Writing Our Histories

Amitava Kumar questions what ordinary existence is in his novel My Beloved Life, which tells the story of India’s history over the last 85 years through the lens of a modest father. In Temim Fruchter’s City of Laughter, Shiva, a queer Jewish mythology student, retraces four generations of her family’s secrets in Poland to try to understand her mother. In Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, an undocumented immigrant is in her final year at Harvard, but deportation haunts her as she tries to navigate the future, caring for her undocumented grandparents, and a complicated relationship with her home country of Ecuador. Join these authors for a conversation about what it means to write about personal histories in relation to a place and all of the fraught nuances and reckonings that come with it. Moderated by Manuel Gonzales (The Regional Office is Under Attack!)