Memoir, Mental Illness, and Comedy: Excavating the Mother in Maria. In February 2025, I had the chance to have a powerful conversation with Maria Bamford about her brilliant memoir, Sure I’ll Join Your Cult . In the aftermath of the Eaton Fire, this interview feels like a bittersweet postscript to an era. After meeting through the vibrant community in Altadena we had the pleasure of orbiting each other for a while. We discuss our mothers, our favorite authors tackling nuance

Traumatized Masculinity and the Dark Romanticism of Craig Clevenger Craig Clevenger, a West Coast literary darling, notable for his inventive foray into the phantasmagoric with his early novels of neo-noir has dropped another glimmering, ruminative addition to his literary genre-bending oeuvre.  Join our conversation in my interview and read about his latest crime novel Mother Howl  in the Brooklyn Rail's June 2024 issue.

Grateful to Books Editor Joseph Salvatore of The Brooklyn Rail for the opportunity to be in conversation with acclaimed memoirist Emily Rapp Black on the writing of her latest nonfiction book, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg : a work of great bravura that will undoubtedly find itself a classic among the robust literature on Kahlo.

In April, I did a very special interview with Holly Rudolph at LA Review of Books who related to experiences detailed in my memoir, A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia. We speak candidly on some of the meat of the book, unpacking inter-generational mother-daughter/familial relationships, Medicare, anti-psychotic treatment, and representation of mentally ill characters in contemporary media like Shameless , Homeland , as well as YA novels li

So grateful to Amelia Kennedy at Write or Die Tribe for writing "How Can We Both Love and Survive Our Parents? - A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of my Mother and Schizophrenia by Claire Phillips": a thoughtful review of my memoir which you can find on their site here. She likens the book to writing by Sylvia Plath and describes how the prose invites readers to "bond over the journey throughout the memoir and constantly details without overexplaining the stigma surro