Siri Hustvedt: Memories of the Future | Town Hall Seattle

When veteran author Siri Hustvedt discovered her old notebook along with early drafts of a never-completed novel, she found herself caught in a dialogue between her past and present selves. The product of this juxtaposition was Memories of the Future, her new novel that brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today. Hustvedt takes Town Hall’s stage to provide a glimpse into the process of the novel’s creation, and to reflect on the internal decade-spanning conversation that emerged alongside it. She meets in conversation with journalist Lauren Du Graf to enlighten us on the novel’s themes: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought. Join Hustvedt and Du Graf for an exploration of sanity, madness, and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage. Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Lost Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. She has published numerous papers in scholarly and scientific journals, and her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Lauren Du Graf has written about film, art, music, and literature for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Oxford American Magazine, and elsewhere. Her research and writing have been supported with fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Presented by Town Hall Seattle.