Boston Book Festival 2019

We are all products of both our family and the time and place we live in. The three accomplished memoirists in this session explore aspects of the power of home and family in identity creation. Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, longlisted for a National Book Award for nonfiction, is, according to the New York Times review, “among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade.” The yellow house in New Orleans East was witness to the lives of Broom and her eleven siblings. Maureen Stanton, who grew up in the shadow of Walpole State Prison, describes in Body Leaping Backward how, as her family simultaneously dissolves and loses its toehold in the middle class, Stanton also descends into drug use and criminal behavior. People Magazine, which chose Stanton's memoir as a "Best New Book" called Body Leaping Backward "a blazingly important memoir about the possibility of change." Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers, a memoir in essays, tells a riveting story of her immigrant Filipino family and of her abuse within that family. Novelist Celeste Ng praised Talusan’s memoir, noting that “Grace Talusan writes eloquently about the most unsayable things: the deep gravitational pull of family, the complexity of navigating identity as an immigrant, and the ways we move forward even as we carry our traumas with us." Callie Crossley, host of Under the Radar on WGBH radio, will moderate the discussion with these talented authors.