As Told To

“Voices of their generation. Except for Greta Thunberg. And Malala. Amanda Gorman . . .you know what, I take it back.” — Jimmy Fallon

That’s high praise for the comedy writing duo of Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, from their former boss at NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” where our podcast guests became the two youngest writers in that program’s storied history and earned a shared spot on Variety’s “Power of Young Hollywood Impact List” in 2021.

Shaw and Kronengold began dating and writing together as freshmen at Yale University and capped their undergraduate career with a 2018 commencement address that went a little bit viral. (Okay, it went a whole lotta viral – their speech was seen by more than 5 million people, and landed them an agent…and, eventually, their “Tonight Show” gig.)

Together, they’ve just published a disarmingly funny collection of essays, stories, and humor pieces called Naked in the Rideshare: Stories of Gross Miscalculations, which was hailed by actor and comedian Will Ferrell as “incredibly original, bizarre, and funny” prior to publication by William Morrow in November.

Join us as we talk about what it means to find your voice in collaboration with your partner, and to take that voice to one of the most dynamic writing rooms in late night television – and beyond.

Learn more about Rebecca Shaw & Ben Kronengold:

• Website
• Rebecca’s website
• Ben’s website
• Rebecca’s Instagram
• Ben’s Twitter
• “Wax Paul Now” Trailer

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog
• Daniel Paisner's SHOW: The Making and Unmaking of a Network Television Pilot
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

George McFly’s A Match Made in Space, from “Back to the Future”…

Hank Moody’s God Hates Us All,” from “Californication”…

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein’s How I Did It, from “Young Frankenstein”…

Some of our best-loved movies and television shows feature books written by one of the lead characters. In many cases, the publication of those “books” becomes a central plot point or a running gag. (Think Handbook for the Recently Deceased, from “Beetlejuice.”) In other cases, those books leap from the screen and onto our bookshelves—IRL, as the kids like to say.

That’s the case with Look Out for the Little Guy, the in-movie memoir by Scott Lang, also known as Ant-Man, as seen on screen in the Marvel Studios blockbuster, “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.” The book was published by Hyperion Avenue in September and became an immediate New York Times best-seller, but here’s a news flash: it wasn’t really written by Scott Lang, the “Everyman Avenger” played in the movie by actor Paul Rudd. And no, it wasn’t really written by Paul Rudd, whose face graces the front cover of the book in stores and online, and as it appears as a prop in the movie.

In fact, the book was really written by our guest Rob Kutner, a veteran comedy writer who has collected five Emmys, a Peabody and a Grammy writing for such shows as “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” on Comedy Central, and “Conan,” on TBS. Rob’s other television writing credits include “Teen Titans Go,” “Angry Birds: Summer Madness” and “Dennis Miller Live,” and he has also written material for the Oscars, Emmys, and MTV Movie Awards broadcasts, as well as for two White House Correspondents Dinners.

He is also the author of Apocalypse How: Turn the End-Times into the Best of Times! and the just-published Snot Goblins and Other Tasteless Tales, with illustrations by David DeGrand.

Join us as Rob shares what it was like to channel the voice of a fictional character to craft a page-turning memoir of an ex-con turned world-saving superhero, and to be tasked with the caretaking of the life and legacy of one of the most beloved characters in the Marvel Universe.

Learn more about Rob Kutner:

• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

“If I’m developing a recipe for a client, or for my own books, I’m all about people telling me what they think about it, what it invokes for them, what they would do differently,” notes New York Times best-selling cookbook author Adeena Sussman about the collaborative nature of preparing recipes for readers.

If there’s anybody who knows what it means work in partnership in the kitchen, it’s Adeena Sussman—the co-author of 15 books, including the best-selling Cravings series written in collaboration with model and television personality Chrissy Teigen. Adeena is also the co-author of The Sprinkles Baking Book, written with Candace Nelson, the noted pastry chef and founder of Sprinkles cupcakes.

Adeena’s latest solo book, Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals from My Table to Yours, celebrating (and reimagining!) the traditional foods that have long graced her family’s Shabbat table, became an immediate best-seller upon publication in September 2023. The book is a follow-up to Adeena’s 2019 cookbook Sababa, named one of the best cookbooks of the year by The New York Times, Bon Appetit, and Food & Wine.

A lifelong visitor to Israel who has been writing about that country’s food culture for almost twenty years, Adeena lives, cooks, and writes in Tel Aviv, in the shadow of that city’s famed Carmel Market.

Learn more about Adeena Sussman:

• Website
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Pinterest

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

Rennie Dyball is an award-winning journalist, ghostwriter, middle-grade novelist and children’s book author who’s found a way to marry her lifelong interest in horses with her many and varied talents as a writer. Together with her co-author Piper Klemm, she created the popular Show Strides series of equestrian-themed novels for middle grade readers—originally published by The Plaid Horse and soon to be reissued by Andrews McMeel Universal. Rennie’s standalone novel for children, Good Boy, Eddie, was published by The Plaid Horse earlier this year.

As a ghostwriter, Rennie has helped to give voice to a number of celebrity-driven autobiographies and memoirs, including the Audible Original memoir, Stronger Together, with Terry Crews and Rebecca King Crews; Full Circle, with Andrea Barber (Kimmy Gibler from “Full House”); A Famous Dog’s Life, with Hollywood animal trainer Sue Chipperton; and, Fierce Style, with fashion designer Christian Siriano. An accomplished equestrian, Rennie has also drawn on her love of horses to collaborate on With Purpose: The Balmoral Standard, with top trainers Carleton and Traci Brooks.

Her most recent book, B Is For Bellies, a picture book celebration of body positivity, with illustrations by Mia Saine, was published by Clarion Books in July.

Rennie was a reporter and writer at People for over 15 years, before retiring from the magazine in 2017, and she continues to write for People.com as a freelance book critic.

“People was the best training ground I could imagine,” she says of her development as a writer. “More than anything, I took away the importance of making every word count.”

Join us for a winning conversation on what it takes to build a life and career out of two abiding passions—in Rennie’s case, riding and writing.

Learn more about Rennie Dyball:

• Website
• Instagram
• Threads

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

“I’ve been obsessed with the corrosive power of secrets since my first novel,” reflects the best-selling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro, a writer who has been mining her own secrets since she first put pen to paper.

In a far-ranging, free-wheeling interview with host Daniel Paisner, pulled from a “Book & Author Luncheon” program sponsored by the Friends of the Port Washington (N.Y.) Library in May, 2023, she reflects on her inspirations for her most recent novel Signal Fires, New York Times best-seller and National Jewish Book Award-winner now out in paperback, and for her gripping 2019 memoir Inheritance, also aNew York Times best-seller and National Jewish Book Award-winner.

Her fascination with secrets is at the heart of Dani’s wildly popular podcastFamily Secrets, now in its ninth season, which invites guests to examine the secrets they choose to carry and the ones they choose to share, and it is at the heart of this conversation. “We all live in aftermath, all the time,” she tells Paisner. “Aftermath is the story of our lives, really.And the question is, What do we do in that aftermath? And how does an incident or a secret that is kept impact us over a long lifetime?”

Join us as Dani Shapiro looks to answer her own question—and in the process, sheds meaningful light on the stuff of all fiction and memoir.

Learn more about Dani Shapiro:

• Website
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter

More resources mentioned in the episode:

• Port Washington Library Website
• Daniel Ford's short story collection Black Coffee

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

Lindsey Jacobellis is the most dominant athlete in the history of women’s snowboardcross—a thrilling head-to-head sport that made its Olympic debut at the 2006 games in Torino, when Lindsey also stepped to the Olympic stage for the first time. And yet the inaugural running of the event was nearly her undoing. At 20 years old, Lindsey had a commanding lead heading into the final stretch of the medal round when she grabbed her board on the penultimate jump and was unable to land cleanly, spilling off the course and looking on in despair as her rival, Tanja Frieden of Switzerland, sped past to claim the gold. The world looked on as well, in judgement and disbelief, and Lindsey’s fall would go down as one of the biggest unforced errors in sports—a misstep that allowed her to ultimately write one of the greatest comeback stories in Olympic history.

