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• The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past ( Creative nonfiction) Random House (New York, NY), 2024

• The Memory Palace website - https://thememorypalace.us/about/

  For fiteen years, Nate DiMeo has written, produced, and hosted The Memory Palace, a podcast of short, narrative essays put to music that conjure lost moments and forgotten figures from America’s past or find strange, new magic in the familiar. The show has been a finalist for a Peabody award. Nate was the Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 2016/2017.

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  Nate DiMeo

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Nate DiMeo

  DiMeo in 2024
  Born 1974 (age 50–51)
  Providence, Rhode Island
  Alma mater Rhode Island College (BA)
  Occupation(s) Podcaster and author
  Known for The Memory Palace
  Spouse Leila Gerstein
  Children 1
  Nate DiMeo (born 1974) is an American podcaster, screenwriter, and author based out of Los Angeles, and the host of the podcast The Memory Palace.[1] He is also the author of Pawnee: the Greatest Town in America (2011) and The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past (2024). He was a finalist for the 2012 Thurber Prize for American Humor.[2]

  After spending a decade working in public radio, DiMeo created his own podcast centered around lesser-known historical narratives. The show has been received with critical acclaim and was nominated for a Peabody Award in 2016.[3]

  Early life and education
  DiMeo was born in 1974 in Providence, Rhode Island. His parents, John and Judy DiMeo, were special education professors at Rhode Island College.[4]

  After his birth, the family moved to Rehoboth, Massachusetts, where he was raised. He suffered from Graves' disease as a teenager.[5] He attended Rhode Island College, graduating in 1997.[4]

  Career
  After college, DiMeo played guitar for the Providence indie rock band Bermuda. An organizing effort to save the city's Safari Lounge venue led to an interview with WBUR, where DiMeo eventually secured his first job in public radio.[6]

  He moved to Los Angeles to become an editor on the public radio show Marketplace. He began reporting on air as well as writing for various television shows, including Parks and Recreation and The Astronaut Wives Club.[6][7]

  He began producing short history-based audio vignettes on the side, mostly at first for his own growth and enjoyment. The first episode of what became The Memory Palace aired in November 2008, and the show became sufficiently popular (and financially viable) that he could work on it full time. The show joined Radiotopia in 2015.[5] From 2016 to 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art named him artist-in-residence, and he produced several Memory Palace episodes highlighting aspects and properties of the museum.[8]

  In 2024, DiMeo released a book of vignettes adapted from The Memory Palace.[9]

  Personal life
  DiMeo is married to television writer and producer Leila Gerstein. They live in Los Angeles with their daughter, Quinby.[5]

• Indy Week - https://indyweek.com/culture/talking-with-nate-dimeo-about-the-memory-palace-true-stories-of-the-past/

  Talking with Nate DiMeo About “The Memory Palace: True Stories of the Past”
  Ahead of a book tour stop at Duke University, the host of popular podcast “The Memory Palace” chats about storytelling, butter sculptures, and how learning about the past can crack open greater possibilities for the present.
  by Sarah Edwards
  11/25/2024
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  "The Memory Palace" podcast host and author Nate DiMeo. Photo by Emily Berl.
  "The Memory Palace" podcast host and author Nate DiMeo. Photo by Emily Berl.
  The Memory Palace: Podcasting Public History | The Center for Documentary Studies, Durham | Dec. 2, 6 pm

  “Finding wonder in the past makes me a bit more open to wonder in the present,” says the writer Nate DiMeo. In new book The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past, DiMeo introduces a slate of characters that traverse, with keen wonder, through the annals of history: grape pickers march across California with Cesar Chavez, a socialite moves to Wisconsin to study prairie chickens, a child sits on a roof for years trying to photograph the solar system.

  As with DiMeo’s popular long-running podcast of the same name, all these characters are real people lifted from the past and given, in DiMeo’s grave, sonorous voice, brief poetic treatment. In the book version of the popular podcast—released by Random House on November 19—fans will find new stories, photographs, and other ephemera alongside favorite show segments.

