Female Life on Planet Earth with author Laleh Khadivi

Join Laleh Khadivi in conversation with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton on Khadivi’s latest novel, Female Life on Planet Earth.
About this Event

Join Laleh Khadivi in conversation with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton on Khadivi’s latest novel, Female Life on Planet Earth.

When Heti’s mother, Ana, dies, she leaves behind a spotless legacy: affectionate parent, modern career woman, and life of the party. Heti moves in a daze until her grief is upended by the arrival of an unmarked package containing photographs of Ana as a young woman—robed, standing in front of a burning building, and pointing a gun at a group of sobbing women.

Female Life on Planet Earth follows Heti as she raises teenage daughters, keeps up with client accounts, sits in LA traffic, and prepares to host the traditional anniversary memorial—all while quietly reeling with the violent secrets of the woman she thought she knew. Inside surprising, uproarious stories of female life, Heti discovers the selves women hide away, selves defiantly in search of pleasure, autonomy, delight, and connection. As the one-year mark of Ana’s death arrives, Heti calls together the women who knew her and asks them: Who was my mother, truly? And who are we?

Told with humor and emotional precision, Female Life on Planet Earth is a celebration of lineage, inheritance, and the boundlessness of women over time and space.

“Female Life on Planet Earth is a spellbinding fever dream. A wholly engrossing deep dive into womanhood and loss. A must-read revelation of a book.” - Jonathan Escoffrey, author of If I Survive You 

About the Speakers

Laleh Khadivi’s debut novel, The Age of Orphans, received the Whiting Award for Fiction, the Barnes and Nobles Discover New Writers Award and an Emory Fiction Fellowship. Her debut documentary film 900 WOMEN aired on A&E and premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. She has worked as director, producer and cinematographer of documentary films since 1999. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, VQR, The Sun and other publications. She is the recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a 2016 Pushcart Prize for her story Wanderlust. 

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s most recent novel, On the Rooftop, was a Reese Witherspoon “Reese’s Book Club” pick for September 2022. Her novel, The Revisioners, won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and a George Garrett New Writing Award; was a California and Northern California Book Award finalist, a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Finalist and a Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing finalist; was nominated for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize; and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook's Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

Members: $5
Non-Members: $15