It also cost her many of her sponsors, and shook her confidence, and in many ways stamped her career before it had really begun, and in her just-published memoir Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall, co-written with podcast host Daniel Paisner, she revisits the anguish and heartbreak that found her on the back of that fall— and followed her around like a black cloud through the next four Olympic cycles, finally leading to her two gold medal runs at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

“I’m calling this book Unforgiving because that word has taken on so many meanings for me,” she writes. “It speaks to the single-minded, relentless pursuit that has helped to shape my snowboarding career…but it also reflects the punishing, intolerant treatment I received in the press, and in and around the Olympic and snowboarding communities. And it reminds me that for the longest time I wasn’t able to forgive myself for this one stupid, rash, thoughtless mistake—a mistake that cost me a whole lot more than a simple medal or the chance (for the moment!) to call myself a champion.”

One of the ways Lindsey was finally able to put the fall behind her and reclaim her own narrative was to lean into her many other interests away from the mountain. She moved to California and took up surfing. She became a certified personal trainer and wrote a children’s book, Sochi: A True Story, based on the life-affirming bond she developed with the stray dog she met in the athletes’ village at the Sochi games. And she helped to launch Super Girl Snow Pro, an event series working to showcase the world’s top female pros and provide an inspirational platform for young female athletes.

Join us as we visit with the GOAT of women’s snowboardcross to talk about what it was like to rewrite her story on the snow—and, now, to share that story on the page.

Learn more about Lindsey Jacobellis:

• Website
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Super Girl Snow Pro

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

“Sometimes I’m asked if I’ll ever write a book,” notes actor, playwright and singer-songwriter Jeff Daniels, “and I always answer that I already have. It’s in my songs.”

This is true. But now it’s also true that the stuff of Jeff Daniels’s life is on delightful display in the Audible Originals memoir “Alive and Well Enough”—a collection of stories, musings and songs that invites listeners into the heart and mindset of one of our most versatile performers, offered with grace and good cheer and midwestern soul.

Daniels, the two-time Emmy Award-winning actor and star of such iconic films as “Terms of Endearment,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Dumb and Dumber,” “Pleasantville,” and “The Squid and the Whale,” recalls being inspired in this effort by the story-laced songs of Steve Goodman and Arlo Guthrie, and, more recently, by Bruce Springsteen’s “Springsteen on Broadway.”

Part podcast, part musical memoir, part bulletins from the frontlines of contemporary storytelling, “Alive and Well Enough” is a wildly entertaining mash-up of Jeff Daniels’s many gifts as a writer and performer, including scenes from some of the author’s original plays, many of which have been staged atThe Purple Rose Theatre Company in his hometown of Chelsea, Mich. “[It’s] is the only place where I get to do everything I do,” he says of his new audio project, which he calls “an adventure of an accidental artist who one day looked up and realized he had a sense of humor, a passion for writing, and stories to tell.”

Join us for an insightful, engaging and surprisingly candid conversation on what it means to channel the work of some of our finest playwrights and screenwriters – like Lanford Wilson (“Fourth of July”), Scott Frank (“Godless”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The Newsroom” and the Broadway adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird”).

“When you’re inside the writing, it rubs off,” he says.

This is true as well.

Note: This episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcastfeatures narrative and song excerpts from Jeff Daniels’s audio memoir “Alive and Well Enough,” presented courtesy of Audible Originals.

Jeff Daniels photo credit: Sam Jones

More from Jeff Daniels:

• Jeff Daniels & Jonathan Hogan, “Together Again”
• Website
• Facebook

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

Dina Kraft is a veteran foreign correspondent based in Tel Aviv, where she co-hosts the influential podcast “Groundwork,” sharing stories about Palestinians and Israelis working to change the status quo.

