CULTURE | Women’s Voices Event with Victoria Zackheim

When Women’s Voices come together, a powerful song is born. Join Pam Houston (Waltzing the Cat, A Little More About Me), Zoe Fitzgerald Carter(Imperfect Endings), Mara Purl (Where the Heart Lives), Allison Bartlett(The Man Who Loved Books Too Much), Barbara Graham, and Victoria Zackheim (Exit Laughing) as they read from their fiction and nonfiction work: novels, memoirs, essays, writing that resonates with the powerful voices of women everywhere. Carter and Graham both contributed to Zackheim’s anthology, Exit Laughing, as well.

Read more about this Book Passage author event here.

There’s nothing funny about dying … or is there? Malachy McCourt, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and 22 more share hilarious and moving stories of confronting death. Exit Laughing makes death more approachable as it reveals the funny side of “passing on.” As painful as it is to lose a loved one, Exit Laughing shows us that in times of grief, humor can help us with coping and even healing.

Best-selling author Amy Ferris explains how her mother’s dementia led to a permanent ban from an airline. Ellen Sussman writes of flying her mother’s body home and watching the burial wardrobe spill out on the baggage carousel. Broadway and television actor Richard McKenzie shares the riotous story of a funeral procession led by a lost hearse. Bonnie Garvin even manages to find a heavy dose of dark humor in her parents’ three unsuccessful attempts at a double suicide. These stories, along with tales from Joshua Braff, Barbara Graham, Dianne Rinehart, and more, constitute a book whose purpose is to remind readers that when dealing with illness, aging, and dying, there is an important place for laugh-out-loud humor.