Host Megan Labrise presents two of her favorite nonfiction conversations from 2025.

Happy holidays, Fully Booked fans! This is the second of two special episodes, dedicated to the most intriguing and informative interviews of the year. Last week, we featured fiction. This week, we’re reintroducing two nonfiction conversations:

It is with great joy and affection that I remember American novelist, memoirist, playwright, and essayist Edmund White, the “paterfamilias of queer literature,” who died on June 3. He was the author of many works of groundbreaking literature, including of A Boy’s Own Story,the biography Genet, The Joy of Gay Sex, and the memoir Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. He was the recipient of the Lambda Literary Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. He lived in New York with his husband, writer Michael Carroll. I had the great pleasure of speaking with him in January about The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (Bloomsbury, Jan. 28), and our conversation was all about pleasure. We joined in enthusiasm over his memoir’s forthcoming publication and discussed the role numerous sexual partners played in his life. We touched on pornography, his evolving identity as a gay writer, his admiration for Toni Morrison, and the saddest and sexiest words in the English language.

Later in the year, I was delighted to welcome back an author whose books I always eagerly anticipate. Caro De Robertis is an award-winning writer and translator, whose bestselling novels include 2019 Kirkus Prize finalist Cantoras, The Palace of Eros,The Gods of Tango, and The President and the Frog. They teach at San Francisco State University and live in Oakland, California, with their two children. In May, they joined us to discuss a new work of nonfiction, So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color (Algonquin, May 13). We talked about the genesis of their oral history project and their experience of speaking with the 20 queer elders of color featured in the book. We talked about claiming identities, resisting political violence, community building, continued evolution, humor, heart, and the generosity of their subjects. We ended by imagining some of the ways queerness may continue to reshape our world.    

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

The Zygan Emprise by Y.S. Pascal

Course Over Ground by Bill C. Wilson

Between Wounded and Well by Debra Palmer

Prophets of War by Jack Brown

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.