This event takes place on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance.

Charis welcomes  Molly Gaudry in conversation with JI Daniels for a discussion of Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, a hybrid-genre tour de force that asks: to what extent can fiction reveal more about an author than nonfiction?

In her most innovative book yet, Molly Gaudry embarks on a search for belonging amid loss, framing her memoir around a fictional narrative featuring the tea house woman--a character who appeared first as bride-to-be and then as widow in her earlier books. As Gaudry grapples with traumatic brain injury, family secrets, repressed memories, and the job market in her essays, the tea house woman goes on a parallel quest of identity and desire. Gaudry also delves into literature as guide and comfort, using the words of authors as wide-ranging as Sappho, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marguerite Duras, and Jos Saramago to form yet another text within a text. Artfully braided into a hybrid-genre tour de force, the many strands of Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir ask: to what extent can fiction reveal more about an author than nonfiction?

As the tea house woman manages a mercurial lover, a family business, and caring for her dying father during the winter holidays, Gaudry, too, reflects on some of her own challenges: relearning, post-skating injury, to read and write while in the midst of earning a PhD; questioning her loneliness, desires, and ability to connect; wondering what it would be like if her biological brother flew in from Korea to inform her that their father has died; and navigating her identity as a transnational adoptee. Each essay in Fit Into Me, the memoir, is a testament to resilience, and as those true stories merge with Fit Into Me, the novel, they reveal how literature can become a lifeline that guides us back to ourselves.

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. Desire: A Haunting, its sequel, and Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, are further explorations of the same story world and characters. At Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the BFA and MFA programs. Summers, she teaches fiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.

JI Daniels earned his PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. He specialized in narrative theory, and the impact a work has in bridging readers to writers. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and BA in English from Ohio State University. His research interests include the craft of fiction and non-fiction writing, interactive writing—such as videogames, literary analysis, and other forms of genre crossing/defying writing.

Daniels is the author of a collection of short stories, If You Can, published with Spuyten Duyvil Pres (2020), the novel Mount Fugue, published with Kernpunkt Press (2016), and fiction, non-fiction, and interactive pieces published in The Notre Dame Review, DIAGRAM, Juked, and elsewhere. Since 2010 he has taught first-year composition, literature, fiction, non-fiction, and videogame courses at multiple institutions.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate.

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Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir -- Molly Gaudry in Conversation with JI Daniels