Love and Death

At the Miami Book Fair International, John Hockenberry sat down with ten writers to talk about two big ideas: love and death.  The first set of writers, Benjamin Busch, Carol Blue, Deni Bechard, Judy Goldman and Susannah Cahalan discussed memoirs that dealt with facing the death of a parent, spouse, sibling – or, the prospect of their own death. 

The second set, Christopher Beha, Jami Attenberg, Nina Revoyr, Robert Goolrick, and Scott Hutchins brought to the table novels tackling romantic, religious, and familial love. What resulted were two distinct discussions, conversations that were in turns contentious and intimate, light-hearted and somber.  We hope that listening to them, you'll hear stories that resonate with your own experience.

To find out more about each of the writers — and to hear a snippet of their thoughts on love and death — click on the photos below.

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  Benjamin Busch is an actor, photographer, film director, and US Marine Corps infantry officer.  He served two combat tours in Iraq.  His memoir Dust to Dust chronicles his brushes with death in Iraq and the experience of coming home to face his parents' deaths. 

   

   

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  Carol Blue is a writer and filmmaker.  For twenty years, she was married to Christopher Hitchens, journalist, author and contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Slate, and The Atlantic. In an afterword to Mortality, a collection of essays Hitchens wrote after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer, Blue describes how her husband spent his last months engaged in what he called "living dying."

   

   

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  Deni Béchard is a Canadian-American writer.  His memoir Cures for Hunger recounts how his bank-robber father's suicide compelled him to find out more about his father's childhood and past.

   

   

   

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  Judy Goldman was born and raised in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She is the author of two novels, two books of poetry, and a memoir .  In her memoir, Losing My Sister she describes how the death of her parents drove her apart from her sister shortly before her sister was diagnosed with bile-duct cancer. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

   

   

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  Susannah Cahalan is a reporter at the New York Post.  Her memoir Brain on Fire charts her physical and mental breakdown due to a rare autoimmune disease, and the last-minute diagnosis that saved her life.

   

   

   

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  Christopher Beha is an associate editor at Harper's magazine.  His novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder explores the conflicts between religious and romantic love for two romantically entangled young writers who part ways after college.

   

   

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  Jami Attenberg is the author of three novels.  Her most recent, The Middlesteins, follows the travails of dysfunctional but loving Midwestern family across three generations.

   

   

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  Nina Revoyr was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a white American father.  She grew up in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. Her fourth novel, Wingshooters, explores themes of justice, loyalty, prejudice and love in a small town in Wisconsin.

   

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  Robert Goolrick's latest novel, Heading Out to Wonderful, tells the story of a big love in a small town.  He lives in a farmhouse in Virginia.

   

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  Scott Hutchins is a creative writing lecturer at Stanford University.  The protagonist of his novel, A Working Theory of Love works for a tech company which is using his deceased father's diaries to program a computer to simulate human intelligence.