Episode Details

After actor, dialect coach, and teacher Amanda Quaid was diagnosed with a serious illness in 2021, she responded by trying something new — she wrote poetry. She says, “I was looking for an art form that allowed me to be with uncertainty in a beautiful way.” The result is a captivating memoir-in-poetry, No Obvious Distress, that uses words and phrases from her medical charts to create verse that rings with laughter, tears, and truth. In this conversation recorded at New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum, Amanda reads from her book, and she and Pádraig Ó Tuama talk about the three principles that guided her through illness, her parenting a young child through this time, and her work with medical students, actors, and CEOs.     

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.  

Amanda Quaid was raised in New York City, where she works as a dialect coach. She also teaches at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. After working in theatre for most of her life, Amanda began writing poetry as a way to work creatively with illness. Her debut collection, No Obvious Distress, is out now with John Murray Press and was named Memoir of the Month and one of the best books of 2025 by the British newspaper The Independent. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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