Melanie Brooks presents "A Hard Silence"
When:
Thursday, May 16, 2024 7:00p -
8:00p
Thursday, May 16, 2024 7:00p -
8:00p
Where:
Wellesley Books
82 Central Street
Wellesley, MA 02482
Admission:
$5.00
Hosted by:
Categories:
Good for Groups, Lectures & Conferences
Event website:
https://www.wellesleybooks.com/event/Melanie-Brooks
Melanie Brooks, author of Writing Hard Stories, joins us to discuss her new memoir, A Hard Silence. Melanie will be in conversation with Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog and his latest novel, Such Kindness.
“A profound and riveting journey through shame and grief, A Hard Silence is, quite simply, unforgettable.” Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys
In the mid 1980s, Canada's worst public health disaster was unfolding. Catastrophic mismanagement of the country's blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed nationwide, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV. Among them was Melanie Brooks's surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive.
A Hard Silence is an intimate glimpse into Melanie's memories of coping with the tragedy of her father's illness and enduring the loneliness and isolation of not being able to speak. With candor and vulnerability, Melanie opens her grief wounds and brings her reader inside her journey, twenty years after her father died, to finally understand the consequences of her family's silence, to interrogate the roots of stigma and discrimination responsible for the ongoing secret-keeping, and to show how she's now learned to be authentic.
