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by Memento Morbid
Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries. Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid. Meet a wide range of fascinating individuals including death workers, artists, New York Times bestselling authors, a practicing witch, Hollywood actors, and a former crematorium worker— all exploring the rituals, stories, and delightfully strange ways humans confront the unknowable. Each episode is curious, insightful, and often striking, revealing the beauty, humor, and meaning we can find in life by confronting death head on. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley
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- Yesterday52 min
7: ‘Impossible Bodies’ - Asti Hustvedt
In this episode of Memento Morbid, Joanna Ebenstein speaks with independent scholar, historian, and author Asti Hustvedt about hysteria, gender, spiritualism, and the uneasy territory where medicine meets the uncanny.What happens when the body refuses to behave according to science?Beginning in nineteenth-century Paris, the conversation explores hysteria as a once-dominant medical diagnosis — one that produced real and often devastating symptoms while resisting all attempts at biological explanation. Together, Joanna and Asti trace how figures like Jean-Martin Charcot, founder of modern neurology, took hysteria seriously as a neurological condition even as it destabilised the era’s growing faith in scientific materialism.The discussion moves through decadence and its rejection of positivism, the birth of psychoanalysis, and the surrealists’ fascination with hysterics as figures who existed beyond ordinary rationality. Asti reflects on how many famous mediums — long dismissed as frauds, performers, or curiosities — were also diagnosed as hysterics, and how leading scientists including Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Charles Richet investigated paranormal phenomena with genuine seriousness.Moving between séance rooms, hospitals, photography archives, psychoanalysis, and occult history, Joanna and Asti ask what these “impossible” bodies reveal about gender, trauma, consciousness, and the limits of rational explanation itself.At the centre of the episode lies a provocative idea: that hysteria was never simply about illness, but about bodies and minds that refused to conform — exposing the fragility of the boundaries between science and superstition, reality and imagination, inner life and external truth.📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared — you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid
- 1 weeks ago59 min
6: ‘I've never not known death’ - John Troyer
What happens when a lifetime spent studying death collides with personal loss?Death scholar, writer, and educator John Troyer joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about mortality, grief, funeral culture, and the sometimes uneasy relationship between intellectual understanding and lived experience.Best known for his book Technologies of the Human Corpse and his work with the Centre for Death and Society, Troyer reflects on growing up around the American funeral industry, where encounters with death were part of everyday life from an early age. Together, he and Joanna explore the cultural history of deathcare, and the strange ways modern societies simultaneously hide from and obsess over death.The conversation moves through death studies as an academic discipline, the enduring influence of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, and how conversations about mortality can offer clarity, intimacy, and meaning in everyday life. Troyer also speaks candidly about the deaths of his sister and parents, and the profound realization that even decades spent thinking and writing about death cannot truly prepare us for grief when it arrives personally.Joanna and John reflect on why people are instinctively drawn to conversations about mortality, how pre-death planning can become an act of care, and what it means to live fully while knowing life is finite. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillProduction Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid
- 2 weeks ago48 min
5: ‘Darkness is Healthy and Holy’ - Pam Grossman
What happens when we recognise creativity as a form of magic?Writer, curator, and cultural critic Pam Grossman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about witchcraft, creativity, death, and the unseen forces that shape our lives.Best known for her books Magic Maker and Waking the Witch, Grossman reflects on her lifelong relationship with magic — from childhood fascinations with mythology and divination to publicly embracing witchcraft as both a spiritual and creative practice. Together, she and Joanna explore how modern witchcraft honours darkness, shadow, and mortality without equating them with evil, and why rituals of remembrance and ancestral connection remain vital in contemporary life.The conversation moves through pagan traditions, tarot, artistic process, justice magic, and the cultural stigma surrounding witches. Grossman speaks candidly about anxiety, creative doubt, and the pressure to “make meaning,” while Joanna reflects on how death awareness can sharpen our sense of purpose and deepen our relationship to creativity.At the centre of the episode is a shared idea: that making art is itself a magical act: a collaboration between intention, imagination, and something larger than the self. Whether understood as spirit, ancestry, the unconscious, or creative intuition, both Joanna and Pam ask what becomes possible when we stop treating creativity as pure productivity, and begin approaching it as devotion, ritual, and transformation.📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillProduction Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid
- 3 weeks ago41 min
4: ‘Death isn’t a problem to fix’ - Oliver Burkeman
