Episode 306 – Eva Hagberg Fisher

Virtual Memories Show 306:
Eva Hagberg Fisher

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

“A thread in my book is that I never learn the lessons I want to learn.”

She got through brain surgery, heart surgery, and House-level chronic illness (oh, yeah, and addiction) and came out the other side with a brand-new memoir, but could Eva Hagberg Fisher make it through a podcast-session without catching a cold from her host? We tempt fate with a long conversation about How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship (HMH), the unlikely friendship that saw her through this, the self-jinx of writing about her health, the perverse urge to see her tumor marker tests get worse because at least it would end the uncertainty of her diagnosis, and how pain taught her to balance sobriety with moralizing and martyrdom. We also get into the performative aspect of social media, her ongoing impulse to deception and secrecy and the act of performing vulnerability, the right and wrong way to process one’s emotions, her anxiety in the wake of her recent essay on being in debt, her problems with The Artist’s Way, her immense thanks that her editor cut 95 pages of relationship drama down to two paragraphs, and the stuff you really want to hear us talk about: her dissertation on the professionalization of architectural publicity via the letters of Eero Saarinen and Aline Bernstein Louchheim! Give it a listen! And go buy How to Be Loved!

“My core wound, my fundamental bad belief about myself, is that I’m a hysterical drama queen who’s making things up for attention.”

“I want to know what standard emotional response to a life event is, and then calibrate my response to that.”

“My book can have an ending even if my life is not ending.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Eva Hagberg Fisher’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Wallpaper*, Wired, and Dwell, among other places. She holds degrees in architecture from UC Berkeley and Princeton, and a Ph.D. in Visual and Narrative Culture from UC Berkeley. Her new book is How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded in a workspace in Ms. Fisher’s apartment building on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & Ms. Fisher by me. It’s on my instagram. Nicer photo of Eva by Sylvie Rosokoff.