“This is the beauty of memoir: it can make the alien familiar and the familiar surprising.“ —Mallary Tenore Tarpley
On Wednesday, September 23, Mallary Tenore Tarpley will teach “How to Corroborate Memory When Writing Personal Essays and Memoir.” In this class, students will learn practical techniques to corroborate memory, including revisiting places from the past, conducting interviews, and consulting source materials such as journals, medical records, photographs, and other personal archives. Students will also learn practical takeaways on how to navigate the malleability of memory, approach the challenges that can arise when excavating painful experiences, and honor both the emotional and factual truth of your work by acknowledging when memories are fuzzy, incomplete, or contested.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches a variety of courses on longform feature writing, nonprofit journalism, solutions journalism, personal essay writing, and more. Previously, Mallary was the associate director of UT Austin’s Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas; executive director the nonprofit Images & Voices of Hope; and managing editor at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Mallary’s articles have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and TIME Magazine, among other publications. She has led writing trainings for news outlets around the world and for organizations such as The Poynter Institute, the Society for Features Journalism, and the Writers’ League of Texas. Her new book SLIP explores the under-discussed complexities of eating disorders and recovery from them. Equal parts memoir and journalism, the book weaves together Mallary’s own narrative with perspectives from clinicians, researchers, and others with lived experience. SLIP is the winner of the Association of American Publishers’ 2026 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences. The Association also selected SLIP as a first-place winner in the Medicine Category and as a finalist in the Outstanding Work by a Trade Publisher Category. Mallary received a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the science-related reporting in the book, specifically around the neurobiological and genetic aspects of eating disorders. You can keep up with Mallary via her newsletter, “Write at the Edge,” which features weekly writing tips and best practices: mallary.substack.com.
Here’s what Mallary had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
I always loved the written word, and as an only child who lived in a neighborhood without many kids my age, I spent a lot of time reading and writing by myself. I would climb the Japanese maple tree in my front yard, where I wrote short stories and journal entries. I read countless books there, propping my body up against the strongest limb and losing myself in other worlds. I devoured The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Tuck Everlasting, Bridge to Terabithia, and A Wrinkle in Time, wishing I could make my favorite characters come to life.
I pretended to be the protagonist from Harriet the Spy. In the book, Harriet is an eleven-year-old aspiring writer who spies on her classmates, friends, and neighbors and writes down observations in her notebook. I saw myself in her, as a young girl who was about the same age and had the same dream of becoming a famous author. Like Harriet, with binoculars in hand, I would often spy on my neighbors from high up in my tree and write down activities I deemed suspicious. (Man walking dog stopped and looked up into the sky . . . Car drove down the street slowly . . . Truck just sped by without any apparent reason.) I’d jot down these observations (and a slew of random license plate numbers) in my fluorescent pink Lisa Frank notebook. My neighbors came to know me as Mallary the Spy, and they found my detective skills endearing.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
I used to write personal essays with tidy endings because I thought that’s what readers wanted, and because I was afraid to expose the hard truths in my own narrative. There was a disconnect, though, between the narrative I was sharing with the world and the one I was living out behind closed doors. In more recent years (and especially once I started writing my new memoir SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery), I made the decision to make my writing as authentic as possible. This required courage and vulnerability, but I found that it made my writing stronger and opened up more points of relatability for readers. Instead of saying I was “fully recovered” from my childhood eating disorder, for instance, I started to be more open about the reality that my disorder remains a vulnerability and is still something I contend with as a woman in ongoing recovery. While I wrote my book, I was reminded of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, in which she writes of the main character Edna Pontellier: “At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life — that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.” As a memoirist, I wanted to convey this dual life on the page and show how, by the book’s end, my outward and inward lives were no longer in conflict.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
I love knowing that my writing can help others feel seen and heard. Memoir writing is like holding up a mirror to yourself and your readers, with hopes that they can see themselves reflected in your story and ultimately feel less alone. Even if they can’t relate to your experiences exactly, the hope is that they can see glimpses of themselves and realize something new about their own life story. This is the beauty of memoir: it can make the alien familiar and the familiar surprising. To engage in this type of writing is a real gift, and it’s a reminder that memoirs can have a far greater impact than we may have initially imagined.
Who do you write for?
I write for people who have lived experience with the topics I care most deeply about: eating disorders, grief, loss, parenting, and navigating the ups and downs of recovery. That encapsulates a wide audience, given that a lot of these experiences are universal. I’m keen on writing for people who have eating disorders or who are in recovery from them. There’s not nearly enough literature out there for folks who are navigating what I call “the middle place” between acute sickness and full recovery from mental health issues, and I find myself increasingly writing for those who find themselves in this underdiscussed but populous place. I also write for myself because writing is how I make sense of the world.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
I hope writers who take this class will gain confidence in their ability to corroborate and excavate memories from the past. Students will develop insights and gain practical takeaways on how to navigate the malleability of memory, approach the challenges that can arise when excavating painful experiences, and honor both the emotional and factual truth of their work by acknowledging when memories are fuzzy, incomplete, or contested. As the instructor, I’ll glean from my own experiences writing my memoir SLIP and from the work of others. Students will come away with practical writing prompts, tips, and skills that they can start applying immediately, no matter what stage of the process they’re in.
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Thanks, Mallary!
Click here to learn more about Mallary’s upcoming class.
