Live with Joshua Doležal and Kimberly Warner

Live with Joshua Doležal and Kimberly Warner

From Unfixed Podcast by Kimberly Warner

March 31, 2026 · 50 min

About this episode

Kimberly Warner and Joshua Doležal discuss the intersection of grief, storytelling, and chronic illness in a deeply personal conversation.

This conversation is going to stay with me for a long time. Together, Josh and I walked the fine threshold between grief and storytelling, illness and healing, and I found myself feeling lighter and more stable when we finished. In Josh’s words: You can’t treat grief with a pill. But you can treat it with a story. Last week I spoke with @Kimberly Warner, author of “Unfixed,” a memoir about family identity and chronic illness. It turns out there is no separating the two. After Kim lost her father, she took a DNA test that revealed he wasn’t her biological dad after all. But her biological father had died, too. Those revelations set a complex cascade of grief in motion. Kim was grieving the man who raised her, whom she thought of as her real father, but the DNA test upended her sense of self. And then she never had a chance to meet her biological dad. By the time she discovered that he existed at all, he was already dead. In the midst of all that stress, she began experiencing vertigo. The ground beneath her feet felt like the deck of a boat on open water. There was a name for her illness – Mal De Débarquement Syndrome – but there was no cure. Doctors are impatient with chronic…

People in this episode

Host: Kimberly Warner

Guest: Joshua Doležal

Topics covered

  • grief
  • storytelling
  • chronic illness
  • identity
  • healing
  • family

Keywords

  • grief
  • storytelling
  • chronic illness
  • identity
  • healing
  • Mal De Débarquement Syndrome
  • family
  • memoir

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Unfixed

Places: Mal De Débarquement Syndrome

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