Women's Speaker Series: Gayle Forman, author of Leave Me

September 20, 2016 - 7:00pm

Fee: $30/$25 members - includes an autographed copy of Leave Me, refreshments, and admission to the sculpture garden. Come early to enjoy a stroll around the grounds. Register online or by phone at 414-446-8794.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Gayle Forman, author of Leave Me, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Tuesday, September 20, 7-9 pm.

Gayle Forman has made a name for herself in the world of young-adult literature for her bestselling, captivating, award-winning novels, including I Was Here, Just One Day, and If I Stay, the #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling novel that was adapted into a major motion picture. This fall with Leave Me, Forman takes the leap into adult fiction, using her trademark insight and wit to tell a story of marriage, motherhood, and friendship that will resonate with readers of all ages.

Like many workings mothers, Maribeth Klein, a forty-four-year-old magazine editor, wife, and the mother of twins in New York City, always puts herself last. One day she suffers a heart attack, and assuming her symptoms are just the stress of her very busy life, she doesn’t even realize it. After emergency bypass surgery, Maribeth’s recuperation appears to be an imposition on those who rely on her, and when the usual daily demands from her family persist, Maribeth begins to fear what will happen to herself, and her children, if she continues to backslide. So she does what so many mothers secretly fantasize about doing– she packs her bags, buys a one-way train ticket, and goes off the grid. Although this decision is extreme, she knows that her heart will never heal if she stays. Far from the demands of family and career, and with the help of liberating new friendships, she discovers reasons for leaving even she didn’t even understand, and answers she didn’t know she was seeking.

“The novel may have begun as a cathartic revenge fantasy – the mother who finally says, ‘enough!’– but as I got deeper, it evolved into a story about the complexity of marriage, motherhood, and friendship, the unsaid things that interfere with our ability to take care of ourselves,” explains Forman. “By the end, Maribeth’s shocking choice to run away, to take care of herself – to be selfish – no longer felt quite so shocking or so selfish to me. It felt like something that she was entitled to. Like something we are all, at times, entitled to.”

About the Author

Gayle Forman is an award-winning, internationally bestselling author and journalist. She is the author of Just One Day and Just One Year, and the companion e-novella Just One Night, as well as the New York Times bestsellers If I Stay and Where She Went. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughters. For more information, visit her website.


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