Three acclaimed memoirists tackle the subject of relationships: husbands, lovers, parents, children, love, and loss. And through it all, the project of finding oneself. Amy Dickinson, known for her advice column, “Ask Amy,” uses wry humor to chronicle her experiences with marriage, step-parenting, divorce, the loss of a parent, and finding love again in Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home. Melissa Febos’s new memoir, Abandon Me, is a follow-up to her first memoir, Whip Smart. In Abandon Me, Febos examines her history with addiction and recovery, her work as a dominatrix, and her origins as the child of two fathers: her birth father, a Native American, and the one who raised her, a sea captain. Bestselling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro turns her attention to her marriage in Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage. In this poignant memoir, Shapiro reflects on the shapeshifting nature of love in a marriage that survives the traumas of a child’s life-threatening illness, the loss of parents, and the more mundane but no less stressful day-to-day challenges of financial solvency and home repair. Our discussion of the ties that bind and those that break will be led by Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, author of Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir about the generational reverberations of the Holocaust.