  Sherlocks: In Article 1.20.25-2.16.25 (728 x 90 px) (1).png
  Ahead of a December 2 book tour stop at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, DiMeo sat down with the INDY to talk about the process of putting the book together and how learning about the past can crack open greater possibilities for the present. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

  INDY: How did you determine which stories belong in the book?

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  NATE DIMEO: At this point, there’ve been 223 stories in the 16 years of The Memory Palace. And so there was a lot of picking and choosing, about what would work and which things hinged upon sound too much, and which ones would work on the page and which ones wouldn’t.

  As a kid, there were so many books that were collections of short pieces that my dad had purchased probably for, like, a dime each, these old paperbacks of Ripley’s Believe It or Not stories or Guinness Book of World Records, these things that you might pick up off the shelf over and over. And six months later, you’d read something and you’d be that little bit older, and suddenly this one would click. People have talked to me about the show and that’s kind of the way it works—people listen to some stories, but every once in a while one will knock them out and there’s something about it that speaks to them in their life.

  [I was] thinking back to those books that I loved so much as a kid: What happens when you build one of those for adults, where the randomness is the point? You open [the book] up and are not expecting to laugh, and suddenly you are, or you’re not expecting to cry, and suddenly you are—a book that could sneak up on you. Books used to do that all the time as a kid, and they stopped doing that when you’re an adult. I wanted to bring a little bit of that back.

  Was that part of the decision not to order things chronologically?

  Yeah, absolutely. Part of the way that the show works is that you go in cold, by design. It is anti-algorithmic in that way—I’m sure I could probably find more listeners if I could maximize my SEO and, you know, follow some, like, Mr. Beast format and figure out exactly how to entice and hook people.

  Please don’t.

  2025durham 2030300x250.png
  Yes, thank you. Thank you. The truth of the matter is, I know that if you tell someone “Here’s a story about the second woman to ever cross the English Channel” or “Here’s this woman who made sculptures in butter,” you might think, “I don’t care about this woman who makes sculptures in butter.” But I want you to, and I don’t want you to come in with your guard up, so I don’t tell you what it’s going to be. In this book, I continue to do that. There is no table of contents. You enter each story cold and with the first line, hopefully, it will raise some mystery or question that you want to be answered with the next one.

  I’m curious what you feel the difference may be to listening to this material versus reading it.

  It is a leap of faith, and I do think that for me in particular, it was a difficult one to make, because as a person talking, you know what a good audio sentence is, and I have more faith in that than I might in a good book sentence. Music can do a lot of work, and pacing can do a lot of work. Dramatic pauses are dramatic for a reason, and it’s difficult to simulate a dramatic pause on the page.

  What I’ve noticed is that that sort of imaginary space that all history has to live in—because we have no other way to access it—there’s a conjuring act that feels like magic.

  I realized that is the same thing that happens when you read: If you are reading a Jane Austen novel and riding the bus, part of you is on that bus and part of you is in the Cotswolds in 1805, or whatever. Holding those two spaces is wonderful.

  I started to notice that that’s the same way that history and memory live—it kind of occupies the present at the same time. In the same way that if you’re walking the dog and part of you is back in the argument that you’re going over in your head that you had the night before, or you are reading a book and it is a dry factual account of Gettysburg, and part of you is on the battlefield, and part of you is, again, on that bus.

  The thing that kind of cracked how I could tell these stories was realizing that it was the same as the book—that what you’re doing is giving details and describing things using the same tools of poetic devices or literary devices and trying to create that same kind of fictional space. And that there was nothing wrong in doing that because the facts were there and it was accurate in that fictional space, which is all we ever have of the past.

  In the introduction you talk about how, when learning about a historical figure there can be this moment—some decision or action the figure takes—where they feel real. I wonder about the importance of that kind of moment, when—in our own age—there’s AI and misinformation and people are having a harder time putting a shape around the present and what is “real.”

  I’m very aware of how miasmic and conflicted the present always is. If we were to go back in time right now, and it was 2012 or 2009 and things weren’t so crazy with social media and fake news and AI was but a glimmer in some mathematician’s eye—life is really chaotic, even then, it was really chaotic.

