My Unlived Life

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S.J. Bennett

Season 3, Ep. 8

Sophia and Miriam discuss what her life would have been like if she’d received an offer to work as assistant private secretary to the Queen, a job she was asked to apply for but which ultimately went to someone a bit older. Along the way they discuss what one wears to an interview at the palace, the bravery of female artists, the liberation that comes on the other side of the menopause and some very romantic trees.



S.J. Bennett was a strategy consultant and startup manager before turning to writing. She has published ten books for teenagers, winning The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition in 2009 and the Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2017. The Windsor Knot was her first novel for adults, and Murder Most Royal -her most recent book and the third in the Her Majesty The Queen Investigates series - is out now and available in all good bookshops.


Make sure to subscribe to hear the rest of Season 3 – in each episode, Miriam Robinson interviews a guest about another path their life might have taken. Together, step by step, they write the stories of their unlived lives.

 


Produced by Neil Mason

More Episodes

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Maggie Smith

Season 4, Ep. 4
The poet Maggie Smith and Miriam discuss what might have happened if she’d left her native Ohio to go to graduate school in Tucson, and thus also left the man who ultimately became her husband. Along the way they discuss the impossible questions one gets asked in the aftermath of divorce; how writing your trauma can help you through, though not necessarily in the way you might think, and ways to find yourself when you’re far from home. Maggie also teaches Miriam a very important lesson about band t-shirts.Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. Her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, is out now and available in your local bookshop.Make sure to subscribe to hear the rest of Season 4 – in each episode, Miriam Robinson interviews a guest about another path their life might have taken. Together, step by step, they write the stories of their unlived lives. Produced by Neil Mason