MBJCC Literary Luncheon - Marry Morris

Description

On Wednesday, February 18th at 12:30 pm, The Barbara Eisenberg Literary Series continues with a conversation with Mary Morris, author of the The Red House which reads like a cross between detective novel and historical fiction. It’s only slowly that we begin to see the themes that propel it forward: Jewish history, love in its many forms, and inter generational trauma.

Marry Morris deftly weaves all these elements together, but her great¬est accomplishment is perhaps her ability to make this work of fiction flow with the intimate feeling of a memoir.

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The novel’s protagonist is Laura, a forty two-year-old American and a professional “homestager”; when Laura enters a house soon to go on sale, she makes rooms seem bigger or cozier, and uses furniture and props such as photos rummaged from flea markets to give old homes new stories. As Laura her¬self describes it, “I give people ancestors and memories they’ve never known.” After all, houses and homes can fall short of our expectations to fill our needs of shelter, love, and belonging.

Laura’s journey takes her to a series of houses down the Adriatic coastline, and she begins to uncover a family saga that stretch¬es back to the 1940s. By immersing herself in the places that her family either by choice or by necessity called home, Laura finally begins to face the hard truths of her past.

Mary Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels Gateway to the Moon, The Jazz Palace, A Mother’s Love, and House Arrest, and of nonfiction, including the travel classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. Morris is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and the 2016 AnisfieldWolf Book Award for Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.