Porter Square Books and GrubStreet are delighted to present the latest installment in the Grubbie Debut event series, featuring Anna Hogeland. Her debut, The Long Answer, has already received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Booklist, who call it "a heartfelt, finely wrought journey for fans of Suzanne Finnamore, Erica Jong, and Marian Keyes." Steve Almond will join the author in conversation.

This event will take place at Porter Square Books: Boston Edition and virtually here on Crowdcast on Tuesday, June 21 at 7pm ET.

A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel.

Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.

The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.

Anna Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School of Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont.

Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. He teaches Creative Writing at the Neiman Fellowship at Harvard and Wesleyan, as well as Hugo House, Grub Street, and numerous literary conferences. His essays and reviews have been widely published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, The Wall Street Journal, Poets & Writers, Tin House, and Ploughshares. His journalism has received numerous awards including the top national prize for feature writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. His short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, Best American Mysteries, Best American Erotica, and The Pushcart Prize. He serves as a literary correspondent for WBUR and appears on numerous podcasts. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

GRUBBIE DEBUTS: Anna Hogeland with Steve Almond, The Long Answer