She began her overseas career in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press and has written and reported for a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Los Angeles Times. She currently works as the opinion editor for the English-language edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

A 2012 Neiman Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2015 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, Dina has taught journalism at Harvard University, Boston University and Northeastern University, where she was the director of media innovation at the university’s School of Journalism.

Dina’s first collaboration, My Friend Anne Frank: The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds, written with the late Hannah Pick-Goslar, recounts a brief but enduring friendship that somehow flourished during one of the darkest periods in history. “Lies,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary, referring to Goslar by her childhood nickname, “you are a reminder of what my fate might have been.”

Join us as Dina reflects on the story behind Goslar’s best-selling memoir, and on what it means to bring a journalist’s eye (and ear!) to the task of shining meaningful new light on one of the most familiar chapters in the literature of the Holocaust.

Learn more about Dina Kraft:

• Website
• Facebook
• X/Twitter
• Groundwork: The Podcast
• Watch "My Friend Anne Frank by Hannah Pick-Goslar" on YouTube

More post-show reading material:

• The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow by Daniel Paisner

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

Novelist, screenwriter, producer and publisher Lee Goldberg knows what it is to work in collaboration. He has helped to write and produce a number of television shows, including “seaQuest” and “Monk,” and he also served as a supervising producer and executive producer of the long-running series “Diagnosis Murder,” starring Dick Van Dyke.

While working on “Monk” and “Diagnosis Murder,” he wrote several original tie-in novels based on those series. Lee is also an accomplished storyteller in his own right—the author of nearly 40 novels, including Lost Hills, True Fiction, and the first five books in the Fox & O’Hare series, written with best-selling mystery novelist Janet Evanovich. His latest book, Malibu Burning, tells the story of an elaborate heist staged in the middle of a raging California wildfire, and he’s got two additional books coming out in the weeks ahead—Calico and Dream Town.

Join us for a fun and informative conversation on what it means to work in and around television, and how it is that one writer has been able to capture the imagination of audiences in a variety of mediums.

Learn more about Lee Goldberg:

• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter/X
• Instagram
• Threads
• BlueSky

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount

This episode originally aired on June 21, 2022.

If there’s anyone who knows what it’s like to be invited into “the kingdom of knowing,” to borrow a phrase from journalist Richard Ben Cramer, it’s podcast guest Barbara Feinman Todd, who graduated fromThe Washington Post Style desk to work as a researcher, book doctor, editor and spirit guide on books with Bob Woodward (Veil) and Carl Bernstein (Loyalties), and Ben Bradlee (A Good Life), leaving her uniquely positioned to reflect on the mind and mindsets of the three journalists who were perhaps most responsible for uncovering the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Indeed, as Barbara writes in her compelling memoir Pretend I’m Not Here, there are a hundred different ways to know and to be known, as she would go on to discover for herself in her work as a ghostwriter for such leading Washington personalities as Bob Kerry, then a U.S. senator from Nebraska (When I Was a Young Man); Marjorie Margolies-Mazvinsky, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania (A Woman’s Place); and, ultimately, Hillary Clinton. In what she had thought might be her most attention-getting assignment, Barbara signed on to collaborate with the First Lady on It Takes a Village, coming up with the title and structure of the book, and helping to shape the narrative into a coherent hole. Trouble was, Barbara was “disappeared” from the book’s “Acknowledgements” page, and her contributions whitewashed by the Clinton White House, and so the attention-getting was not at all as she had imagined.

Barbara would go on to teach journalism at Georgetown University for 25 years, and as she leaned away from ghostwriting she reflected on her work as a ghostwriter, and on her years-long relationships with her clients and subjects, with a shifting perspective. Her conclusion? “Writing other people’s lives is a bit silly,” she writes in her memoir, “like playing dress-up, clomping around in your mother’s pumps that don’t quite fit, but it also lets you have a momentary sense of what it’s like to be someone else.” That momentary sense is at the heart of our conversation.

Follow Barbara Feinman Todd:

• Twitter
• Instagram

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount
• Tennants Cove Writers