Self-Portrait: Memoir, Auto-fiction, and History
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
Debra Gwartney, Mitchell S. Jackson, Peter Rock, Elena Passarello
Three books that combine and move between personal and collective histories to probe both the past and present. Part history, part memoir, Debra Gwartney’s I Am a Stranger Here Myself taps the deepest dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West. An electrifying, dazzlingly written reckoning and an essential addition to the national conversation about race and class, Survival Math takes its name from the calculations award-winning author Mitchell S. Jackson made to survive the Portland, Oregon of his youth. In Peter Rock’s autobiographical novel The Night Swimmers, the narrator tries to understand the months he spent, as a young man, swimming with a young widow. He digs through old notebooks and letters, clippings and quotations trying to rebuild the world he’s lost. Moderated by Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses.
Presented by the 2019 Portland Book Festival.