The Women Behind the Door: Roddy Doyle with Dave Eggers

Part of Litquake’s Words Around the World

Sponsored by the Government of Ireland: Emigrant Support Programme, Culture Ireland, and Center for the Art of Translation/Two Lines Press

Join old friends Roddy Doyle and Dave Eggers as they discuss Doyle’s newest novel, a powerful, moving mother-daughter story filled with struggle and redemption by the Booker Prize winner. A follow up to 1997’s standout The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Doyle’s latest, The Women Behind the Door, finds Paula Spencer—mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor at sixty-six—finally starting to live her life. That is until her eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep one day. Nicola is everything Paula wasn’t—independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, a “success”—but now she is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. As Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter must untangle past memory, trauma, and revelations to confront what they mean to each other—and who they want to be. Doors at 6:30PM. $17 adv (book bundle avail.) / $20 door

Host or Publisher Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival