Memoirs: Andre Dubus III on Townie, Melissa Coleman on This Life Is in Your Hands, Marco Roth on The Scientists, and Laura Bell on Claiming Ground
Sunday, Nov. 18, 1:30 p.m., Room 8302 (Building 8, 3rd Floor)
Author(s) and Guest(s)
Andre Dubus III
Worlds, words, and fists collide in Andre Dubus III’s memoir, Townie (W.W. Norton, $15.95). Andre grows up on the wrong side of town, saturated with drugs and violence, where he builds himself up from a scared, skinny kid to a guy who could—and did—send other men to the hospital. His father, an acclaimed fiction writer, lives in a different world, one which Andre slowly begins to inhabit. “ . . . as explosive as a Muhammad Ali prize fight, as vivid as a Basquiat canvas.”—San Francisco Chronicle. Dubus III is a National Book Award finalist and the author of the novels House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, a New York Times bestseller.
Melissa Coleman
In Melissa Coleman’s memoir, One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family’s Heartbreak (Harper Perennial, $15.99), is a chronicle of a dream attained and then lost. Coleman’s parents moved to Maine and turned a rugged patch of land into a working farm devoid of electricity, running water, and phone. Her father became a guru of the back-to-the land movement and Coleman grew up in an idyllic setting. But there was trouble in paradise. Coleman revisits her family’s unconventional life in order to make sense of its culminating pain: her three-year-old sister’s drowning in the irrigation pond her father had dug to sustain the farm. [Coleman] fluently describes the power of the natural world, familial love and heartbreak, grace after loss.” — New York Times Book Review.
Marco Roth
Marco Roth’s memoir, The Scientists: A Family Romance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 23.00), depicts his childhood amid the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. “ . . .this slim, fierce meditation takes readers into realms where more emotional, confessional tales rarely tread.”—NPR. Roth helped found the magazine n+1. This is his first book.
Laura Bell
Laura Bell recounts her wild and transformative adventure in her debut memoir, Claiming Ground (Vintage, $15.00). In 1977, Bell left her family home in Kentucky to herd sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn to Basin. The only woman in a man’s world, she nevertheless found a home among the strange community of drunks and eccentrics, as well as a shared passion for a life of solitude and hard work. “Beautiful, moving, and graceful.” —The Boston Globe.
Schedule
Location
Miami Book Fair International * Miami Dade College
300 NE Second Ave., Miami, FL 33132
Room 8302 (Building 8, 3rd Floor)
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