Moderator: Dani Shapiro, novelist, memoirist, and creator and host of Family Secrets podcast

In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (New York Times Magazine). Now, in twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, she reflects on her own life and family: a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She also meditates on contemporary classic works of literature and explores her own drive to write.