Author Michele Filgate, Wednesday May 22
April 25, 2019
Author Talk:
What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About
with author Michele Filgate and Liberty Hardy
Wednesday May 22 | 6:30 PM
Presented by RiverRun Bookstore! Michele Filgate and Liberty Hardy will discuss Michele’s unbelievable first book, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, named one of Spring 2019’s “Most Anticipated” books by BuzzFeed, LitHub, Bustle, The Rumpus, The Millions, and Publishers Weekly! Free and open to all. Books will be available for purchase.
What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is an anthology about the powerful and sometimes painful things that we can’t discuss with the person who is supposed to know us and love us the most.
In the early 2000s, as an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took many years for her to realize what she was actually trying to write about: the fracture this caused in her relationship with her mother. When her essay, “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About,” was published by Longreads in October of 2017, it went on to become one of the most popular Longreads exclusives of the year, and was shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, Lidia Yuknavitch, and many other writers, some of whom had their own individual codes of silence to be broken.
The outpouring of responses gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers an intimate, therapeutic, and universally resonant look at our relationships with our mothers. As Filgate poignantly writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.”
Contributors:
- Cathi Hanauer
- Melissa Febos
- Alexander Chee
- Dylan Landis
- Bernice L. McFadden
- Julianna Baggott
- Lynn Steger Strong
- Kiese Laymon
- Carmen Maria Machado
- André Aciman
- Sari Botton
- Nayomi Munaweera
- Brandon Taylor
- Leslie Jamison
Michele Filgate’s work has appeared in Longreads; The Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; The Boston Globe; The Paris Review Daily; Tin House; Gulf Coast; O, The Oprah Magazine; BuzzFeed; Refinery29; and many other publications. Currently, she is an MFA student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship. She’s a contributing editor at Literary Hub and teaches at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and Catapult. What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is her first book.
