25 Years of Radio Diaries

This week marks a very special anniversary for Radio Diaries. It’s been 25 years since we first started giving people tape recorders to report on their own lives.

To celebrate, we recently checked in with our very first diarist, Amanda. Amanda was 17 when we first gave her a clunky cassette recorder and asked her to record her life for a few months. Her story about coming out of the closet as gay and clashing with her Catholic parents was part of a series called Teenage Diaries that aired on NPR in 1996.

Now, 25 years later, Amanda is married with kids, and her relationship with her parents has evolved. On this episode we air her original diary and more recent conversations with her parents and her new family.

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Radio Diaries is a small non-profit organization. We make this show with support from listeners like you. You can hear all our stories, sign up for our newsletter, and donate on our website www.radiodiaries.org. Thank you for a quarter century of support.