Join us for an evening with memoirists Kerry Neville and Maureen Stanton to discuss their new books. Kerry's Momma May Be Mad is an inventive and striking memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third chances. Maureen will discuss The Murmur of Everything Moving, a memoir of love, loss, and longing.

This event will take place in the Decatur Library Auditorium, after the library is closed. The Ground Floor doors (from the lower level of the parking lot) will be open at 6:30. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is requested, not required.

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About Kerry Neville:

Kerry Neville is the author of two collections of stories, Necessary Lies, which received the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize and was named a ForeWord Magazine Short Story Book of the Year, and Remember to Forget Me. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, TriQuarterly, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been named Notables in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She received her Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from University of Houston. She was a Fulbright Fellow at University of Limerick in Ireland, where she was visiting faculty in the M.A. Creative Writing Program. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, and teaches at Georgia College and State University.

About Momma May be Mad:

"An unusually intriguing and poignant memoir." - Kirkus Reviews

Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir is an inventive and striking memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third chances. Kerry Neville shares the story of how she was caught in the perfect storm of bipolar disorder, anorexia, and alcoholism when her children were young and her marriage failing and how she found her way back to joy and hope. Electric shock therapy, hospitalizations, and even an exorcism were desperate, if failed, lifelines. But even in that dark chaos, she held fast to an abiding belief in love and fought to regain her own life and her life with her children.

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About Maureen Stanton:

Maureen Stanton is the author of Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, winner of the Maine Literary Award for memoir and Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays have received the Iowa Review prize, the Sewanee Review prize, Pushcart Prizes, the American Literary Review award, and the Thomas J. Hruska award from Passages North. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maine Arts Commission, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

About The Murmur of Everything Moving:

"A poignant, evocative story of love, death, and survival." - Kirkus Reviews

When Maureen and Steve met in their twenties, he'd left behind a difficult marriage and she had ended a troubled relationship. In each other, they found a passionate love and shared a dream of a living off the land in rural Michigan. Three years later, when Steve, at twenty-nine, was diagnosed with cancer, they embarked on an all-out effort to save his life. When Steve's childhood friend, Joey, a drug addict, learned that Steve needed money for experimental cancer treatments that insurance wouldn't cover, he offered to sell Steve's pain medication, a synthetic opioid with a high street value, to help pay the costs; only one of the friends would survive. The Murmur of Everything Moving chronicles a young, working-class couple's odyssey through the medical mileu, as they navigate the terrain of illness and caregiving, of compassion and loss. This beautiful and aching memoir is ultimately a story of love—romantic, brotherly, and spiritual—in all its challenging but exquisite complexities.