Pultizer prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi is on her way to Byron Bay for a special out-of-season event for Byron Writers Festival at Byron Theatre on 31 May.
Faludi is the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. Her most recent book, In the Darkroom, a memoir on her transgender father and a meditation on identity in its many forms, won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction and was named 2016 New York Times Book of the Year.
Here Susan gives The Echo a bit of insight into the things that make her tick as a writer
Describe where you write.
I am pretty set in my ways when it comes to where I work. I write at home at my desk most days – or on occasion in the library – I’m not one of these people who can type away at a noisy cafe, alas.
What book made the greatest impact on you as a child?
Too many to name, but to pick two from my very early childhood: Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, which gave me permission to be a nosy journalist and got me started early (grade school!), and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which, like Harriet the Spy, offered up the powerful image of a girl in possession of an independent and intensely curious mind.
What author living or dead would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?
George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. I’d love to know what Eliot, the brilliant social analyst of her age, would make of the troubling era we find ourselves in now. And I would love to know what Woolf would make of 21st century feminism.
Who should we be reading?
I don’t like to dictate what anyone should read. But I would encourage those grappling with the frightening right-wing resurgence in America and Europe and the doublespeak of its faux-populist leaders to revisit Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism or, well, just about anything by George Orwell.
What are you working on now?
I’m returning to a former writing project about the fate of an American radical environmental movement, which I began and put down some years ago – and which seems all the more relevant as we grapple with the spectre of climate change and the terrifying implications of our failure to take care of the planet.
Susan Faludi will be at Byron Theatre as part of a double-bill event with Canadian writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote, Wednesday 31 May at Byron Theatre.
Session one: 6–7.15pm SUSAN FALUDI in conversation with Zacharey Jane about her prize-winning memoir, In the Darkroom.
Session two: 7.45–9pm IVAN COYOTE acclaimed storyteller and award winning author of Tomboy Survival Guide.
Tickets $30/$45 from the website at byronwritersfestival.com or 6685 5115.
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