We're very excited to have the opportunity to host the virtual launch for Elizabeth Kadetsky's latest memoir, The Memory Eaters! She'll be reading a selection from the book and engaging in a discussion with Irina Reyn, local fiction author and Pitt professor. Head to our Bookshop site's list titled "Recent and Upcoming Events (Pre-order!)" to order both Elizabeth's and Irina's books. You can also check out other curated lists and picks on our main site page, or use the search bar in the upper center-right to look for any book. (Using the book's ISBN usually works best.) #WhiteWhaleWatching

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 on 4/21 Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket.

Praise for The Memory Eaters:

“’Ghosts live with us…. We accept the existence of ghosts,’ Elizabeth Kadetsky writes in her engaging new memoir-in-essays, The Memory Eaters a book that explores the ways in which we both survive and absorb the traumatic events of our family’s past and of our own lives, in part by forgetting them, in part by struggling to preserve them. Do we model ourselves according to our parents’ and grandparents’ behavior? Or are we invisibly altered through our genetic inheritance? How might our conscious attention to the details of our past allow us to change our reactions to the world? And yet how is it that the past also shapes us in ways we can scarcely comprehend or perceive? Kadetsky’s nuanced essays explore the complicated contradictions inherent to memory, how memory holds us captive to our familial wounds, while at the same time helping us preserve the stories, and presences, of those we love.” —Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale

“There’s a scene at the end of Elizabeth Kadetsky’s searing memoir, The Memory Eaters, where the author tries to run power for all the items in a 700-square-foot apartment through two sockets. Not surprisingly, the circuit breaker blows. It is an apt metaphor for the heartbreaking and often brutal catastrophes that befall Kadetsky. But unlike the circuit breakers, the author doesn’t blow. On the contrary, she illuminates her battles with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, her sister’s addiction, and family secrets with radiant insights and gorgeous writing. Ultimately, Kadetsky answers the question inherent in this memoir: Can we remake the past using the wisdom of the present? The Memory Eaters exquisitely answers that question in the affirmative.” —Betsy Carter, author of We Were Strangers Once

Elizabeth Kadetsky's short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, Post Road, Agni, and elsewhere. She has written for the Village Voice, The Nation, and more. She has traveled to Malta as a creative writing fellow at the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, to France as a fellow in the arts at Camargo Foundation, and to India as a two-time Fulbright fellow. She is the author of the memoir First There Is a Mountain (Dzanc Books rEprint series, 2019; and Little Brown, 2004), the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (Nouvella, 2015), and the short story collection The Poison That Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014). She is an associate professor of fiction and nonfiction at Penn State University and a nonfiction editor at New England Review. www.elizabethkadetsky.com

Irina Reyn is the author of What Happened to Anna K, The Imperial Wife, and Mother Country. She is also the editor of the anthology Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State. She has reviewed books for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Forward, and other publications. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in One Story, Tin House, Ploughshares, Town & Country Travel and Poets & Writers. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Brooklyn, NY.