Catch a conversation with Matthew Quick and Marly Rusoff diving into The Silver Linings Playbook and his new memoir Dad. Love. Me.About this Event
Don't miss this opportunity to get up close with Beaufort resident and best-selling author Matthew Quick, in an interview with Marly Rusoff, founding board member of the Pat Conroy Literary Center. They'll discuss both The Silver Linings Playbook and his new Memoir Dad, Love, Me and many more wide-ranging topics.
The interview is from 1-2PM, followed by a book signing (book not included in ticket price) 2-2:30PM.
STUDENTS: You must show valid Student ID at check-in.
ABOUT: Dad, Love, Me:
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • Written in the form of a letter to his ailing father, this debut memoir from the bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook explores the complicated burden of caring for an abusive parent who is dying—here is Matthew Quick’s most personal and potent work to date.
“This book will gut you and then, somehow, put you back together.” —Scott Galloway • “Dad, Love, Me is a masterpiece….It will change people’s lives.” —Lori Gottlieb • “A gut punch of a memoir…What a gift this book is.” —Catherine Newman • “For all its heavy subject matter, the book has a remarkably light touch and sense of grace.” —Kirkus Reviews
“What begins as an excavation of childhood trauma gradually becomes something rarer and more enlightening: an account of what happens when forgiveness arrives only after the parent who most needs it begins losing the ability to understand it....It’s difficult to read this book without feeling that some redemption and reconciliation—between parents and children, between scarred memory and forgiveness—have become possible.” —The New York Times
On the surface, Matthew Quick seemed to have it all—a loving wife, a thriving career as a novelist, and a beautiful home. He’d traveled all over the world advocating for mental health awareness, standing before crowds as a success story. But secretly, he was depressed and some days, he didn’t want to live.
Years earlier, when he first told his father he wanted to be a novelist, the response was immediate and brutal: “Idiot!” That voice—angry and belittling—would echo through Quick’s mind for years. He channeled his pain into his debut novel, The Silver Linings Playbook, crafting a complex father-son dynamic drawn straight from his own life. The book became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Still, the approval Quick longed for never came. His father remained cold and withholding. The deeper the rift between them grew, the deeper Quick sank into anxiety and addiction.
In this book, Quick takes readers deep into his psyche, as he wrestles with both his own mental health and his father’s cognitive decline. A health scare finally forces Quick to get sober, but then, overcome by creative paralysis, writer’s block threatens to end his career. The blank page is unbearable. As his desperation for healing peaks, Quick turns to a Jungian analyst he nicknames “Zeus.” In the safety of analysis, as Quick’s repressed pain and shame surface, he finally cracks. Just as he is putting himself back together, his father is diagnosed with dementia.
Suddenly, the clock is ticking. If there is ever going to be reconciliation, it has to happen now. Quick and his wife pack up their lives in coastal North Carolina, drive eight hours, and move into a house just around the corner from Quick’s parents, on an island right outside of Beaufort, South Carolina. There, as his father slips further and further away, Quick races to make a healing connection.
Dad, Love, Me is Quick’s raw, vulnerable, and deeply moving account of what it means to forgive a parent who never really knew how to love you. It’s about wounds that never fully heal, and the power of showing up anyway. This beautifully brave and life-affirming memoir is a must read for anyone who has been starved of love but wants to keep loving anyway.
ABOUT: The Silver Linings Playbook: A New York Times bestseller, The Silver Linings Playbook was adapted into the Oscar-winning movie starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. It tells the riotous and poignant story of how one man regains his memory and comes to terms with the magnitude of his wife's betrayal. During the years he spends in a neural health facility, Pat Peoples formulates a theory about silver linings: he believes his life is a movie produced by God, his mission is to become physically fit and emotionally supportive, and his happy ending will be the return of his estranged wife, Nikki. When Pat goes to live with his parents, everything seems changed: no one will talk to him about Nikki; his old friends are saddled with families; the Philadelphia Eagles keep losing, making his father moody; and his new therapist seems to be recommending adultery as a form of therapy. When Pat meets the tragically widowed and clinically depressed Tiffany, she offers to act as a liaison between him and his wife, if only he will give up watching football, agree to perform in this year's Dance Away Depression competition, and promise not to tell anyone about their "contract." All the while, Pat keeps searching for his silver lining. In this brilliantly written debut novel, Matthew Quick takes us inside Pat's mind, deftly showing us the world from his distorted yet endearing perspective. The result is a touching and funny story that helps us look at both depression and love in a wonderfully refreshing way.
ABOUT MATTHEW QUICK:
Matthew Quick is the New York Times bestselling author of , which was made into an Oscar-winning film; eight other novels, including , a #1 Indie Next Pick and a main selection of the Book of the Month Club; and the memoir, , which The New York Times lauded and named an Editors’ Choice. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, a #1 bestseller in Brazil, a Deutscher Jugendliteratur Preis 2016 (German Youth Literature Prize) nominee, and selected by Nancy Pearl as one of Summer’s Best Books for NPR. The Hollywood Reporter has named him one of Hollywood’s 25 Most Powerful Authors. Matthew lives with his wife, the novelist Alicia Bessette, in Beaufort, South Carolina.
ABOUT MARLY RUSOFF:
Marly Rusoff is a literary agent who left New York to settle in Beaufort, SC. She was first introduced to the Lowcountry by Pat Conroy, who was her friend for nearly five decades. She became his literary agent when his legendary agent Julian Bach retired.
Before moving to New York, while operating her campus area bookstore in Minneapolis, MN, Marly founded the nonprofit Loft Literary Center. It was there that she met the author Pat Conroy following publication of The Great Santini when he escaped to cooler Minnesota to spend time with his sister, the brilliant poet Carol Conroy.
By 1980 Marly had left her bookstore and moved to New York City to become the Publicity Director for Houghton Mifflin Publishers. She arrived in time to plan the launch of Pat Conroy’s novel, The Prince of Tides. Later she became VP and Associate Publisher at Doubleday, in charge of the company’s publicity and marketing, and with the exception of his self-published first book, The Boo, she has promoted or represented every book Pat published.
The list of the hundreds of authors with whom she has worked include novelists Pat Conroy, Cassandra King Conroy, Margaret Atwood, Tim O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Ron Rash, Debra Dean, Lynda Cohen Loigman, Patti Callahan Henry, Thirty Umrigar, and most recently, Annabel Monaghan. She also worked on memoirs by Patricia Hampl, Rosalynn Carter, Paulina Porizkova, Deborah Rodriquez, Kerry Egan, Homeira Qaderi and Andrew Schulman.
When Pat passed away in 2016, Marly, and her agency partner and late husband, Mihai Radulescu, with the essential support of Pat’s widow, Cassandra King and Pat’s family and friends, and Beaufort’s then-mayor Billy Keyserling, opened the non-profit Pat Conroy Literary Center as a tribute to Pat’s values as expressed through his written word. By year’s end, the newly-formed board hired its first Executive Director, Jonathan Haupt.
As a founding board member and an active supporter of the Center and its mission, Marly continues to serve on the Board of Directors of this vital educational nonprofit.
Event venue
USCB Center for the Arts, 805 Carteret Street, Beaufort, United States
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