Often belittled, when not ignored, in the past, stories of women’s lives written by women have provided many of the past decade’s most powerful novels, memoirs and those books that inhabit the grey area between the two. Three writers who have drawn on their lives to produce poetry and prose that resonate with audiences discuss the challenges of writing memoir: not only how to shape it, but finding the courage to expose their experience. Join Janice Galloway, author of acclaimed ‘true novels’ about growing up in Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s; Catherine Simpson, whose powerful memoir of her sister’s life and death is winning praise; and Jenny Lindsay who turned her teenage diaries and reading of classic feminist literature into a meditation on the #MeToo.