📅 Oct 07, 2026Oprah9 MIN65 VIEWS21 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Oprah and Amanda Rizkalla discuss Amanda’s experience becoming unhoused as a teenager, the invisible reality of families living without stable housing, and how Hungered challenges assumptions about who can lose their home.
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What Oprah Winfrey said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Oprah Winfrey interviews the author of the novel 'Hunger,' discussing the author's personal experience with housing insecurity as a teenager, which inspired the book. The author explains that the story, told from the perspective of 12-year-old Sophia, explores the invisibility and paradox of homelessness, where a life-disrupting event goes unnoticed by peers and teachers. Winfrey draws parallels to her own childhood, noting the fragility of financial stability. The author emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of being reduced to a statistic and how close anyone can be to losing housing, even after living comfortably. The conversation touches on writing techniques, such as vivid food imagery to convey hunger and the choice of a child's perspective, which the author says was natural given her age when she started writing. The author also references Brian Goldstone's Pulitzer-winning book 'There Is No Place for Us,' which similarly illustrates how hardworking people can end up without shelter.
Key takeaways
The book 'Hunger' was inspired by the author's own housing insecurity as a teenager, starting as a college assignment.
The story is told from the perspective of 12-year-old Sophia to capture the invisibility and paradox of homelessness.
Food imagery in the book is used to translate Sophia's inner life, not just as decoration.
So I started, like you said, writing this book when I was a sophomore in college. And I had this deadline I needed to meet — the short story assignment that was due. And at the time, the writing advice that was floating around was a mix of, you know, "write what you know" and "write the story that only you can tell, in a way that only you can tell it."
And so initially I used this short story assignment as a way to make sense of this experience of housing insecurity that I experienced when I was a teenager. But the more I studied fiction, the more I learned that storytelling actually requires more than that — it has to be more than just a way to make sense of difficult things, like a diary. And so I decided to use my experience as a jumping-off point to invent these characters and get at evoking what this experience felt like, instead of beat for beat, you know, "this happened, then this happened."
Yes. When my parents decided to separate, my mom, brother, and I decided that it'd be best if we started a new chapter in our lives. And so we decided to move away. And this is around the time of the recession — it was a few years after, actually, the recession — and so finances were tight for a lot of people, including us. And we ended up losing our housing. And when that happened, we had to quickly learn how to rely on each other in ways that we could not have anticipated.
Okay. All right. So at 13, when this happens, it's just life-shattering, I would think, because you have to explain or deny and try to hide from your friends and the people at school about what's going on with you, right?
Yeah. Right. There's a sense that a lot of this experience felt invisible, and it's something I wanted to capture in the book as well — that there's this really big paradox to an experience like this. The paradox being that in the book this experience has completely upended and disrupted Sophia's life, but it has done so in a way that is almost entirely invisible to the people around her. Her friends at school have no idea that this is happening. Her teachers don't know. And the effect that has is it makes this really loud, disruptive experience actually pass over very quietly, and, you know, feel all the more isolating and alienating because of that.
10 more exchanges in this transcript
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Winfrey, O. (2026, October 7). The Reality of Homelessness Most People Never See [Interview transcript]. Oprah. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2999289/
MLA
Oprah Winfrey. "The Reality of Homelessness Most People Never See." Oprah, 7 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2999289/.
BibTeX
@misc{winfrey2026_2999289,
author = {Oprah Winfrey},
title = {The Reality of Homelessness Most People Never See},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Oprah. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2999289/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
