My guest on this episode is Paige Maylott. Paige is a writer and gamer who works as an accessibility expert at McMaster University. Her first book, the memoir My Body Is Distant, was published by ECW Press in 2023. That book won an Independent Publisher Book Award for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Rakuten KOBO Emerging Writer Prize in the nonfiction category. Publishers Weekly said that “Maylott’s gripping debut memoir covers her gender transition, divorce, and experiments with online relationships in thrillingly nonlinear fashion.”

Paige and I talk about the cultural and personal importance of the early 80s video game Zork, about the decision she made, while writing her memoir, to always show herself in a worse light than anyone else, and about how she struggled with the idea of writing a second memoir—but why she is doing it anyway.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.