"In writing to yourself you really manage to get enough separation that you can have real compassion for yourself and real trust in yourself and you can become your own best friend."
— Janice Erlbaum

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

At 15, Janice Erlbaum gave her mother an ultimatum: take back the violent stepfather, and I'm leaving. Her mother took him back, and Janice walked out that night into New York City's shelter system. Twenty years after the publication of Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, Janice joins Mike to talk about life at Covenant House and in group homes in 1980s Manhattan, and how being told she was a "bad girl" pushed her to become one. She also talks about the teachers who saw something worth saving, and why writing the book honestly meant owning the harm she did, not only the harm done to her. She explains why readers still pass the book from mother to daughter, how the people she wrote about responded, and the one piece of advice she'd whisper to her teenage self and to everyone else: keep writing it down.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Leaving can be the healthiest choice a kid makes. Janice's split-second decision to walk out rather than live with violence made her life worse before it got better. She says it has served her well ever since.

2. Kids live down to the labels adults give them. In the group home, she was treated as homeless because she was "bad," so she set out to be the baddest bad girl there was. Many of the girls around her weren't runaways but "throwaways," including gay and trans kids thrown out by their families.

3. One adult who sees you can change everything. An overworked drama teacher cast her, unreliable as she was, as the lead in the spring play. She showed up every single day.

4. Honest memoir means owning your part. She had long told a story in which she was only the victim. To write Girlbomb truthfully, she went back to Covenant House and wrote about the violence and lies she took part in, too.

5. Catharsis feels terrible while it's happening. Janice compares the drafting process to vomiting: awful in the moment, a relief once it's out. She finally wrote the book once a stable relationship gave her the calm to sit still with it.

6. The truth can earn forgiveness. Old friends told her the book was hard to read, but "you didn't lie, you were fair." Some of them are glad that time in their lives has been memorialized.

7. Keep writing it down. Her advice for anyone, at any age: getting your thoughts onto the page creates enough distance to treat yourself with compassion and become your own best friend.

GET THE BOOK

Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir by Janice Erlbaum
Villard, March 7, 2006
ISBN: 9780812974560

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FCKPI0?tag=rettocasgra-20
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9780812974560

Support your local indie bookstore — if it's not on the shelf, ask them to order it.

CONNECT WITH JANICE

Website: https://janiceerlbaum.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janice.erlbaum/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/girlbomb
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82676.Girlbomb

CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST

Mike Carlon | Uncorking a Story

Website: https://uncorkingastory.com
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Uncorking a Story is produced by Mike Carlon. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

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"These people from small towns across the country had the power to go up against Hollywood directors and Hollywood producers, demanding that changes be made to those films."
— Glenn R. Miller

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Glenn R. Miller started out as a unit manager on NBC soap operas and game shows. He went on to journalism, public television and decades of agency work, and he finally took a swing at fiction with his award-winning comic novel Doorman Wanted. His new novel, Rough Cuts, grew out of a conversation with his mother-in-law, who had found boxes of note cards in her grandfather's files. Her grandfather was a small-town Ohio minister who had served on the state's film censorship board in the 1920s, and the cards ordered Hollywood studios to cut their films. Glenn and Mike talk about how a minister in Marietta could overrule a Hollywood director, why censors started writing their own lines, and how much of that era's comedy was lost. They also discuss why satirizing the 1920s turned out to be as hard as satirizing today, and why censorship is never as simple as it looks.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Great stories can be hiding in a family's file boxes. Rough Cuts began with a mother-in-law's offhand discovery of note cards detailing cuts demanded of Hollywood films. Glenn spent a week in the Marietta College archives sorting those cards by what offended the censors: sex, violence, disrespect for authority, and drinking that went unpunished.

2. Small-town censors held real power over Hollywood. Eight states had censorship boards that could force changes before a film was shown, and neighboring states often followed their lead. That gave local appointees, usually with no film background, leverage over major directors and producers.

3. Censorship was also a business. Studios paid state boards to review their films and then paid again for every foot of film the boards cut. Glenn argues that those fees gave the commissions every incentive to flag scenes.

4. Censors stopped cutting and started creating. Censors removed question marks from title cards because they caught the innuendo, and they required declarative sentences instead. Some went further and added lines of their own to improve the films, which became the richest source of satire in the novel.

5. Comedy took the biggest hit, and much of it is gone. Glenn compared the cards against surviving silent comedy shorts and found punchlines cut again and again, leaving some films that likely made no sense to Ohio audiences. About 75% of films from that era have been lost or are nearly impossible to view.

