Where:
Porter Square Books
25 White Street
Cambridge, MA 02140
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Lectures & Conferences
Event website:
https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/rachel-zimmerman-author-us-after-conversation-alysia-abbott
Porter Square Books is thrilled to welcome Rachel Zimmerman for the release of her memoir Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide. This event will take place on Monday, July 1 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (25 White St. Cambridge, MA 02140).
RSVP on PSB's website to let us know you're coming and to receive event updates!
ABOUT US, AFTER
When a state trooper appeared at Rachel Zimmerman’s door to report that her husband had jumped to his death off a nearby bridge, she fell to her knees, unable to fully absorb the news. How could the man she married, a devoted father and robotics professor at MIT, have committed such a violent act? How would she explain this to her young daughters? And could she have stopped him? A longtime journalist, she probed obsessively, believing answers would help her survive. She interviewed doctors, suicide researchers and a man who jumped off the same bridge and lived. Us, After examines domestic devastation and resurgence, digging into the struggle between public and private selves, life’s shifting perspectives, the work of motherhood, and the secrets we keep. In this memoir, Zimmerman confronts the unimaginable and discovers the good in what remains.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Rachel Zimmerman is the author of Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide, forthcoming in June 2024. An award-winning journalist, Zimmerman has written about health and medicine for more than two decades. She currently contributes stories on mental health to The Washington Post and previously worked as a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and a health reporter for WBUR, Boston’s public radio station. Her essays and reporting have been published in The New York Times; Vogue; The Cut; O, The Oprah Magazine; The Atlantic; Slate; The Huffington Post; and Brevity, among others.
Zimmerman is co-author of The Healing Power of Storytelling; and The Doula Guide to Birth. She’s been awarded residencies at Millay Arts and the Turkeyland Cove Foundation and currently lives with her family in Cambridge, Mass.
Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and an ALA Stonewall Award winner, a winner of the Madame Figaro Prix Heroine, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. In 2022, she was awarded an artist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the only child of gay poet and writer, Steve Abbott. As a journalist, essayist, and critic, she's written for The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Vogue, Marie Claire, TheAtlantic.com, TriQuarterly and Psychology Today, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from New School University and was a contributing producer at WNYC Radio. Her first full-length book, Fairyland was completed with the help of a Ragdale Fellowship and the wonderful staff at W.W. Norton and is currently being made into a feature film. She's presented Fairyland at bookstores, libraries, literary festivals and universities across the United States and in France, as well as on NPR's Weekend Edition, Fresh Air, The Brian Lehrer Show, KQED's Forum, and the BBC's Outlook, among other venues. The French edition of Fairyland was published by Edition Globe on March 12, 2015 with a series of events in Paris. Additionally, the book has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese.
Alysia is also co-founder of The Recollectors Project, dedicated to remembering parents lost to AIDS and supporting the children they left behind. You can learn more about this project by listening to her interviews on The Leonard Lopate Show and Here & Now.
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