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Episode 97: Emma Heming Willis and Michele Bender

As Told To

Release Date: 10/07/2025

Second Printing: Bruce Vilanch show art Second Printing: Bruce Vilanch

As Told To

This episode originally aired on June 7, 2022. Two-time Emmy Award-winner Bruce Vilanch has written jokes for Bob Hope, Lily Tomlin, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and virtually every Hollywood star to grace the Academy Awards stage from 1989 – 2014.  As one of the entertainment industry’s most sought-after joke writers, the actor, comedian and songwriter was perhaps best-known to audiences for his work behind-the-scenes at the Oscars, supplying one-liners to hosts and presenters. (Oscar-watchers are still talking about the year Jack Palance did...

info_outline Episode 102: Gathering of the Ghosts 2025 show art Episode 102: Gathering of the Ghosts 2025

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Join podcast host Daniel Paisner as he moderates a panel discussion at the second annual ghostwriting conference earlier this year.   Dan is joined by former As Told To guests , , and , as the veteran collaborators compare notes on craft and process—a fun, spirited, insightful reflection on the very many ways authors and journalists are writing in collaboration.  Learn more: Please support the sponsors who support our show: Daniel Paisner's Daniel Paisner's  (PODCAST) | 30% discount (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership ...

info_outline Episode 101: Samantha Rose show art Episode 101: Samantha Rose

As Told To

“As a ghostwriter, I’ve trained my ear to listen for what’s really there or not there, to discern what’s underneath or between someone’s words,” writes veteran collaborator Samantha Rose, in her stirring, soaring new memoir . “I hear what’s implied, what’s withheld…” Samantha’s gifts as a storyteller are very much on display in the pages of her new book—a heartbreaking account of her mother’s suicide, published earlier this year by Sybilline Press. An Emmy Award-winning television writer and a New York Times best-selling collaborator, Samantha has written...

info_outline Episode 100: Alex DeMille show art Episode 100: Alex DeMille

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Nelson and Alex DeMille’s is an electrifying read and a chillingly timely one,” writes The New York Times best-selling novelist Megan Abbott of the third and final father-son collaboration in the Scott Brodie & Maggie Taylor series. “[It’s] both a master-class in suspense and a haunting exploration of the dangers and costs of a surrender to technology, an abandonment of the human.” Yes, it is. It’s also the final novel from legendary author Nelson DeMille, completed posthumously following his death in September 2024, and a follow-up to the duo’s first two collaborations in...

info_outline Episode 99: Matthew Winkler show art Episode 99: Matthew Winkler

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Student journalist and first-time documentary filmmaker Matthew Winkler joins us to discuss his work on a film chronicling the life and career of Joya Sherrill, an unsung American jazz vocalist who wrote the lyrics to the Billy Strayhorn standard, “Take the A Train,” made famous by the Duke Ellington orchestra. Matthew came across Sherrill’s name during his freshman year at Tufts University, while doing research for Boston Globe journalist and noted biographer Larry Tye, who was writing a book about jazz. Matthew, a music and history major, was astonished to discover the small...

info_outline Episode 98: Michael E. Long show art Episode 98: Michael E. Long

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Podcast guest calls himself “a professional explainer with a restive mind.”   He is just that.   Trained as physicist, Mike is the co-author of the international bestseller , which has been translated into more than 20 languages, and the sole author of the recently-published follow-up title .   As a speechwriter, he has written for members of Congress, U.S Cabinet secretaries, presidential candidates, governors, diplomats, and business leaders. As a ghostwriter, he has collaborated on several books of non-fiction. As a playwright, he’s had more than two dozen of his shows...

info_outline Episode 97: Emma Heming Willis and Michele Bender show art Episode 97: Emma Heming Willis and Michele Bender

As Told To

“No two caregiving journeys are alike,” writes Emma Heming Willis, the wife of actor Bruce Willis, who was diagnosed in 2023 with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), a rare form of dementia affecting behavior, movement and language. “But we are connected by the same unchosen thread.” In , Emma writes movingly and hopefully about the blessings and burdens of being thrust into the role of caregiver, emerging as a passionate voice for care partners and families navigating neurodegenerative disease. Together with her collaborator, Michele Bender, she offers an essential blueprint for others...

info_outline Episode 96: Samuel G. Freedman show art Episode 96: Samuel G. Freedman

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“Pull the heart of your work out of your chest and lay it out there for the gods,” podcast guest Samuel G. Freedman told his Columbia Journalism School graduate students on the first day of his final semester after 35 years of teaching. “That’s all I’m asking of you. Not much.”   No, not much. And yet what Sam Freedman asked of his students during his tenure as one of our leading journalism educators was everything. Before his retirement this spring, his popular book-writing seminar led to the publication of 95 books by his students. “He’s been the godfather to an awful...

info_outline Episode 95: Jane Leavy show art Episode 95: Jane Leavy

As Told To

Jane Leavy is the New York Times best-selling author of , , and . She is also the author of the comic novel , hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “the best novel ever written about baseball.” A longtime sportswriter and feature writer for The Washington Post, Jane covered baseball, tennis and the Olympics during her tenure at the paper. She also wrote features for the Post’s “Style” section on sports, politics and popular culture. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Grantland, The Los Angeles Times, and Tablet.  In her latest...

info_outline Second Printing: D. Watkins show art Second Printing: D. Watkins

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Episode originally aired on Nov. 2, 2021. “Don’t make it out, make it better.” That’s a line from podcast guest D. Watkins, offered in the book trailer for his book of essays , in which he gives voice to the voiceless and shines meaningful light on what it means to come of age in East Baltimore, in one of America’s poorest black neighborhoods.  It’s a line you might hear as well from D.’s NBA legend Carmelo Anthony, himself a product of an uncertain, unforgiving environment–the housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Baltimore. In the future Hall-of-Famer’s...

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“No two caregiving journeys are alike,” writes Emma Heming Willis, the wife of actor Bruce Willis, who was diagnosed in 2023 with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), a rare form of dementia affecting behavior, movement and language. “But we are connected by the same unchosen thread.”

In The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path, Emma writes movingly and hopefully about the blessings and burdens of being thrust into the role of caregiver, emerging as a passionate voice for care partners and families navigating neurodegenerative disease. Together with her collaborator, Michele Bender, she offers an essential blueprint for others confronting some of the same issues facing her own family.

“My grief can still paralyze me,” she shares in the pages of the book she wishes someone had handed her when her husband was first diagnosed. “I still have a hard time accepting what is, yet FTD doesn’t give you many options. It can suck all the air out of a room. So I’ve made a choice to pump oxygen back into our lives, for the sake of our girls, Bruce, and me. And to give the middle finger to this disease.”

Join us as we visit with Emma Heming Willis and her co-author Michele Bender for a heartbreaking and heart-lifting conversation on what it takes to tap the universal elements in such a deeply personal story—and what it means to step from an unimaginable darkness at home to stand in the world as a light for others.

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