In A Life of One’s Own: None Women Writers Begin Again, author Joanna Biggs’s divorce catalyzes a fascination with women across history whose artistic innovations emerged out of conflict with gender expectations. Considering the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Huston, Biggs discovers the strength and resolution that emerge when one is faced with the task of reconfiguring one’s life.
Biggs will appear in conversation with critic and novelist Lauren Oyler, who similarly engages with literary history in her project of shaping and critiquing the literary present. They will discuss the constraints and liberties of writing as women in the contemporary world, creative heritage, and their sense of responsibility toward the future.
About the speakers:
Joanna Biggs is an editor at Harper’s Magazine. A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again was a New York Times spring pick and was shortlisted for the Marfield Prize / National Award for Arts Writing. The book also earned Biggs a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. While she now lives in New York, where she is at work on a novel, she lived in the 12ème arrondissement in 2003, when a demi-baguette cost 20 cents.
Lauren Oyler‘s essays on books and culture appear regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and many other publications. She is the author of the novel Fake Accounts and an essay collection, No Judgment, which was published this year. She lives in Berlin.
