Episode 114: Nora Dahlia Zelevansky

What do we do with memory when it is no longer behind us, but standing in front of us? How does what we remember shape the present, inform the future, and color—sometimes even haunt—the past?

Author Nora Zelevansky returns to At the Podium to talk about memory, nostalgia, first love, friendship, and the complicated selves we carry across time. Her newest novel, Backslide, written under the pen name Nora Dahlia, follows two former first loves forced back into each other’s lives decades later—and explores what happens when memory collides with the people they have become. 

In this conversation, Nora and Patrick explore the emotional landscape of memory: the freedom of growing up before cell phones and social media, the ways formative experiences continue to shape us, the truths and omissions that accumulate inside long friendships, and why relationships rarely divide neatly into heroes and villains.

At the emotional center of the episode, Nora brings that idea out of fiction and into her own life. She reflects on the quiet grief of watching her daughter move on to a new school and realizing that an entire season of her own life—the friendships, laughter, community, and daily rituals surrounding that school—had ended as well.

At its core, this conversation is a journey in which Nora and Patrick move past nostalgia into the strangely beautiful and melancholic experience of encountering a person, place, or version of yourself that still exists vividly in memory even though time has moved on. It is where memory becomes both gift and ache: a way of preserving who we were while reminding us that time continues to change who we are.