  You would read something very practical and normal, like The New York Times opinion page and there’d be nine different things that were explaining, you know, the Obama administration or whatever was happening. And you would not buy some of it, and you would be like, “I think Maureen Dowd is wrong about this thing.” The truth of the matter is the story that all these people are telling about the present…you can argue about all of this stuff all the time. Because we do.

  The present itself is always so contingent and up for debate. It’s always this process of coming to a mutual understanding through language and stories. So why shouldn’t the past be anything else? If there’s anything that I am trying to remember or let my readers know about the past it’s that it is just like the present. The people in the past were just like us and were real people.

  On history and historians
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  Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the people that we read about in the news today are real people. It takes a leap of imagination to put yourself in their shoes, or even in the shoes of the person who’s a couple of rows away on the bus.

  To me, there’s something really valuable about looking to the past and seeing the ways in which people’s lives are constricted or determined or enabled by the economic condition and rules and mores of the day and what was simply in the air they breathed or the work they were allowed to do. It reminds me that the present is no different—that our time now is itself historical. And it snaps me into a kind of presence.

  All of the strangeness and disassociation and unreality of the present, while very pointed right now because the questions about AI are so present—the truth is, I think it was there all the time, we just had a bit more comfort in the things that we were hanging our hats on. And now it feels like our hat is going to fall if we hang it on this piece of news or that piece of news.

  I don’t want you to feel like you have to give any spoilers away about your event, but you are going to reference some stories from North Carolina. Is that right?

  What will go down at this event is that I’ll tell stories for a while, and then I’ll have a conversation about the book and about process and stuff like that. A lot of the stories are pretty dynamic and set to music, there are visuals and some pretty incredible animations that, over time, I’ve commissioned and worked with people on. And I will also be reading, including a North Carolina story that is really pivotal in the book about the Outer Banks. It’s a good time. It really is.

  To comment on this story email arts@indyweek.com.

• wbur - https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/11/18/nate-dimeo-memory-palace-book

  Nate DiMeo recasts his quirky podcast histories for the page
  November 18, 2024
  Michael Patrick Brady
  Nate DiMeo's new book "The Memory Palace" draws from his podcast of the same name. (Author photo courtesy Emily Berl; book cover courtesy Random House)
  Nate DiMeo's new book "The Memory Palace" draws from his podcast of the same name. (Author photo courtesy Emily Berl; book cover courtesy Random House)
  With his podcast-turned-book “The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past,” writer and host Nate DiMeo aims to show readers that history isn’t just a dry accumulation of dates and bold-faced names. Rather, it’s a living, breathing thing that can hold personal relevance for us here in the present—provided we’re able to see things through the right lens.

  Since 2008, DiMeo has plumbed the murky depths of the past for his podcast, which sheds light on obscure people and oddball events that have fallen through the cracks of our collective memory. A Rehoboth native, DiMeo found early inspiration as a teenager exploring his family’s own history in nearby Providence, Rhode Island.

  WBUR is a nonprofit news organization. Our coverage relies on your financial support. If you value articles like the one you're reading right now, give today.

  “I have a lifelong fascination with the inherent unreality of the past,” says DiMeo, “and the idea that these are all things that really happened, but that the only way to access them is through an act of imagination.”

  His new book includes nearly 50 short vignettes. Though there are a few running themes, there’s little to connect them to one another save that they struck DiMeo’s fancy or tugged at his heartstrings. Some are frivolous and lighthearted, such as the tale of Caroline Shawk Brooks, who in 1873 embarked on a successful, if not well-remembered, career sculpting classical busts in butter. Others are more weighty, like that of Hercules, a man enslaved by George Washington who, in his pursuit of freedom, became irrevocably separated from his family. Each is told in DiMeo’s signature style, which uses narrative techniques more commonly found in fiction to infuse the stories with emotion, suspense, and pathos.

  At times, his stories recall the wistful nostalgia of radio broadcaster Paul Harvey, whose long-running program, “The Rest of the Story,” teasingly unfurled forgotten bits of lore about famous celebrities and important historical figures. Where DiMeo differs from Harvey however, is in his willingness to tell tales that complicate our view of the past and bring uncomfortable truths to the fore.