6. Censorship is not black and white. Glenn wanted his minister to be a comic antagonist who still scores some real points. The novel draws a line between choosing what your own children see and deciding what everyone else is allowed to watch or read, a distinction that echoes today's book bans.

7. It's never too late to start the book you keep thinking about. Glenn published his first novel at 64 and Rough Cuts at 66. He credits workshop classes at the Loft Literary Center and the confidence that came with his first sale, and his one piece of advice to his younger self is to start writing sooner.

GET THE BOOK

Rough Cuts by Glenn R. Miller
Publisher: Koehler Books
Release: September 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798897470747

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GXN4P6BZ?tag=rettocasgra-20
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9798897470747

Support your local indie bookstore — if it's not on the shelf, ask them to order it.

CONNECT WITH GLENN

Website: https://glenn-r-miller.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glennrmillerauthor/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/glennmiller1

CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST

Mike Carlon | Uncorking a Story

Website: https://uncorkingastory.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@uncorkingastory
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uncorking-a-story/

SUBSCRIBE & LEAVE A REVIEW — It helps more readers and writers find the show!

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/uncorking-a-story/id563636205
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Uncorking a Story is produced by Mike Carlon. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

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"At the end of the night after you've been performing in front of thousands and thousands of people, you go to your hotel room and you're alone and you have to deal with that."
— Machan Taylor

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Machan Taylor never meant to write a book. She was born in Japan, uprooted to New Jersey as a child, and spent four decades as a professional singer, touring stadiums with Pink Floyd in the eighties and Sting on the Brand New Day tour in 1999 and 2000. Years of talk therapy for childhood trauma had taken her only so far. When COVID hit, she began psychedelic-assisted therapy with a trained psychologist, and the journaling that came out of that work grew, over about three years, into 60,000 words and her memoir, Naked Out Loud. Machan talks with Mike about what life on the road really looked like behind the private jets and five-star hotels, why holding the finished book finally let her let go of the embarrassment, and how a screen actors' strike pushed her into teaching, back to college in her fifties, and on to a job at NYU's Clive Davis Institute.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. You don't have to set out to write a book to end up with one. Machan's memoir began as journaling during therapy, with no plan to publish. About three years in, she realized she had 60,000 words, and a friend connected her with a small publisher of music memoirs.
2. Putting your story on the page gives you distance from it. Once her words were outside her head and on the screen, Machan found she could look at them almost objectively. As she puts it, it's you, but it's not you, and that shift was part of her healing.
3. The vulnerability is scariest right before you let go. Handing the manuscript to her publisher left her asking whether she really wanted to do this. Holding the printed book changed that: she felt liberated, and the embarrassment she had carried for years simply loosened its grip.
4. Other people's judgment isn't yours to carry. With her 70th birthday a week away, Machan says she no longer cares how readers judge her stories. There will always be critics; that's on them. She wrote the book for herself, and hopes her honesty helps others tell their own stories.
5. A glamorous life can hide real struggle. On tour she played to crowds of 20,000 to 100,000 people, but underneath she was fighting imposter syndrome, insecurity and the feeling of not being good enough. After the show, you go back to a hotel room alone, and that loneliness is why so many musicians turn to drugs and alcohol.
6. Healing can come from places you didn't expect. Traditional talk therapy couldn't get Machan past her childhood trauma. Working with a trained professional, she found that psychedelic-assisted therapy quieted her ego enough to sit with old pain and work through it.
7. It's never too late to go back to school. Machan started working so young that she never finished college. She earned her bachelor's degree in her fifties, went on to a master's at NYU, and now teaches at the university's Clive Davis Institute.

GET THE BOOK

Naked Out Loud: From Yokohama to Pink Floyd and Beyond
by Machan Taylor
New Haven Publishing Ltd · December 15, 2025 · ISBN 9781915975287

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G675WBR6?tag=rettocasgra-20
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9781915975287

Support your local indie bookstore — if it's not on the shelf, ask them to order it.

CONNECT WITH MACHAN

Website: https://www.machantaylor.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/machantaylorofficial
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/machantaylor/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/machan-taylor-810196156/

CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST

Mike Carlon | Uncorking a Story

Website: https://uncorkingastory.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@uncorkingastory
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uncorkingastory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uncorkingastory
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@uncorkingastory
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/uncorkingastory
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uncorking-a-story/

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It helps more readers and writers find the show!

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/uncorking-a-story/id563636205
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5HZiAEtFlhAzk60Z4eAkhY

Uncorking a Story is produced by Mike Carlon. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.