Exploring Entanglements: Thought, Memory & the Stories We Weave – Fiction

Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men. A novelist in late-middle age and late mid-career, she is in crisis – but doesn’t know it yet. Unfolding over the course of a weekend-long book festival where Julia will be promoting her memoir, Kate Christensen’s Good Company: A Novel examines what “good company” means as Julia comes to terms with what she really wants. Lydia Millet’s Fair Ones: A Double Novel follows two Brooklyn, New York, women in their forties reeling from the sudden and baffling death of their friend Claire. In Fair, Mara’s shocked account of the tragedy, she and Jen come to grips with Claire’s murder. Ones, told from Jen’s point of view, picks up a year later, as she and Mara wrestle with new relationships and old secrets. In Julie Orringer’s Luna, Phoenix, Queen: A Novel, a woman unhappy in her marriage falls for a colleague at school. Then she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and her husband – filled with envy and anger – finds, rewrites, and publishes her unfinished novel as his own. This is a tale of artistic and marital betrayal, and a cry of rage against vulnerability and helplessness. Moderating the conversation is Lauren Acampora…