  I have a lifelong fascination with the inherent unreality of the past.
  Nate DiMeo
  DiMeo is keen to show readers how the lives of his subjects unfolded in ways that were shaped by factors unique to their time, factors that were often beyond their control. “I think it’s useful, especially today, to understand how the economics and technology and social structures of your day can dictate the kind of life you get to live within it,” he says.

  Nowhere are these ideas clearer than in the story of Elizabeth Hughes, one of the first diabetic patients to receive insulin treatments. It’s a heartwarming story in which the suffering young girl is rescued from certain death by a powerful new remedy that was discovered almost by accident. But DiMeo is quick to put it in a sobering context. “We should think, too… of the other patients who didn’t live long enough for the treatment to be discovered,” he writes. “Or whose parents weren’t justices of the United States Supreme Court,” as Elizabeth’s father was, “and couldn’t get insulin in those early days.”

  Other stories emphasize the chaotic, contingent aspects of history. In “The Nickel Candy Bar,” DiMeo takes readers on a wild adventure through time that begins with the creation of the Baby Ruth candy bar and ends with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Reading it feels something like falling into a particularly fascinating rabbit hole while clicking links on Wikipedia or getting lost in the fictive realities of postmodern novelists like E.L. Doctorow and Benjamin Labatut. Through this simple story, we’re able to see the implausible connections and uncanny coincidences that put the lie to our studiously linear conception of history and reveal how peculiar and conditional the past really was.

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  DiMeo maintains a casual tone throughout the book, seeking to keep things light even when venturing into darker territory. In his telling, George Washington regards the escape of Hercules, his enslaved cook, as a “bummer.” Recalling the well-intentioned yet clumsy relocation of Plymouth Rock in 1774, DiMeo begins by saying he likes “to think of the men in the first part of this story as just a bunch of dudes, just a bunch of dudes doing dude things.” When the dispute over the ownership of the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur devolves into a “period of protracted litigation,” he declares the back and forth “super boring” and pledges to “jump over it.” As a storyteller, DiMeo is here for a good time, not a long time.

  He’s also aware that many, if not most of the stories he retells here may not speak to everyone—but if even one manages to inspire a sense of wonder in a reader or gives them a fresh perspective on what’s happening in their own lives, he feels it’s all worth it.

  “With these stories, I’m trying to activate a sense of the life within these historical figures,” says DiMeo. “They might be wracked with anxiety or have ambitions that are unmet. These are feelings that we ourselves have. And that’s the stuff that often gets left out of history. I don’t think that anyone necessarily needs to remember any of these people. What I’m saying is they might be useful to you. And occasionally, you may find a new hero or heroine that informs how you live today.”

• Writer's Digest - https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-nonfiction/nate-dimeo-on-the-power-of-writing-short-stories

  Nate DiMeo: On the Power of Writing Short Stories
  In this interview, author Nate DiMeo discusses how he turned his podcast of 15 years into his new collection of short historical stories, The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past.
  Robert Lee BrewerNov 21, 2024
  Nate DiMeo is the creator and host of "The Memory Palace," a Peabody Award finalist and among the first group of podcasts preserved by the Library of Congress. He was previously the artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he has performed stories from "The Memory Palace" live with music, pictures, and animation all over the United States and Canada, as well as in England, Ireland, and Australia. DiMeo is the co-author of Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America , a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Prior to producing "The Memory Palace," DiMeo spent a decade in public radio and could be heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, or Marketplace. He has written for NBC’s "Parks and Recreation" and ABC’s "The Astronaut Wives Club." Follow him on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

  Nate DiMeo: On the Power of Writing Short Stories
  Nate DiMeo

  Photo by Emily Berl

  In this interview, Nate discusses how he turned his podcast of 15 years into his new collection of short historical stories, The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past, his advice for other writers, and more.

