Thursday, December 11, 2014
8:00pm (reception at 7pm with wine and live music)
Meghan Daum
in conversation with Sandra Tsing Loh
The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404
RSVP/PURCHASE TICKETS
General Admission: Complimentary
Purchase the book, $26, guarantees a reserved seat.
Join us for our year end party featuring Meghan Daum in conversation with Sandra Tsing Loh. Plus live music, wine and some nibbles.
Meghan Daum is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth. She is also the author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House and The Quality of Life Report, a novel. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, and other publications. She has also contributed to NPR’s Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life. Meghan has appeared several times on the Live Talks Los Angeles stage, interviewing Molly Ringwald, Anna Quindlen and Francine Prose. Visit her website.
In her new book of essays, Daum pushes back against false sentimentality and manufactured emotion in American life. Negotiating the fraught territory between youthful preoccupations and the jolt of encroaching middle age, she uses her own life experience to examine our culture’s relationship to ideas and feelings that have previously been considered “unspeakable.” The essays range in subject and in tone from a defense of inappropriate romantic partners, and a bittersweet celebration of the love of a good dog, to a jeremiad against foodie culture and an outrageous, comedic treatise on the allure of lesbian culture.
In her poignant essay, “Difference Maker,” Daum describes her work in the child welfare system and her own wrenching decision not to have children. In “Matricide,” Daum considers a legacy of mother-daughter antipathy and the uncomfortable emotions provoked when a parent dies. In “Diary of a Coma,” she traces the process of losing her grasp of language and spending five days unconscious during a freak illness. Other lighter essays take on the ephemeral nature of “being an adult,” the proper way to appreciate Joni Mitchell, and the perverse pleasure of feeling invisible while playing charades with movie stars in Hollywood.
Sandra Tsing Loh’s work ranges from off-Broadway solo shows (Aliens in America, Bad Sex with Bud Kemp) to radio commentaries on NPR’s Morning Edition and on This American Life. Variety named her as one of America’s 50 most influential comedians. Her weekly Loh Life and syndicated Loh Down on Science are broadcast on KPCC. A contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly, her memoir The Mad Woman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones, based on her Best American Essay 2012 on menopause, was published by W.W. Norton in May, 2014. Her previous books include Mother on Fire, A Year in Van Nuys and Depth Takes a Holiday. Her new solo show Burning Woman, developed by the Sundance Theatre Lab, will premiere in 2015.