The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #122: Meg Stone

"My writing style is what happens when you take memoir, reporting, and 'straight nonfiction' and put them in a blender."

Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.

Here’s the 122nd installment, featuring Meg Stone, author of The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

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Meg Stone. Portrait by Sharona Jacobs Photography.

Meg Stone is the Executive Director of IMPACT Boston, an abuse prevention and empowerment self-defense organization. Her first book, THE COST OF FEAR: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-based Violence was published by Beacon Press in 2025. Her writing has been published in Huffington Post, Boston Globe, Newsweek, Washington Post, Dame, Ms., and other publications. Meg lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her partner Mal and a shockingly large collection of musical theater cast albums.

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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’m 51. I started writing when I was a teenager. My high school had a student musical and about 90% of the writers were boys, so I had my first experience of struggling to access my creativity in a male dominated space.

Then, my senior year, I got to take a creative writing class. The teacher was spacey and disorganized in a way that caused us to speculate about how many drugs she’d taken in the 1960s. But her unbridled joy was infectious and her assignments stretched us—short stories one week, sestinas the next. Some people worked on novels, others wrote heartbreaking personal essays. I wrote a surprising number of poems.

It would take me years to appreciate how important it was to have such a nurturing space to write. We got critique that was honest, but not shaming or demoralizing. Even my most cringe-worthy pieces (like an un-funny play called “Fiddler on the Roof Gives Violin Lessons”) were given respectful, constructive feedback.

I went to college thinking I would be a writer, but got absorbed in feminism before I could finish unpacking my dorm room. My college was known for having a great English department, but my first creative writing class was awful. The professor believed that political issues ruined the art of writing. I wrote a short story from the perspective of a man who was a die-hard feminist who had just learned that a woman he’d casually dated had had an abortion without telling him. I’m not saying the story was good (I’ve never thrived in fiction). But I wanted to put characters in situations that tested their political beliefs. I craved feedback on how I could do that better, but instead I was told that politics were weighing me down.

I resigned myself to thinking that “creative writing” (whatever that means) and activism were incompatible. I chose activism. I worked at the domestic violence crisis center, I went to protests, and I stopped seeing myself as a writer. Still, I couldn’t resist pouring over each sentence of my papers, making sure the words sounded exactly right. I wrote my senior thesis on racism in domestic violence services and the moments I spent editing and rewriting the sentences and putting the chapters in order were joyful. I didn’t start writing again until my late 20s when I found a vibrant community of queer and feminist writers who held open mics where politics were the norm, not the problem.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

THE COST OF FEAR: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence was released February 25th, 2025.

What number book is this for you?

One.

When it comes to avoiding violence, most women have gotten a lot of questionable advice, like “don’t wear a ponytail, an attacker could grab it” or “or “don’t go shopping alone.” The Cost of Fear exposes how sexist safety advice keeps us small—and offers a bold, evidence-based path to true personal and collective safety. At the intersection of feminism, public safety, and social justice, The Cost of Fear empowers us with evidence-based tools to resist coercive control, reclaim our power, and join the fight for social justice—not by shrinking our lives, but by expanding our agency.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

Narrative Nonfiction or creative nonfiction. My writing style is what happens when you take memoir, reporting, and “straight nonfiction” and put them in a blender. The result is either a beautiful concoction or a gross brown smoothie that smells weird. I categorize my book this way because it’s structured around a central argument and it’s heavily researched and reported, but it also includes deep personal exploration.

It took years to understand that I’m not a memoir writer. In my late 20s and early 30s I read nothing but memoir. I loved brave, vulnerable writers who unpacked complicated truths about their families, and themselves. I decided I wanted to write like that. Then, one night, in a writing class, I found what a focus. The teacher gave us each a deck of cards as a prompt. I built a house that collapsed. I immediately started writing about the years I spent working nights in a domestic violence shelter.

I worked on a memoir about domestic violence work for 10 years, never understanding why it didn’t work. Then, an astute teacher looked at my 5 millionth draft and said, “You need to be writing nonfiction, not memoir.” They diagnosed my problem perfectly—every chapter about the complicated politics of domestic violence advocates trying to embed ourselves in court systems without being coopted by them worked. Every chapter where I tried to explore myself didn’t. So the memoir was like a souffle that fell.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

When it comes to avoiding violence, most women have gotten a lot of questionable advice, like “don’t wear a ponytail, an attacker could grab it” or “or “don’t go shopping alone.” The Cost of Fear exposes how sexist safety advice keeps us small—and offers a bold, evidence-based path to true personal and collective safety. At the intersection of feminism, public safety, and social justice, The Cost of Fear empowers us with evidence-based tools to resist coercive control, reclaim our power, and join the fight for social justice—not by shrinking our lives, but by expanding our agency.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

After I abandoned my memoir, I wrote and published essays and op-eds, sometimes using parts of the memoir. But it was a challenge to find creative writing classes that focused on the kind of book I wanted to write. Most nonfiction classes I found focused on how to build a platform and market yourself rather than the craft of writing, or the strategic political choices about how an issue or incident is presented.

