Launch Party! "Certain and Impossible Events" by Candace Opper

White Whale Bookstore

Book launch for "Certain and Impossible Events" by Candance Jane Opper with featured readers  Sarah Minor and Aisha Sabatini Sloan.

We're thrilled to host the launch for Candace Jane Opper's debut book, Certain and Impossible Events! She'll be joined by Sarah Minor and Aisha Sabatini Sloan for a reading that'll include the ways in which they incorporate visuals into their work. <a href="https://whitewhalebookstore.com/readytoship/certain-and-impossible-events" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Copies of Certain and Impossible Events will be available </a>on our <a href="https://whitewhalebookstore.com/readytoship" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">ready-to-ship website</a>, which also has a wide selection of recommended and best-selling books, store merch, book subscription boxes, and more. You can request specific books you don't see on the site <a href="https://whitewhalebookstore.com/request-a-book" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">through this form, too</a>. All orders ship from our store in Pittsburgh. Sarah's and Aisha's books are available <a href="https://bookshop.org/lists/recent-and-upcoming-events" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">on our Bookshop.org list for recent and upcoming events</a>. Check out our curated lists and picks on <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/whitewhale" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">our main Bookshop.org affiliate page</a>, or use the search bar in the upper center-right to look for any book. (Using the book's ISBN usually works best.)This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 1/22. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out <a href="http://whitewhalebookstore.com/eventfaqs" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">our FAQ for events here</a>.About Certain and Impossible Events:Certain and Impossible Events orbits the death of a fourteen-year-old boy who shot and killed himself a week after Kurt Cobain’s suicide had become international news. Haunted by the hazy circumstances around her classmate’s death, Candace Jane Opper takes a kaleidoscopic lens to the cultural history of suicide in America, unearthing an invisible network and revealing the ways that no individual suicide—well-known or hardly documented—exists in a vacuum. Fusing personal narrative with history and science, Opper interrogates the ways suicide is handed down to us—from literature to YouTube, from middle school health class to sociological study, from the immutability of objects to the fluidity of oral history. In this candid and unsentimental epistolary essay, Opper invites us into her decades-long obsession with a boy she barely knew, creating space for herself and her readers to embrace a radical kind of unforgetting.Praise for Certain and Impossible Events:Certain and Impossible Events is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s a powerfully original exploration of the many meanings of suicide and a beautifully written memoir of a particular kind of loss. I was impressed with the intellectual curiosity of this book, and also with its emotional rigor. With astonishing insight and candor, the author drew me into the endlessly unfolding mystery of her decades-long obsession with her teenage crush, a boy she scarcely knew, who killed himself at 14. Certain and Impossible Events is both a clear-eyed tour de force about suicide and an intimate and ultimately poignant portrait of one woman coming to grips with an experience that inexplicably shaped her. Perhaps most of all, I loved the quality of the prose. I was in this talented writer’s thrall from page one. —Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest TrailCertain and Impossible Events is a stunning gutpunch of a memoir for the heart and for the head. In laser-sharp, near-cinematic prose, Candace Opper both remembers and discovers the childhood friend lost to suicide, a decades-long examination of the hierarchy of grief and the nature of personal obsession. I kept putting the book down to remind myself to breathe. I kept picking it up to find out what happened next. I’ll keep picking it up for what it shows me about this beautiful mess of a world and how I can better walk through it. —Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life Certain and Impossible Events is the shoebox full of memories that you don’t know what to do with, lovingly and unsparingly curated into a museum of infatuation, grief, obsession, and hard-won wisdom; it’s the love letter to your teenage self that you would write if you could. A memoirist who seeks the harshest truths about both her own life and the American mind, Opper draws you into her one history in a way that will re-examine yours. —Sarah Marshall, Host of You're Wrong AboutIn this profoundly moving meditation on the suicide of a classmate, Opper dives into the raw wound of a decades-old obsession, seeking not healing or closure but a deeper understanding of the changeling nature of the wound itself--cultural and personal, specific and universal, public and private. Unsentimental, lucid, harrowing, but ultimately restorative, Certain and Impossible Events left me breathless. —Maryse Meijer, Heartbreaker and NorthwoodIn Certain and Impossible Events, Candace Opper tells us the story of a girl who loses her adolescent crush to the most unknowable death: suicide. Opper carries the reader through the evolution of her grief, from awkward teenage obsession through to womanhood, where she comes to know almost every answer but the one she seeks. Certain and Impossible Events also comes with a side of 90s nostalgia and a fascinating exploration of suicide in pop culture. If you’ve ever felt the loss of a friend or acquaintance to suicide, but never felt there was a proper place for your grief, this one will resonate. —Dese’Rae L. Stage, Founder of Live Through ThisAbout the authors:Candace Jane Opper is a writer, a mother, and a visual artist. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Narratively, Literary Hub, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Vestoj, among others. She is the author of Certain and Impossible Events, selected by Cheryl Strayed for a Kore Press Memoir Award. She grew up in the woods of Southern Connecticut and now lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and son. candacejaneopper.com, @candaceopper (Instagram, Twitter &amp; FB).Sarah Minor is the author of Bright Archive (2020), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (2021), and The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated, a digital chapbook from Essay Press (2016). Her work has appeared in places like The Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Mid-American Review, and was selected for the 2018 Barthelme Prize and featured in Gulf Coast. She serves as the video editor at TriQuarterly Review, a contributing editor at Essay Daily, and as Assistant Director of the Cleveland Drafts Literary Festival. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art.Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. She earned an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from NYU and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She is the author of The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, as well as the forthcoming book-length essay, Borealis and Captioning the Archives, a collaboration with her father. A 2020 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is an Assistant Professor of creative nonfiction at University of Michigan. https://aishasloan.com/