Acclaimed author Sue Miller will be hosted by Sara Divello as she returns to South End Writes on Tuesday, November 10 at 7:00 PM to read from her widely praised new work of fiction, Monogamy. In a laudatory reprise of the novel, NPR’s Maureen Corrigan described Miller as “one of our most emotionally profound and nuanced writers.” Miller will be introduced by her colleague, Lilly King, whose recent novel, Writers and Lovers, is on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2011, King was at the South End library to present an earlier novel, Father of the Rain.
Miller has a long and distinguished history with FOSEL’s South End Writes program, both as an author who presented several of her remarkable novels, The Lake Shore Limited in 2010 and The Arsonist just a few years ago, but also as someone who generously invited many of her literary colleagues to talk about their literary works at the South End library. Jack Beattie, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Hoffman, Edith Pearlman, Doug Bauer, Anita Shreve and many other of Miller’s literary friends and associates made their way to the tiny South End branch where they were warmly welcomed by enthusiastic Southenders, delighted to meet such luminaries right here in their ‘hood.’. The novelist, who lived in the South End for many years, currently resides in Cambridge.
Monogamy, also prominently featured in a recent New York Times Sunday Book Review, is a “rich, complex book,” according to bestselling author Richard Russo, “an old-fashioned slow burn of a novel that allows readers to dream deeply.” It describes a Cambridge couple, photographer Annie and bookseller Graham, whose thirty-some year marriage has long been the envy of their friends and acquaintances. When Graham suddenly dies, Annie discovers that shortly before his death Graham had an impulsive, brief affair he was trying to end. She spirals into darkness wondering if she truly knew the man who loved her. Monogamy delves into the secrets families keep from one another, a mesmerizing work of fiction in which Miller reflects on the transformative power of memory, and the triumph of love over death itself. “A thoughtful and realistic portrait of those golden people who seem to have such enviable lives,” said Kirkus Review.
The author’s has ten previous novels that have been widely translated and published in 22 countries around the world. The Good Mother (1986) was more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts. Subsequent novels include three Book-of- the-Month main selections: Family Pictures (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), While I Was Gone (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), and The Senator’s Wife. Her last one was The Arsonist. Her non-fiction book, The Story of My Father, was described as a “beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease.”
Miller was recently awarded a 2020 spot in the Writers-in-Residence program at The Mount, the Berkshire estate of author, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. Her previous honors include Guggenheim and Radcliffe Institute fellowships. She was on the board of PEN’s American Center and chair of PEN New England, an active branch that worked with writing programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons. She has taught fiction at, among other places, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT. She currently lives in Cambridge.
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