Boston Book Festival 2018

Love stories--both in real life and on the page--are rarely as simple as “happily ever after.” In this session, we’ll hear from three authors whose most recent novels illustrate the vicissitudes--and bittersweet comedy--of modern relationships. Stephen McCauley, who’s been exploring unconventional relationships since his first novel, The Object of My Affection, does it again with charm and conviction in My Ex-Life, in which a gay man explores whether you can go home again when his ex-wife asks him to tackle her daughter’s college admissions crisis. In Chelsey Johnson’s Stray City, a young lesbian in 1990s Portland, Oregon, does the unthinkable--she hooks up with a man, becoming pregnant and consequently questioning everything she thought she knew about her identity. And Andrew Martin, in his debut novel Early Work, traces the sexual, ethical, and literary misadventures of millennials whose reality has been (over)determined by the books they read. Leading the discussion is Jessica Keener, whose own most recent novel is Strangers in Budapest.