Telling the Unwanted Story: an Interview with Memoirist Jill Kandel

Challenging experiences are often what inspire … or drive … people to write. That is certainly the case for my friend and neighbor Jill Kandel, whose second memoir, The Clean Daughter, was published this spring. I recently interviewed her about her experience writing that difficult story, and our conversation was published today on the Brevity blog. Take a peek (below the pic) … and then do check out her beautiful book.

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Book launch! Jill and me with most of our writing group

Guest Blogger's avatarThe Brevity Blog

By Sarah Coomber

Your second memoir, The Clean Daughter: a Cross-Continental Memoir, takes us to five different countries, yet all of your experiences tie into figuring out your prickly relationship with your father-in-law. How did you get to the heart of that story?

This was a hard book to write, because it is really personal, and it touches on not only my life, but my in-laws, my husband, my children and my grandparents.

It circles around three themes. One of them is my relationship with my father-in-law, Izaak, who spent his entire life in the Netherlands. We had a difficult relationship, and I felt in order to understand him, I needed to understand the Netherlands better, so I did quite a bit of Netherlands research.

Izaak was a child in Nazi-occupied Holland, so I went to the Netherlands several times to research World War II, learning what it was…

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