That combination of scenes and ideas works in audio. And a good script paints vibrant, visual scenes and caps each of those off with a deeper idea. Every audio piece starts off as a script. I transitioned to audio when I was 22, but still, writing is a huge part of that job.

I was a literature major in college, interned at magazines and saw myself eventually writing for Rolling Stone. I’ve always written pretty prolifically, whether it was fanfiction or diary entries. STEPHANIE: I’ll say this for Mom: She forced me to write journals every week from when I was six years old, and it did form a valuable habit. What was it like transitioning from audio journalism, and journalism overall, to memoir writing? SOFIA: Most of your journalism background is in radio producing, such as for “This American Life,” or other podcasts but your writing has been featured in publications from Vox to The New York Times as well. It worked, and gave the book a nice narrative flow. The result ended up reading more as a collection of essays, so my editor encouraged me to make it feel more like a memoir by rearranging everything to follow the true chronological order of my healing journey. I had my research organized by ideas - dissociation, brain science, physical implications, intergenerational trauma - and I started writing based off of those themes, combining my research with the feelings and realizations doing the research elicited in me. I so admired how well-organized the book is, its fluid mix of storytelling and science. STEPHANIE FOO (she/her): I studied the structure of Esmé Weijun Wang’s “The Collected Schizophrenias” before I started writing. How did you organize the structure of this book and intertwine the reporting with your personal experiences? Did you envision its skeleton from the start or did it emerge as you wrote and revised? SOFIA KOYAMA (she/her): I want to start with discussing the process of writing this book, which not only follows your journey of learning to live with trauma, but also illuminates complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a condition that until recently has been under-researched and under-diagnosed.

Book what my bones know