You may have already seen the video. Amanda Wilson, author and content creator from North Carolina, posted what she thought would be a simple family moment: announcing at her birthday lunch that she'd been accepted to a master's program in creative writing in Glasgow, Scotland. Her aunt kept eating. The internet had feelings about it.

But there's a lot more to Amanda's story than one viral moment.

She and Melinda talk about her self-published debut novel Mixed Tapes and Mixed Emotions — a mid-2000s coming-of-age story about a homeschooled girl navigating a public university, religious deconstruction, emo boys, and everything she was never taught growing up in a conservative bubble. Amanda wrote most of it during one of the hardest years of her life: battling depression, going through a divorce, and holding onto writing as the ...