  Name: Nate DiMeo
  Literary agent: Richard Abate, 3Arts
  Book title: The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past
  Publisher: Random House
  Release date: November 19, 2024
  Genre/category: History/Literary Essays
  Previous titles: Co-Author of Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America
  Elevator pitch: For 15 years in his pioneering podcast, The Memory Palace, Nate DiMeo has turned to the past to make sense of the way we live today, finding beauty and meaning in history’s dustier corners, holding things up to the light and weaving facts, keen insight, wit, and poignant observation into unforgettable tales. Now, his unique historical stories are brought to the page for the first in an enchanting collection along with gorgeous illustrations and found photographs.

  Nate DiMeo: On the Power of Writing Short Stories
  Bookshop | Amazon
  [WD uses affiliate links.]

  What prompted you to write this book?
  There’s a particular type of reading experience I treasured as a kid that I’ve missed as an adult: There were these books I would pour over again and again—The Book of Lists, Where the Sidewalk Ends, a stack of faded paperbacks collecting old Ripley’s Believe it or Not stories—filled with short, transporting pieces, beguiling illustrations that you could get lost in for an afternoon and turn to again and again. I wanted to try to create one of those books that would bring that particular magic into adulthood, a collection of the types of stories I’ve been writing for the past 15 years for “The Memory Palace” podcast—short historical stories that tap into the tools of fiction and poetry to draw out meaning and wonder from the raw-material of the past, woven together with illustrations and artifacts and found photographs in a way that might bring back that treasured feeling. A “kid’s book” with adult concerns.

  How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
  I’ve been toting around this idea for over a decade. Since the earliest days of my podcast, I would get occasional invitations to lunch with a book editor or agent. They liked my show. They liked the writing. They liked the platform. They wondered if I had a book in me and I would pitch them a collection. They would ask me if I had a short story that I would like to go long on instead, or perhaps one of those stories that seems short, but that really explains America. In short, they longed for the next Seabiscuit or Cod or the like. And, I got it; those books are pretty great. But short is what I do. I believe in the power of short—of the brief, punchy tale, of extracting wonder from tiny things. It took me a long time to find a publisher who believed in the potential of a collection.

  Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
  I had always worried a little bit (it my hum-drum writer’s insecurity) about whether the stories from my podcast would hold up on the page. That they wouldn’t collapse without the music or my voice holding it up. So, it was heartening and kind of thrilling to see it all come together on the page. That the stories themselves did work well, but moreover, that there were whole new creative avenues to explore in collecting them—putting this one next to that one, switching the order around, pairing one or another with the perfect picture, or conjuring up some idea for an illustration and then sending DeHaan off to her drawing board and having her come back with something better than I’d even imagined.

  Nate DiMeo: On the Power of Writing Short Stories
  Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
  In my earliest conversations with Random House, they asked whether there was a way I could take people behind the scenes a bit at The Memory Palace. Was there a way to kind of pull back the curtain and discuss how I came to this story or that. Every idea we kicked around fell flat. They all felt a bit like DVD commentary to me. But eventually I hit upon trying to write a series of memoir-based stories that would use the techniques of The Memory Palace and apply them to my own life. I’d never written about myself. The biggest surprise in the writing process was finding that idea actually worked. That there was a certain power in turning my usual lens to my own past and eventually it grew into something that, in a way, feels like the heart of the book and an odd sort of key to unlocking the rest of the stories.

  What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
  Over the course of the past 15 years I have found, again and again, that it is personally useful to write these stories. That taking the time out of my life, every couple of weeks, to dive into the past and try to connect with that wonderful, peculiar, imaginative pleasure of conjuring a sense of a different time, made me feel more connected to my own time. It kind of snapped me into presence. Made me aware of the fleeting nature of time. It sounds corny, but writing these stories is about as close as I come to a spiritual practice. It makes me feel a little more centered, a little more aware, makes me look at the world with a bit more wonder, with my eyes and my heart a bit more open. I’d like readers to find a bit of the same in this book too. I want it to work like one of those beloved books you might have pulled down from your childhood bookshelf again and again: You can open it anywhere and lose yourself for a bit, change your day, and maybe see your present moment in a new way for a moment.

  If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
  I spent much too much of my life not quite understanding that the people who I admired—writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, athletes, whomever—were real people. It took me forever (far too long) to realize that a filmmaker was simply someone who made a film; a novelist wasn’t some elevated being, they were a person who’d written a novel. If you want to be a writer, just write. If you want to be a great writer, keep writing.

