In-Store: Tracy Clark-Flory: My Mother's Daughter w/ Irin Carmon

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/vV3ilzgP5eg
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From the journalist and author of Want Me (an NPR Best Book of the Year) comes a “tender, revelatory, and deeply moving” (Amanda Montei, Touched Out) story of family secrets, sisterhood, and the importance of untangling all that we inherit from our mothers.

Tracy Clark-Flory had a sister out there, somewhere. She knew that her mom, Deb, was sent to a home for unwed mothers as a pregnant teenager in the Sixties. After placing her baby for adoption, Deb was committed to a mental institution in her grief. Decades later, she had Tracy, who grew up as an only child longing for her sister. Now, in her thirties and a mother herself, Tracy takes a DNA test in hopes of finding her sister—and she does.

Newly connected with her half-sister Kathy, both daughters start asking questions about the past that their mom, who had died years earlier, could no longer answer. Tracy sets out to make sense of what happened back in 1965. She learns that their mom was pulled into a racist and sexist system designed to turn “bad girls” into proper women and wives. Tracy realizes that her own life has been profoundly shaped by her mom’s past, but she also uncovers a bigger story about patriarchal control, mother-daughter dynamics, and the way that shame keeps us divided—both within ourselves and from each other.

Blending powerful memoir with cultural criticism, My Mother’s Daughter is a moving, intimate tale of traumatic inheritance and intergenerational healing.

Tracy Clark-Flory is a journalist, essayist, and author of the memoir Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire, an NPR Best Book of the Year. She has written for Cosmopolitan, The Cut, ELLE, Esquire, Marie Claire, Glamour, The Guardian, The Washington Post, WIRED, Women’s Health, and many others. Previously, she was a senior staff writer at Jezebel and a staff writer at Salon. She writes a weekly newsletter and cohosts Dire Straights, a feminist podcast critiquing hetero love, sex, politics, and culture. Learn more at TracyClarkFlory.com.

Irin Carmon is a senior correspondent at New York magazine and the author of Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America. She speaks frequently across the country on gender, reproduction, and public affairs. She is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Carmon’s New York magazine reporting and essays have twice been recognized with Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club. Her reporting in The Washington Post on sexual harassment at Charlie Rose and CBS News in 2018 was honored with a Mirror Award from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University and was a finalist for the Livingston Award.

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