Memoir Roundtable at The Church

The Church will host a Memoir Roundtable on Sunday, September 17, at 2 p.m. Linked by their intimate lives with artists, Ada Calhoun, Alice Carrière, and Kelly McMasters come together as a panel to discuss the art of memoir writing, and to weave together experiential portraits of the intricacies of art, love and introspection. Poet and best-selling author/memoirist Jill Bialosky, author of the acclaimed novel, “The Deceptions,” a novel about art, moderates the panel. This event will be preceded by a workshop on memoir writing led by Calhoun on Saturday, September 16.

Ada Calhoun, daughter of American art critic and poet, Peter Schjeldahl, invites readers to join her on the journey of grappling to understand her father as she finishes a biography on Frank O’Hara that Schjeldahl abandoned in the 1970s. Named one of the best books of 2022 by The Washington Post, NPR, and Oprah Daily, “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me” tells the kaleidoscopic story of a daughter finding herself and her father, through the bond of their shared medium, writing.

Alice Carrière, daughter of American painter Jennifer Bartlett and charismatic European actor Mathieu Carrière, tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village. Alice is a child living in an adult’s world devoid of boundaries and supervision. In adolescence, she begins to lose her grasp on herself, as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her away from herself. In “Everything/Nothing/Someone” Carrière manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to create a mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.

Kelly McMasters invites readers into a different relationship with the art world, as a painter’s former partner and art model. Navigating marriage and motherhood, art and ambition, grief and nostalgia, and the ever-elusive concept of home, McMasters creates a beautiful portrait of the possibilities and limitations of life as an artist. In “The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays,” McMasters invites readers to join her in the vulnerable act of exposing the difference between outside perspective versus inside reality.

Jill Bialosky is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, “Asylum,” four novels, most recently, “The Deceptions” and a New York Times bestselling memoir, “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished life” and “Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir.” She is an executive editor and vice president at W. W. Norton & Company.

Tickets for the roundtable. are $20 ($10 members). The Church is at 48 Madison Street in Sag Harbor. For details visit thechurchsagharbor.org.