DiMeo, Nate THE MEMORY PALACE Random House (NonFiction None) $33.00 11, 19 ISBN: 9780593446157

A collector of "true short stories" parades a caravan of curiosities.

In mining "the space between the story of our lives and those lives as we live them," DiMeo plays magician, conjuring the enchantments that reside in the subtle and unseen, often moment to moment. They come to him as some random fact or anecdote that finds a purchase in his imagination and are processed as stories. DiMeo, a former radio personality and artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is creator and host ofThe Memory Palace podcast and co-author ofPawnee: The Greatest Town in America. His first solo book engages deeply with history, locating new ways of perceiving lives familiar or obscure: how Samuel Morse invested 35 years learning to be a painter before tragedy compelled him to invent the code that bears his name; the legacy of Elizabeth Van Lew, aka Crazy Bet, a clever Southern iconoclast who spied for the Union in the Civil War; the strange history of Egypt's Temple of Dendur; the rebuke to today's anti-immigration forces embodied by the Jewish refugee shipSt. Louis in World War II; the story of 19th-century farm wife turned artist Caroline Shawk Brooks, who sculpted masterworks in butter; and the inspiring career of Olympic runner Betty Robinson. Often DiMeo can only draw inferences from the facts at hand, but he is on surest footing when drawing on stories fromhis past, among the collection's most fluid and emotionally resonant. The book's anecdotal structure is reminiscent of, but superior to, the late Paul Harvey'sThe Rest of the Story (1977), with its characteristic surprise or ironic endings. Although some of the writing can be pedestrian, there are flashes of eloquence and style. Stylistics, however, are beside the point.

DiMeo's illumination of small wonders edifies and entertains.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"DiMeo, Nate: THE MEMORY PALACE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883540/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ca797dff. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.

• BookPage
  https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/the-memory-palace-nate-dimeo-book-review/
  Word count: 416

  November 19, 2024
  The Memory Palace
  By Nate DiMeo
  Review by Deborah Mason
  The Memory Palace collects stories from Nate DiMeo’s award-winning podcast about historical people—famous and unknown alike, all breathtakingly human.
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  A memory palace is a memorization technique used by figures as diverse as Cicero, international memory champions and the late, great Sherlock Holmes. Practitioners visualize placing images representing information they want to recollect in a familiar setting that they can revisit whenever their memory needs a nudge. The Memory Palace: True Stories of the Past, by award-winning podcaster and screenwriter Nate DiMeo, however, is a more intimate and complex edifice than any mnemonic device. Instead of facts and figures, DiMeo’s memory palace is inhabited by the moving true stories that illustrate how human beings throughout history, whether famous, infamous or unknown, felt the same emotions and had the same imperfections that we have and humans will always have.

  Like DiMeo’s podcast of the same name, The Memory Palace’s stories—numbering nearly 50 in this volume—are briskly told, varied, unexpected and often paradoxical, giving us a sideways view of human nature. William Mumler, a 19th-century con artist photographer who stumbled upon a technique to make “ghosts” appear behind his subjects, gave genuine comfort to spiritualist Mary Todd Lincoln as she grieved the death of her child. William James Sidis, a boy genius who, at age 11, gave a Harvard lecture on the implications of the fourth dimension, could have been an academic celebrity, but instead sought seclusion to pursue his passion: collecting streetcar transfers. Carla Wallenda, the last surviving child of the founders of the Flying Wallendas high wire troupe, witnessed over several decades the gruesome deaths of her father, husband, cousins, aunt and uncle—but until her death at the age of 85, never felt so alive as when she was on the tightrope.

  DiMeo ordered the stories in no particular way, and he suggests that The Memory Palace could be a “dipping book.” But there’s a benefit to reading it in order: In his final seven stories, he seamlessly interweaves episodes from his family’s lives in a way that illuminates both the individuals chronicled in his “cabinet of curiosities” and the project of the book and podcast as a whole. Readers will feel a shiver of recognition and understanding—making a second or third visit to DiMeo’s memory palace both irresistible and gratifying.