Love, Loss, and Meaning in Life: World-Renowned Therapist Irvin Yalom & Joyce Carol Oates BABF 2021

Learn more about the 7th Annual Bay Area Book Festival here! https://www.baybookfest.org/

“Mourning is the price we pay for having the courage to love others,” opens the extraordinary memoir by renowned psychiatrist Irvin Yalom (Love’s Executioner) and his late wife, Marilyn Yalom, the esteemed feminist scholar and writer. Exploring universal questions of intimacy, love, and grief, A Matter of Death and Life recounts the final months of the couple’s 65-year marriage after Marilyn’s cancer diagnosis. The book is written in alternating sections until Marilyn’s death, after which Irv, the “therapists’ therapist,” revisits his decades’ worth of writings as a way to cope with his own grief.

There could be no better partner for this conversation than Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most honored authors in American letters, whose more than 100 books­­—fiction, memoir, essays, poetry and more­­—masterfully delve into love, loss, mortality, and other core human experiences. Her memoir A Widow’s Story (2011) depicts her own struggles after the loss of her husband of 47 years. Both of her latest books, the poetry collection American Melancholy and short story collection The (Other) You, explore how circumstances and choices indelibly shape how we live and find meaning.

We present this conversation on Mother’s Day, after a year that taught us all to cherish human connection more than ever. Today we pay tribute to the women we love, but also to the many people this year who have cared for us (since mothering comes in many forms).

Get the books: http://www.baybookfest.org/bookstores​

Enjoyed this program? All live festivals have been impacted by these hard times and the Bay Area Book Festival is no exception. If you enjoyed this programming, please consider leaving us a tip to help cover production costs: https://www.baybookfest.org/donate_ap/