Author Event: This is What Happens When Women Read by Julianna Glasse

Join us for a special event with Julianna Glasse, author of This is What Happens When Women Read. This event is free, but we appreciate your RSVP below so we can plan for your attendance.

“In telling her story, Julianna Glasse blazes a trail for every woman who has ever felt oppressed by religion and the patriarchy and muted by other people’s rules and judgment. This is a page-turning, sexy, and eye-popping memoir of liberation. I couldn’t put it down.”—Chelsea Handler

“This book is a searing bibliography of self-expression, one book at a time. It’s breathlessly propulsive, with courage mounting on every page. In an era of rising illiteracy, I found myself as a reader alternately lamenting what non-readers miss and cheering for what Julianna found. This book is what happens when women read: they transform into who they were always meant to be. Julianna uses her radiant light to liberate, and I’m so grateful that she persevered in her journey of revolutionary reading.”—Tia Levings, author of The New York Times bestseller A Well-Trained Wife and I Belong to Me

“Women's reading is often dismissed as a hobby or a trivial distraction. But as Glasse's fierce own story and fierce analysis shows, a woman reading can be the most radical act.”—Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her

An empowering story of self-actualization by a former Christian pop star whose life was transformed when she began reading forbidden books.

At the peak of her fame, Julianna Glasse was a pop star, an exemplary wife, and a glamorous, high-profile influencer, one half of a Christian power couple. She and her husband, a Major League Baseball star, led Bible studies for his team and their wives. But when her love of reading led her to books like Plato’s Republic, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Emerson’s essays, and poems by Dickinson, Rumi, and Rilke, something inside her shifted and she began to question things she’d previously accepted as truth. Aware she had crossed a line, she hid the books under her bed, in her linen closet, wherever they wouldn’t be found. When her husband discovered them, he was furious: “This is what happens when women read!” he bellowed—a phrase that liberated her. She left her marriage, the church, and her married name behind and embarked on a mission to educate herself and help women like her claim their agency.

In this riveting memoir, Julianna writes of her very public and painful split from both the church and her husband—the self-hatred, depression, shame, and suicidal impulses that almost destroyed her; the books she read that inspired her to embrace life as an autonomous, independent woman and pursue an advanced degree from Oxford University; and, finally, her path to self-discovery and purpose.

With a suggested reading list at the back of the book, This Is What Happens When Women Read is at once a dramatic personal story, a conversation starter about women’s liberation, and an inspiring tribute to the power of books.

Julianna Glasse is a former Christian pop star and the founder and CEO of This Is What Happens When Women Read, a global organization dedicated to the liberation of women through education and safe community. She holds a master’s degree from the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, with which she has created a partnership to provide scholarships to educate, support, and empower women who have left restrictive religious communities. She currently resides in New York City.

Jeri Hansen is a weaver of people, ideas, and possibilities, occasional instigator, and, officially, President & CEO of the Napa Chamber of Commerce. Her career has unfolded where business, public policy, and community meet. Along the way, she has kept coming back to the same questions: Who needs to be in the room,
and how do we get them talking to each other? She has found that the best ideas often take shape when people from different sectors stop exchanging business cards and start exchanging perspectives, ideally over good food and maybe a glass of wine.

At the Napa Chamber, Jeri puts that instinct to work every day. She connects people, starts conversations, builds unexpected partnerships, takes on tough issues, and helps shape what comes next for Napa. Her path has included agriculture, wine, sustainability,
workforce and economic development, public policy, and more boards, committees, task forces, and working groups than she would probably care to count.

Her philosophy is simple: relationships matter, community doesn't happen by accident, and leadership is not about having every answer. It is about asking the right questions, bringing in the right people, and listening to what they have to say. When she’s not in a boardroom, or at meeting or event, Jeri can usually be found in her garden, at a concert, reading, cooking with abandon, golfing badly, or sharing a glass of rosé with her husband John, friends, and two wildly lovable Australian Cattle Dogs, Zoey and Lexi.

Event venue

Napa Bookmine, 1625 2nd Street, Napa, United States

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