I am not a journalist but I wanted to include interviews and reporting. I am an abuse and violence prevention expert, and while I wanted my book to be practical, I didn’t want to write self-help. I love the craft of making sentences.

I had a series of unworkable book ideas. Then Trump won the 2016 election. I’m not proud of this, but I got sucked into the media narrative about forgotten rural, working class white people whose support for Trump was unfortunate but sympathetic. My specific curiosity was about women abuse survivors who voted for him. I interviewed Trump-voting survivors in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and some of the other swing states that were getting relentless coverage in liberal-leaning media. I went to a women’s gun convention in Burnet, Texas, a town not 2 hours from Austin where every billboard was for a gun store, a Christian church or an anti-abortion message.

For that book proposal, I found an amazing agent, Leila Campoli. She was helpful and committed in ways that are beyond any reasonable expectation. We went on submission twice, and didn’t find a publisher either time. It would have been reasonable for her to drop me as a client, but she didn’t. She gave me the time and space to come up with a better idea. There were a few false starts, but in 2023 I finished the book proposal for THE COST OF FEAR and she found it a perfect home with Beacon Press.

Now that I am publicizing THE COST OF FEAR I realize just how much authors have to talk about our books. I’m grateful to be talking about work I believe in rather than people whose politics threaten most of what I love. I’m also grateful that some of what I learned from trying to connect with survivors across a bitter political divide was published in an essay I wrote for Huffington Post.

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What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

The hardest part was finding the right book. That process took 4 years, 12 years or 30 years depending on when you start the clock. Once I had the right book, it’s not that the writing wasn’t hard, but it was a different and better kind of hard. It was effortful like deadlifting 205 pounds after a 10-hour day at work, but not frustrating or aimless like all my previous book ideas had been. Even on my worst writing days I noticed the absence of all the doubt and indecision that had overshadowed every other book I’d tried to write.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

I interviewed 80 people for THE COST OF FEAR, almost 60 of whom are quoted and/or referenced. Some are abuse survivors sharing incredibly vulnerable life experiences, some are researchers, some are public officials, and some are men who peddle the kind of baseless safety advice that keeps women scared. (Like, don’t wear a ponytail, don’t wear headphones in public, don’t go shopping alone, etc.) Except for the public officials, I gave everyone their interview transcript and invited them to edit or remove anything they’d said, even the men who peddle baseless safety advice. Also, people got to choose whether to be referenced by their real name or a pseudonym.

That said, there is a bit of my personal story in the introduction and while my mom is incredibly supportive and generous about it, other family members are not. I did not make the changes people wanted, because I felt that doing so would undermine one of the key points in my book: Too often we pin the horrible beliefs we have about abusers on stigmatized strangers rather than reckoning with the people in our families and communities who are capable of causing that much harm. (One woman I wrote about stalked the sex offender registry and was enraged that registered sex offenders lived in her town, but she was a member of a Catholic church during the height of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.) So I wanted to talk about my own experience of abuse, and there’s no way of doing that without upsetting people who are invested in silence. I did include an author’s note stating that personal stories were my memory, but I don’t think that helped.

I worked on a memoir about domestic violence work for 10 years, never understanding why it didn’t work. Then, an astute teacher looked at my 5 millionth draft and said, “You need to be writing nonfiction, not memoir.” They diagnosed my problem perfectly—every chapter about the complicated politics of domestic violence advocates trying to embed ourselves in court systems without being coopted by them worked. Every chapter where I tried to explore myself didn’t. So the memoir was like a souffle that fell.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

Ghosts of St. Vincent’s by Tom Eubanks. I found it in the back corner of Unabridged Books, one of my two favorite indie bookstores in Chicago. Eubanks is a long-term survivor of the AIDS crisis who writes in compelling and heartbreaking detail about St. Vincent’s hospital in New York City. It was a Catholic hospital with a long history of caring for the most stigmatized patients—from people with cholera in the 1800s to gay men with AIDS in the 1980s. In 2010 the hospital went bankrupt and was sold to a company that turned it into luxury condos and town houses. Eubanks stayed in St. Vincent’s in the mid-1990s before going on HIV medication that made his viral load undetectable. The he blends memoir, reporting, history and political analysis helped me see a path to the book I wanted to write.

