[B]OLD AGE With Debbie Weil

May 09 2024 40 mins 1

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Today, Debbie talks with Sarah Fay, a 52-year-old award-winning author, writing teacher, and mental health keynote speaker whose work has been featured on NPR, Oprah Daily, Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, and more. Her journalistic memoir Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses (HarperCollins, 2022) was an Apple Best Books pick and was hailed in The New York Times as a “fiery manifesto of a memoir.” Her sequel, Cured: The Memoir, tells the story of Sarah’s full recovery from serious mental illness and how recovery is possible for everyone.

She writes for many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and The Paris Review, where she was an advisory editor. Her essays have been chosen as a Notable Mention in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. As a teacher, she’s on the faculty at Northwestern University and runs Writers at Work, a weekly publication with workshops to help creative writers produce their best work on Substack and get paid (very) well to do it. Her master plan is to make Substack the literary center of the universe.

They talk about the parallels between Sarah’s journey of recovery from misdiagnosis to curing her own serious mental illness and her work teaching Substack writers to think big (and get paid for it). Debbie wanted to know if Sarah’s journey to mental health was connected to her success as a writer AND to her ability and desire to help other writers. The answer is yes. They touch on emotional literacy, the prerequisites for healing from mental illness, how to deal with anxieties as writers, what Substack is and who it is for, and what Sarah loves most about helping other writers.

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