What does it mean to live well, knowing our time is finite?Author Oliver Burkeman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about time, mortality, and what it means to live well inside finite lives.Best known for Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman reflects on his shift from scepticism about self-help and productivity culture to a deeper engagement with anxiety, limitation, and acceptance. Together, they explore why the drive to “do everything” so often leaves us more overwhelmed—and what changes when we stop treating finitude as a problem to solve.The conversation moves through Stoicism, Zen Buddhism, medieval imagery of death, Silicon Valley’s quest for immortality, and the enduring mystery of consciousness. Burkeman speaks openly about fear—of loss, impermanence, and non-existence—while Joanna reflects on how death contemplation can reshape a life’s trajectory and our ideas of what is important.At the centre of the episode is a shared idea: meaning doesn’t arise in spite of limits, but because of them. Death, rather than diminishing life, provides it with meaning, poignancy, and value.Together, they ask what becomes possible when we stop trying to outrun time—and start living within it.📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillExecutive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid
- 4 weeks ago49 min
3: 'Grave Dirt & Mud Pies' - Leila Taylor
Grave dirt makes the best mud pies… Leila Taylor, writer, designer, cultural critic and Creative Director of Brooklyn Public Library, joins Joanna Ebenstein for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about the Gothic as both a cultural form and a lived sensibility—one that moves through memory, history, music, and space.Drawing from her acclaimed books Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul and Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread, Taylor explores how Gothic feeling is not confined to aesthetics or subculture, but emerges through lived experience: in architecture that unsettles, in histories that refuse resolution, and in the emotional residue of place. She reflects on growing up as a “spooky kid” in Massachusetts, playing funeral in a cemetery with friends—lying in open graves, performing rituals of death, and making mud pies from “grave dirt.” These early encounters with mortality become a lens for understanding how we learn to live alongside death, even as children.The conversation moves through Black Gothic traditions, literary and musical influences—tracing back to Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit and moving into Joy Division, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees—as well as Gothic literature from Frankenstein to Wuthering Heights. Taylor also reflects on haunting media, brutalist architecture, and theories of residual memory, sound, and haunting.📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Robleto Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid
- Apr 30, 202644 min
2: 'I'm a Monster Now'- Paul Giamatti
What Does It Mean to Become Someone Else?Award-winning actor and producer Paul Giamatti joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging, eerie, and often amusing conversation about monsters, performance, and the porous boundary between life and death.From childhood fascinations with werewolves and classic horror to the uncanny psychological states accessed through acting, Giamatti reflects on a lifelong obsession with transformation—of bodies, identities, and consciousness. He recounts a genuinely unsettling ghostly moment during a production of Hamlet, explores the idea of acting as a form of possession, and considers why theatre can feel more spiritually charged than film.The conversation weaves through late-night radio and the hypnotic voice of Art Bell, Giamatti’s cult television series Lodge 49, esoteric book collecting, and the strange intimacy of voices in the dark.Thoughtful, curious, and quietly uncanny, this episode asks what it really means to inhabit other lives—and what those experiences might reveal. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillProduction Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid
- Apr 23, 202651 min
1: 'Corpse Girl' - Caitlin Doughty
What Happens to a Body After Death?Mortician, author and death care reformer Caitlin Doughty joins Joanna Ebenstein for a candid, curious and surprisingly funny conversation about what really happens to our bodies after we die and why modern Western culture would rather not think about it.From Caitlin’s early days working in a crematory to founding Order of the Good Death, they explore death positivity, funeral industry myths, human composting, bone rituals and the strange ways we hide mortality from view.Are we the weird ones in history when it comes to death? And what might change if we looked at it directly?📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillExecutive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid
- Apr 15, 20262 min
Welcome to Memento Morbid….
Memento MorbidFascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries.Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid. Meet a wide range of fascinating individuals including death workers, artists, New York Times bestselling authors, a practicing witch, Hollywood actors, and a former crematorium worker- all exploring the rituals, stories, and delightfully strange ways humans confront the unknowable. Each episode is curious, insightful, and often striking, revealing the beauty, humor, and meaning we can find in life by confronting death head on. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillExecutive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeley
About Memento Morbid
Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries. Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid. Meet a wide range of fascinating individuals including death workers, artists, New York Times bestselling authors, a practicing witch, Hollywood actors, and a former crematorium worker— all exploring the rituals, stories, and delightfully strange ways humans confront the unknowable. Each episode is curious, insightful, and often striking, revealing the beauty, humor, and meaning we can find in life by confronting death head on. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley
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