“At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory,” writes National Book Award–winning author Jacqueline Woodson at the end of her novel Another Brooklyn. “Someday I’ll look back and ‘then’ will be a speck on the horizon,” notes the narrator of bestselling novelist Claire Messud’s latest book, The Burning Girl. The mutability of memory, the swift passage of time, the use of stories to make sense of experience, the treacherous landscape of female adolescence, and the simultaneous vitality and volatility of teenage girls’ friendships—these are common threads that run through these narratives, as both writers draw perceptive, unsentimental portraits of young women growing up and growing apart. This year’s unconventional take on the BBF’s annual fiction keynote brings these two visionary artists together in conversation about their latest work, in a session hosted by UMass Boston English professor Sari Edelstein, whose research addresses the literature of coming of age.
