Terry Gross

Natasha Trethewey has written before about the murder of her mother decades ago by her step father. She got a new window on her mother's life after getting access to the police files about her mother's case. Her new memoir is 'Memorial Drive.'

Mike Birbiglia explores his ambivalence about parenthood in the new book, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad. Stein collaborated on the memoir, contributing her side of the story through poems, published under the name J. Hope Stein.

Mary Trump's father, Fred Trump Jr., was Donald Trump's older brother and the black sheep of the family. After Fred Jr.'s death in 1981, Mary Trump's grandfather changed his will to exclude Mary and her brother. She writes about her family's tangled history in the new memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.

Michaela Coel says she initially wanted to create a series about sexual assault because of her own experiences. But as she heard from other people who had similar stories, she began to think more broadly. "I realized that many people had some sort of experience that was connected to mine," she says. "There were so many different ways to explore consent and how it affects us today. What better place for a story than one that I felt many people could find an identification in?"

"I saw firsthand how police and prosecutors manipulate evidence, coerce witnesses into giving false testimony," says Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries. His memoir is When Truth is All You Have.

The late J.L. Chestnut was the first Black lawyer in Selma, Ala. He was working with the NAACP at the time of the city's 1965 civil rights march. In 1990, he spoke to Fresh Air about Bloody Sunday.

"This climate that we're in right now with our polarizing political views in this country, it was very similar in South Africa," the star of The Old Guard says. Originally broadcast Dec. 16, 2019.

Trejo has played menacing characters on Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy. The documentary, Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo, chronicles his years in prison. Originally broadcast March 14, 2018.

In her new book, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, Christine Montross writes that in the U.S., people with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be incarcerated than they are to be treated in a psychiatric hospital — despite the fact that incarceration often makes mentally ill people worse.

Colin Jost's new memoir, A Very Punchable Face, describes his experiences growing up in a middle-class household on Staten Island. "Part of writing this book was being excited to talk about parts of my life and weird episodes in my life that I thought that would be entertaining for people," he says. Or, he adds, for people to "just get another chance to laugh at me."