Susan Conley, PA ’85, will return to read from her memoir The Foremost Good Fortune on Friday, May 13, at 7 p.m. in the OWH Library’s Freeman Room. The event is sponsored by the Department of English and the Roger Murray Chair of Creative Writing.
In 2007, Susan and her husband relocated their family from Portland, Maine to Beijing, and between learning to negotiate daily life in a foreign culture and raising two small boys, Susan soon learned that she had breast cancer. Between trips to Boston for treatment and return trips to Beijing, Conley discovered that living with cancer is in itself a kind of cross-cultural exchange.
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “for Conley, ‘cancer becomes the story within the China story,’ in much the same way that the Forbidden City is a part of Beijing, a city within a city. The disease becomes a piece of the larger narrative, but does not dominate her entire experience. In graceful and honest prose, she effectively tells both sides of her tale. She gets us to identify and empathize.”
Now back in Maine, Conley and two writer friends launched a creative writing lab called The Telling Room, which has become a literary hub for both adults and students. The Foremost Good Fortune was selected by O, The Oprah Magazine in its top 15 must-reads for February 2011 and was picked by More Magazine as one of the 12 spring books they’re “buzzing about.” Slate Magazine chose it as their Book of the Week in early March. Stop by today to check it out at the OWHL, and you can read it before the program.
