Marisa Silver – Life Story (January 2022)

Silver’s lecture issues from her particular affinity for novels and stories that narrate an entire life, ones in which the subject is not a particular set of dramatic events or circumstances, but time itself. In this lecture, we will look at what memoir can teach us about how to approach the challenges of writing the “life story” using, as our texts, Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, and Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje.