Sue Halpern — What We Leave Behind - with Jane Mayer

Watch author Sue Halpern's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

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It's the perennial question: are we a product of how we were raised, or is our identity hardwired by our genetic inheritance? When her adoptive mother dies in a freak accident, high school senior Melody Marcus doubles down on her refusal to learn anything about her birth parents. In this age of 23&me, though, that may not be possible, and the secrets hidden in her DNA threaten to upend everything she knows about herself and her family.

For Candace Milton, a successful woman in her forties, the collateral damage from her parents' tortured marriage has led to a life of intentional unattachment. She is happy--enough. But a chance encounter with a friend of Melody's father will challenge this assumption and force her to reimagine who she is and who she might become.

Big-hearted evocative, and achingly relatable, What We Leave Behind grapples with destiny, belonging, and love, and makes us question our own idea of family: the kind we're born into and the kind we create.

Sue Halpern is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Summer Hours at the Robbers Library. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, and Condé Nast Traveler. A former New Yorker staff writer, she lives Vermont with her husband, the writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben, and is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.

Halpern is in conversation with Jane Mayer, the chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, covering politics, culture, and national security. Mayer is an author of several best-selling books, including “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” which the Times named as one of the ten best books of 2016, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” a finalist for the National Book Award, and one of the ten best books of the year by the Times. She is a co-author, with Jill Abramson, of “Strange Justice,” also a finalist for the National Book Award, and, with Doyle McManus, of “Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988.” In 2022, she was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists’ Hall of Fame. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.

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