Another is High Price by Dr. Carl Hart. Hart is a Black neuroscientist who studies and treats people who use drugs. He grew up in Miami in the 1970s and he shows both through his story and empirical evidence that a lot of the problems in Black families that got blamed on drug use were actually the result of institutional racism. High Price includes vivid, beautifully written scenes of his experimental studies with drug users. One minute I feel like I’m in the lab with him, the next, I’m reading a thoughtful argument about how his research contradicts conventional wisdom about drug users. And a page and a half later, he convinces me to change my opinion about what addiction actually means and how few people who use drugs are actually dependent on them. High Price was published in 2013, long before changes in state-level drug laws rendered neighborhoods like mine full of pot stores. Carl Hart brought clarity to the difference between decriminalizing and legalizing—decriminalizing means treating drug use like speeding or parking illegally, not like assault or robbery.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

If a writing teacher tells you that political statements or analysis are ruining your creative work, find a different teacher! There are great writers out there who can teach you to make your writing more artful or nuanced or vivid without trying to stifle your analysis or call to action.

What do you love about writing?

I love two opposite aspects of writing. One is uncensored, generative freewriting. I know opinions about Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way are all over the map, but I love morning pages, the practice of starting each day by freewriting 3 pages in a journal. I’ve been doing them almost every day for 25 years and I love how quickly my morning pages move from mundane to breakthrough—one minute I’m reminding myself to take the leftovers out of the fridge, the next I’m discovering the central argument of my book.

I also love how writing forces clarity of thought. Struggling over a sentence until I get it just right not only improves what’s on the page, but makes me more disciplined in how I think (and how I want to persuade others to think) about abuse, violence, and what we can do to prevent it.

What frustrates you about writing?

The wrong turns and false starts. I haven’t been able to develop a worldview or spiritual practice that helps me see the thrown out chapters and paragraphs as an essential part of the journey.

What about writing surprises you?

As a “subject matter expert” who has been doing this work for 30-plus years, I was most surprised by how much I learned about an issue I thought I knew well. Doing a deep dive into the history of sex offender registries and interviewing the criminologist who led the study that shows they don’t decrease recidivism was especially illuminating. I had a basic understanding that crime policy isn’t grounded in evidence, but one researcher helped me understand why. She is not yet tenured, and the only thing that matters for her job security is publishing papers in academic journals. She could spend hours and years on the tedious work of coalition building, or educating legislators or mobilizing constituents who are willing to advocate for evidence-based public policy. But even if she did change laws, it wouldn’t count for much in a lot of academic circles. (I guess that’s not about writing, but without writing I would not have realized it!)

I interviewed 80 people for THE COST OF FEAR, almost 60 of whom are quoted and/or referenced. Some are abuse survivors sharing incredibly vulnerable life experiences, some are researchers, some are public officials, and some are men who peddle the kind of baseless safety advice that keeps women scared. Except for the public officials, I gave everyone their interview transcript and invited them to edit or remove anything they’d said, even the men who peddle baseless safety advice. Also, people got to choose whether to be referenced by their real name or a pseudonym.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

I start almost every day with morning pages. I sit on a futon in our office/guest room with my feet up, balancing a cup of coffee on my lap desk. My morning pages book is a 3-ring binder filled with scrap paper. I free write on the blank side of everything from fundraising letters for organizations I don’t care about to drafts of last year’s budget. It’s liberating to do my first writing of the day on paper that is so disposable. It brings the stakes down and liberates me.

I have pens I only use for my writing—Color Luxe brand gel pens. The body of the pen is translucent so I can see the ink disappear as I use them. I always feel a sense of accomplishment when I empty a pen.

After morning pages I move either to my desk or the floor. I pull out my laptop or a printed draft or a research study I need to read, and I start working on more focused writing. When I was working on THE COST OF FEAR, I did my focused writing at a particular café in my neighborhood. My second book demanded a different routine, so now I mostly write at home.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

My other creative pursuit is cooking. I pour a glass of red wine, turn on show tunes or podcasts about musical theater, and immerse myself in the world of mushrooms and arborio rice and homemade vegetable stock and the smell of garlic and red pepper flakes cooking in olive oil. I love cooking because it’s a way to be create without making any decisions. Being a writer and an executive director means living in a constant state of deciding, so I love having a creative pursuit where all I have to do is follow a recipe.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

My next book, DON’T FIGHT BACK And 10 Other Myths about Crime, Personal Safety and Gender-Based Violence will be published in February 2026 by Beacon Press. It’s a deep dive into all the baseless safety advice that has an endless shelf life on the internet. (The most tired warnings about stranger danger from the 80s and 90s are having a “renaissance” on TikTok!) In it I debunk everything from the oversimplified statement that “attackers can tell a good victim by the way they walk” to the completely baseless belief that human traffickers are lurking in Walmart parking lots.

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Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.