you something about where my thinking was at the time. That title suggested transience, longing, and maybe even a kind of expected disposability—the feeling of being a stop along someone else’s journey rather than the person in charge of the map. There were a couple of other titles after that, but none of them fully worked.
It was actually during a hallway conversation with my Trio House publisher, Kris Bigalk, that we landed on Wayfinding. Something clicked. The title both described the book and helped me understand it. Wayfinding was about movement, but also about agency.
I began to understand that movement and navigation were not just subjects in the book; they were the backbone of the book. The cars, gas stations, border crossings, and airports, and what happened in them were my milemarkers, if you will. They were how my memory organized itself. I don’t really remember my life by year or age. I remember my life by where I was trying to get to, what I was trying to escape, who was with me, and what I believed might be waiting around the next curve. And to be clear, there are a lot of things I don’t remember or can’t access at all.
Wayfinding could not be a memoir about arriving at expected insights and tying up the story with a pretty bow. The narrative had to create the reader experience of searching, which is not always orderly, either physically or emotionally. Sometimes, there is just unavoidable chaos.
At some point, in the revision, I stopped asking, “What happened next?” and started asking, “How did this place change me?” That became the pivotal question. It allowed me to organize the book by association without losing the thread. A chapter could start in one decade and open a door into another because of the emotional geography bridging them. That structure worked for me, and I hope readers feel and connect with that continuity.
Putting that together was really difficult and involved. I created timelines and lists, as best I could, of locations, cars, journeys, and images like postcards, maps, and hotel rooms. Eventually I could understand there were emotions associated with each of them. I guess you could say that each chapter traveled along two paths at once: through an actual place and through an inward journey.
And you’re right, Kelly—keeping all of those elements in the air was difficult. Much like Beard, Wayfinding excavates the experiences of my younger self while layering in a more mature, reflective voice. I wanted readers to feel the immediacy of those earlier experiences—the closet, the hotel room, the ambulance—but I also wanted the mature narrator to offer the insight my younger self could not yet access.
Maybe it sounds a little woo-woo, but I discovered the structure through revision, conversation, and most importantly, listening to what the words had been trying to tell me, and what the book was ready to be.
Which leads me, Kelly, to one of the questions we get at nearly every event, which is about the next project. And while I’m always grateful that an audience is interested enough in my writing to be curious about the next book, I sometimes find myself slightly flummoxed about how to answer. I’m a multigenre writer, and I don’t want to lose a nonfiction audience by telling them I’m working on a poetry collection or a short-story collection. Though, selfishly, I would love for them to become fans of me as a writer and follow me wherever I go next. I know you always have projects in the hopper, so I’m curious: How do you handle the question, “What will we see next from you?” And perhaps the more dangerous follow-up: “When?”
KFL: Ha! This is so right. I’ve actually started a blog series on my website (and my Substack) called “Sophomoric” to address this exact question for myself as much as for anyone else. To garner some momentum as well as to find community during that process, I’m capturing what I’m currently finding both joyful and challenging about trying to write a second book to address this exact question for myself as much as anyone else. The short answer is I’m currently working on a second memoir and a screenplay adaptation of Beard. I’ve also got a series of linked poems about my great aunts I’ve been writing that for the last couple years, and I think some other family history poems might be forthcoming from me as well. The capacity to hone and trust my own voice as I wrote Beard was so hard won that the fear of going through all of that again hangs over me a bit, so the longer answer is I’ll be continuing to find ways to keep moving forward even when I doubt myself or feel afraid. I think a huge part of that is just continuing to be as intentional as I can about reading books and encountering creative work that reminds me that my love for the work is stronger than my fear of doing it wrong. How about you? What’s next for you?
RG: I have a few projects in the works. I’m an Aries—I like to have choices!
My next book-length project—probably, maybe—has a strong element of obituaries. I’ve always been fascinated by obituaries and the culture around them: the way we summarize a life. I do find it ironic that Wayfinding is filled with survival and living, and this next project seems to be diving into death. But both are really about making sense of a life.
Like you, Kelly, I also have a poetry project in progress. Poetry was my first genre, and lately I’ve been feeling pulled back in that direction. I love the musicality of the language, and find real joy there.
RENEE GILMORE(opens in new tab) is a multi-genre writer, memoirist, essayist, and poet who identifies as neurodivergent. She writes about her experiences growing up in a family of car enthusiasts—mechanics, racers, and collectors—and navigating a family full of secrets. She fearlessly explores the illusion of happiness. Through her writing and lived experience, Renee proves that resilience can be practiced both by accident and intention. Renee holds degrees from the University of New Mexico and Hamline University. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Louisville Review, Fatal Flaw, and Pink Panther Magazine, as well as at Writer’s Digest. She lives in suburban Minneapolis with her husband, Steven.
KELLY FOSTER LUNDQUIST(opens in new tab) is the author of Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage, winner of the 2026 Minnesota Book Award in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. Her work can be found in People magazine, The Times of London, the Huffington Post, and Writer’s Digest, among other places. Originally from Mississippi, she now teaches writing in Minnesota. Dan Savage recently told her on the air that she was “absolutely delightful company” and that Beard was an “incredibly moving tour de force” and those are both things she likes to brag about now.
