Lisa Borders on the Sustenance of Art in Dark Times
From Talking Writing by Martha Nichols, John Vogel, and Neva Talladen
March 26, 2026 · 46 min · Season 6 · Episode 11
About this episode
Lisa Borders discusses her new book and the role of humor in her writing during challenging times.
Lisa Borders, author of three novels, talks with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about her newest book. Last Night at the Disco (Regal House Publishing, 2025) is a fictitious memoir framed as a letter to the former editor of Rolling Stone , Jann Wenner. That context gives the audience their first clue about the book’s narrator, Lynda Boyle. The introduction to the letter also gives us a few other vague references to crimes, the loss of a teaching position, and a “coke-fueled disco queen” that help fill in a few blanks while raising many more questions. Although humor had always been a part of Lisa’s personality and writing, for a time she leaned away from it. Her first two books, Cloud Cuckoo Land and The Fifty-First State , reflected this shift, but starting around 2016—as she developed the tone for what would become Last Night at the Disco —she started focusing on humor, including writing a submission for McSweeney's Internet Tendency over the course of a year. That piece was accepted and published as “ Signs That You Are a Gen-Xer Going Through Menopause ,” which went viral. In this interview the two discuss narrator Lynda Boyle, satirizing avant-garde poets, and her…
People in this episode
Host: John Vogel
Guest: Lisa Borders
Topics covered
- art
- humor
- memoir
- writing process
- literature
- interview
Keywords
- Lisa Borders
- Last Night at the Disco
- humor
- memoir
- writing
- John Vogel
- interview
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Last Night at the Disco, Cloud Cuckoo Land, The Fifty-First State, Signs That You Are a Gen-Xer Going Through Menopause
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