Writing about our Mothers-and Others: Panel Discussion

by Jenny McPhee

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Our panelists will discuss the challenges of writing—in memoir and fiction—about our mothers and others who are close to us. Lyndall Gordon is the biographer of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others, and is writing a memoir of her relationship with her mother. Katie Hafner, healthcare writer for The New York Times, is author of the forthcoming Mother Daughter Me, a memoir about growing up with her alcoholic mother, which Jane Smiley calls “an unusually graceful story, one that balances honesty and tact.” Joanna Hodgkin’s Amateurs in Eden tells the story of her mother Nancy Durrell’s marriage to novelist Lawrence Durrell. Bella Pollen is the author of five novels, of which the latest, The Summer of the Bear, returns Pollen to a beloved place of childhood holidays. Sarah Glazer is a journalist and co-organizer of the Upper Wimpole Street Literary Salon.