The Book of Mother: A Conversation With Violaine Huisman and Deborah Treisman
Talk
A photograph of Violaine Huisman
A prizewinning tour de force after its publication in France, Violaine Huisman’s debut novel is now available to English readers in a stunning translation by Leslie Camhil (ed. Scribner).
Join Violaine Huisman and New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman as they discuss the masterful coming of age account of a young woman with a dazzling yet damaged mother who lived and loved in extremes.
Beautiful and charismatic, Catherine, a.k.a. “Maman”, smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard, and loves too extravagantly. During a joyful and chaotic childhood in Paris, her daughter Violaine wouldn’t have it any other way. With spectacular ferocity of language, a streak of dark humor, and stunning emotional bravery, The Book of Mother is an exquisitely wrought story of a mother’s dizzying heights and devastating lows––and a daughter who must hold her memory close in order to let go.
This event is organized by Albertine Books.
Violaine Huisman was born in Paris in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York for twenty years, where she ran the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s literary series and also organized multidisciplinary arts festivals across the city. Originally published by Gallimard under the title Fugitive parce que reine, her debut novel The Book of Mother (Simon & Schuster) was awarded multiple literary prizes including the Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire.
