Listen:
What does it take to unlearn the messages you were raised with and reshape them into a publishable memoir?
In this episode of Freelance Writing Direct, I chat with Anna Rollins about the internal and structural shifts that reshaped her debut memoir, Famished.
Anna reveals how expanding the scope of her manuscript, incorporating reporting, and strengthening her platform repositioned the project and led to multiple offers.
We explore how diet culture and evangelical purity culture shaped the 1990s media landscape, and what it means to critically reexamine the messages women absorbed about appetite, obedience, and ambition. I also reflect on my own experience crafting magazine cover lines that reinforced those narratives, and what it means to revisit that era from a different vantage point.
In This Episode
- How purity culture shaped her early beliefs about body, faith, and obedience
• How questioning those inherited ideas reshaped both her identity and the structure of her memoir
• How that reinvention ultimately led to multiple offers
• The unconventional way she landed her agent
• The interview question she learned from Estelle that consistently yielded stronger quotes
• How writing during the pandemic helped her quiet marketplace anxiety
• The courage it took to examine religious harm while remaining inside her faith
• Why some of the strongest sections emerged when she stopped writing for the audience and started writing to discover and play
Watch On YouTube
About Anna
Anna Rollins is the author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. Her groundbreaking debut memoir examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites. Her writing has appeared in outlets like The New York Times, Slate, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Joyland, and more. She’s an award-winning instructor who taught English in higher education for nearly 15 years and a 2025 West Virginia Creative Network Literary Arts Fellow. A lifelong Appalachian, she lives with her husband in West Virginia where they’re raising their three small children. Follow her on Substack and Instagram @annajrollins.
Connect with Anna
Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl
Estelle’s Substack feature on Anna
Learn with Estelle
If this conversation resonates, there are several ways we can work together right now.
I’ll be at AWP Baltimore 2026. If you are attending, please stop by my panel and say hello.
New Post on Substack
Why Your Memoir Draft Still Feels Flat
How to craft your writing so it carries emotional echoes and structural cohesion. There is also a special offer for paid subscribers.
Read it here
WEBINAR TODAY
Upcoming Writer’s Digest Webinar
Amplifying the Echo Effect in Memoir and Essays
February 26
1:00–2:30 pm ET
We will excavate the images, threads, poems, songs, and objects already hiding in your draft and shape them into emotional architecture.
NEW: Next Editor on Call Event
Our next free Editor on Call event at NYU is officially open for registration.
I’ll be in conversation with Susan Dabbar of PROVOKEDmagazine about what makes a pitch stand out and how to position your work for publication.
Private Small-Group Memoir Class
March is sold out.
Next six-week session begins May 2026.
Email freelancewritingdirect@gmail.com to join the waiting list.
Read & Subscribe
New in Electric Literature
For Valentine’s Day, I curated 9 Memoirs About Dating, Desire, and Reclamation for Electric Literature.
Revisiting these books as I draft my own memoir reinforced how memoir becomes transformative not through romance alone, but through reckoning.
Read the full list here.
I’ve also interviewed the Editor in Chief of Electric Literature on Freelance Writing Direct about what editors are looking for and how writers can position their work.
Listen/watch that episode here.
’ve also spoken with several of these memoirists on Freelance Writing Direct about craft, desire, and reinvention. You can listen to those conversations on the podcast.
Watch, Read & Listen
TEDx Talk
How to Get Noticed in Your Writing and Beyond
Book
Writing That Gets Noticed
Named a Poets & Writers “Best Book for Writers”
Audiobook available here
Podcast
Freelance Writing Direct
2025 Podcast of the Year, American Writing Awards
About Estelle
Estelle Erasmus is an award-winning journalist, TEDx speaker, and author of Writing That Gets Noticed. She is the host, founder, and executive producer of Freelance Writing Direct and an adjunct professor at NYU.
Her work has appeared in more than 150 publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, PBS/Next Avenue, The Independent, and AARP The Magazine. She has served as editor-in-chief of five national magazines.
Follow Estelle
Instagram: @EstelleSErasmus
TikTok: @EstelleSErasmus
Twitter/X: @EstelleSErasmus
Bluesky: @estelleserasmus.bsky.social
